On three important issues coursing through the news this summer, MAHA and the Trump administration appear to be in different places.

Data centers:

The president took to Truth Social this week to say, “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” Yet a new poll finds nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their community, including 52 percent of Republicans. MAHA activists recently sent a letter to the Trump administration warning against using coal to fuel the growing number of data centers, writing, “American AI leadership should not come at the cost of a more toxic burden for American children.”

MMR Vaccine:

The president this summer implied the combined MMR vaccine (one vaccine covering measles, mumps and rubella, which has been the standard in the USA since 1971) could be dangerous and signed an executive order calling for it to be separated into three different shots given across three appointments, while the subject of measles cases remains in the headlines. Trust in the MMR vaccine among American parents, though, remains high. And while 55% of MAHA parents tell KFF they are “in the middle” when it comes to vaccines, 3 out of 4 MAHA parents say they are confident in the MMR vaccine’s safety, and 86% say the vaccine is important for children in their communities. Read more here about pushback to the executive order.

Glyphosate:

This June, the Supreme Court sided with Bayer/Monsanto and the Trump administration in a case that effectively reduces the avenues for people to sue over suspected health effects from glyphosate, months after the President signed an executive order bolstering future glyphosate production. Two-thirds of Americans, though, favor banning, yes, banning, the herbicide’s use on American crops, including 72% of supporters of MAHA, according to a new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center. MAHA felt gutted over the EO and the administration siding with the manufacturer in the case.

With two months to go before the Midterms, and having just passed the two-year mark in the union between MAHA and MAGA, we’re asking: what do supporters of MAHA see as their political future?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been on the road campaigning for Republicans. But is this what MAHA rank-and-file want?

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We invited a group that has been supportive of MAHA over the past two years to ask where they are today. They speak only for themselves. And it’s of course entirely possible that if we fielded a different group of MAHA supporters, they’d hold different views.

Jeff Hutt, a Texas-based political consultant who worked on the Kennedy presidential campaign and was the spokesperson for the MAHA PAC, urged supporters not to get hung up on a label or one political party.

“I don’t think it really matters what we call it going into the future. And maybe the word MAHA is not going to be used after 2028. But the actual ideas and the concepts, regenerative agriculture, whole foods, these things, that’s going to be part of the political narrative from now going forward, and that’s what we should be good with.”

He pointed to one model for MAHA’s future: the Christian Right. He is of course referring to the political movement of conservative Christians.

“We have to look at this as a caucus.”

“We have to kind of see ourselves almost as the Christian Right. And the Christian Right was able to come into the Republican Party, and it was able to demand a lot of changes from the Republican Party, and the Republicans really shifted their platform for many years pre-Donald Trump, to kind of acquiesce to this group,” he told us.

MAHA, he said, should become what he called a “fulcrum caucus,” a focused movement that can amplify its influence by turning out votes that can tip a tight race in either direction.

This future movement, he said, should not think about party and should aim its energy locally. “Look at your local state senator, look at your local state representative, and look at them as individuals who are promoting these MAHA, these health-conscious attitudes, and you vote for them.” That, he argues, would leverage MAHA’s vote to move dialogue into action.

Mark Harris is a self-described political independent, co-founder of MAHA Ohio, and veteran of the Kennedy presidential campaign. He is deeply disappointed by how he sees Trump Republicanism influencing the MAHA grassroots movement. He said he is clear-eyed about politics requiring trade-offs, but feels things have gone too far.

“It’s not that we’re compromising in Washington and getting things done, and how the sausage is made in politics. We’re affecting advocates on the ground, the way they talk about the issue they advocate for, and pushing them closer to the corporate talking points.”

He continued.

“We know from being in it (MAHA) that it’s not one unified thing, but the collective understanding under that label has moved so much closer to the corporate interest that for me, I can’t stomach it any longer. That’s a personal line. I don’t expect anybody else to have the same view as me.”

He acknowledges the argument that it’s better to stay aligned with the administration and fight from within over policy.

“But for me,” he told us, “the calculation, the scales just shifted. It’s to the point where I think it would be better to build something that’s doing all the things we want to do, and doesn’t have the tainted label on top of it.”

“Why don’t we find it to transition these issues to something better?” He asked.

Is that “something better” the Democratic Party?

Tim Ryan, a Democratic Party veteran and 10-term former Congressman from Ohio and advocate of many of MAHA’s positions a decade before MAHA, says yes, and no.

He has, at times, been a fairly iconoclastic member of the Democratic Party. He challenged Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader in 2016 and later opposed her bid to return as speaker in 2018. He also spoke out against President Joe Biden running for reelection, as early as 2022, while calling for a generational change. He sees political free agency as the best path forward for MAHA.

“In America, we try to put everybody in a box. I think MAHA is breaking through that and really positions super well right now to be able to do their own thing.”

“You’re better off being your own thing and aligning with Democrats. Maybe if there’s a Democratic thing, and bringing Republicans, or aligning with Republicans on an issue that the values align, and then trying to persuade Democrats to come over.”

“You don’t want to be in a position where you’re lockstep with one side because they will hurt your feelings, and they will disappoint you, but if you’re able to go to the other side on particular issues, they’re not going to take you for granted.”

Aaron Everitt is a writer and video producer who volunteered for the Kennedy presidential campaign. He pointed to Republican Representative Thomas Massie’s failed primary race, losing to a Trump endorsed candidate.

“Trump still has a tremendous amount of power within the Republican Party. If you look at Massie’s defeat, you can point it specifically at the hands and work of Donald Trump…”

He continued, “I’d like the people that can be successful and can be good and the issues that do speak to people, whether that’s Massie or anybody else, I’d like them to have the ability to be disassociated with the kind of Trumpism politics of the Republican Party. I think that’s what I want to see happen within this movement.”

Everitt is skeptical that any movement can stay independent while riding a politician’s coattails. Those tails can be a shortcut to power, he argued, but it leads to political dependency and ultimately subordination.

“If there’s to be such a thing as federal politics that survive the next 50 years,” it will require movements like MAHA, he said, to “rise to the surface without always having to be a caboose on somebody’s kind of populism or their popularity.”

And then success, he said, “won’t be because someone wins an election. It won’t be because someone you know is very good at their Truth Social posts. It will be because we realize and recognize that there are things we want for our children and for our children’s children that we’re not going to give up on.”

“I think that’s probably the best aspect of what’s left out of whatever this thing was, is that many, many people recognize that there are a whole lot of other people that we can get along with and talk about the things that matter to us most.”

Elizabeth Frost is a consultant, co-founder of MAHA Ohio, and a former Kennedy campaign staffer.

She can see rebranding MAHA as a possible path, but not starting over.

“To change a name is one thing,” she told us. “But I think to walk away and say this is broken is a different conversation. And that’s somewhere that I can’t really see myself, given you know what we’ve been able to do.”

Among her cohort of 20-somethings, she said she increasingly hears questions over the ingredients going into food and how it relates to their health.

“And that is something that’s not taken away, regardless of what happens on the Hill. What people know and believe in the decisions that they make in their daily lives is something that doesn’t really come and go with who’s in charge and who’s in charge of a movement.”

She continued, “So, as long as we are able to continue changing hearts and minds, and changing the conversations and ingredients and decisions that are happening at the grocery store and the dinner table. I think we’re doing incredible things, and it’s worth continuing.”

Zen Honeycutt is the founding executive director of Moms Across America and a MAHA grassroots leader focused on environmental toxins (she was also a signer of the letter to the administration about coal-fueled data centers).

“Politically, it really actually doesn’t matter to me what somebody’s political background is because they all have loved ones that they want to be healthy. They’ve got kids, they’ve got sisters, they’ve got moms, they’ve got themselves.”

“I will talk to everybody and anybody, everywhere,” she said.

For her, the issues themselves are powerful enough to transcend politics.

“I think that when I sit across the table and talk to somebody about these issues and how these toxins are impacting their families, it’s going to reach them somewhere in the heart, and at some point they’re going to take action and do something about it.”

As for MAHA’s union with the Trump administration, she sees a long list of positive changes it has achieved, on a range of fronts, including reducing food dyes, changing the vaccine schedule, and making school lunches and SNAP benefits healthier.

To this, Brinda responded: “There’s going to be people listening who will also push back on qualifying some of those things as wins because they’re going to say that a lot of those things from the food companies are all voluntary. There’s a lot of controversy over the vaccine schedule being upended. People say that’s eroding trust in vaccines.”

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“There’s a lot of things that have happened because of the MAHA movement,” Honeycutt said. “And so I’m not going to completely sever ourselves from it at all.”

“People say we’ve got burned, or we got used, or we got manipulated, or whatever. I don’t care about that because we have made these issues bigger and louder, and more movement has happened than ever before.”

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But as this case becomes increasingly entangled in larger debates, we’ve found ourselves asking: Is Lindsay Clancy’s story being asked to tell us more than it actually can?

The arrival of a baby can be one of the most vulnerable periods in a family’s life. New parents are exhausted and isolated. Severe postpartum psychiatric illness can be devastating and, in some cases, life-threatening. Families can struggle to find appropriate care. Emergency rooms may not know where to send someone in psychiatric crisis. Doctors may lack the time, resources, or coordination necessary to provide the kind of care their patients need.

And for many American families, the problem begins even earlier: there simply isn’t care nearby.

More than a third of U.S. counties are maternity-care deserts, meaning they have neither an OB provider nor a birthing facility. Six in ten rural counties don’t have a single OB, and one in four women in rural areas travel more than 30 miles just to give birth. When something goes wrong, the emergency room often becomes the backstop.

The gaps in maternal mental healthcare are equally stark. An estimated one in five pregnant or postpartum women in the U.S. experiences a maternal mental health condition, yet roughly three-quarters go undiagnosed or untreated. And in 45 states, there isn’t a single inpatient or residential treatment program specifically dedicated to maternal mental health.

Those are real problems. And they deserve far more attention than they typically receive.

On today’s episode, we hear from three physicians—two psychiatrists and an ER doctor: Dr. Julia Riddle, a reproductive psychiatrist, Dr. Bryan Shapiro a psychiatrist specializing in tapering off antidepressants, and Dr. Anne Zink, an ER physician and public health leader. We talked with them about what it is actually like to encounter patients with severe psychiatric needs. They describe a system that can sometimes enable basic care, but just as often obstruct it. They talk about the difficulty of finding appropriate treatment, the pressure placed on doctors, and what happens when patients fall into the gaps between different parts of a fragmented healthcare system.

But Lindsay Clancy’s case presents a particular challenge.

By most accounts, this was not simply the story of someone crying out for help and being ignored. She appeared to receive a significant amount of care and support. She had contact with medical professionals. Her family was involved. She was being treated.

And yet, the unimaginable still happened.

That fact doesn’t mean the system worked perfectly. Nor does it mean there is nothing to learn from her care. Those questions are precisely what a trial and careful examination are meant to explore. But it does suggest that we should be cautious about turning one horrific case into definitive proof of a much broader argument.

There is a temptation, especially in an era when every tragedy is quickly absorbed into an existing cultural battle, to make individual stories stand for something larger. One side may see Lindsay Clancy as evidence of a broken psychiatric system. Another may see her as evidence of the dangers of psychiatric medication. Others may use her story to illuminate the desperate lack of support available to new mothers.

Perhaps there are important conversations to be had about all of those things.

But an important problem does not need the wrong example to make it real.

The question isn’t whether we should talk about how we care for new families, people experiencing severe mental illness, or patients navigating a complicated medical system. Of course we should.

The harder question is whether, in our eagerness to draw broader conclusions, we risk asking Lindsay Clancy’s story to tell us more than it actually can.

Listen to our episode here.

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Millions of people follow your work. Your leaders are called “the most trusted in America.” You go to work each day with a sense of purpose and conviction that what you do matters.

You don’t REALLY have a sense of who is following your work or why they follow it. You just know that they do.

And that makes you feel really good.

Then something happens.

And the façade crumbles.

Suddenly, many people claim to know how to do what you do. Your expertise is flattened. There are bad-faith actors claiming that facts are real when they are not. The value of what you do begins to diminish because there are now many others doing it—whether they are good at it or not.

The idea that you even need to belong to this particular institution in order to do that work becomes questionable.

Pretty soon, you begin to question the institution itself. You wonder whether it is making choices that serve its own interests rather than the public it exists to serve. You wonder why it didn't see these changes coming. Why it failed to adapt to the way people actually live their lives. And whether, in trying so hard to preserve itself, it has made itself increasingly irrelevant.

I’m not talking about public health.

(Well, not yet.)

I’m talking about journalism.

The field I’ve spent most of my career working in.

The truth is, mainstream journalism has spent almost 30 years grappling with what happens when an institution can no longer assume that people will listen.

For much of the twentieth century, journalists could just focus on their reporting, whether from a war zone or a local zoning meeting, without really having to consider how people encountered their work.

The infrastructure did that for us.

There were three television networks. A local newspaper. A few national papers of record. A handful of radio stations. A relatively small number of institutions had an extraordinary ability to decide what information people encountered, which stories mattered, and, to a large extent, how the public understood the world.

When Walter Cronkite was called “the most trusted man in America,” that wasn’t simply a reflection of his individual credibility. It reflected an entire information ecosystem in which a relatively small number of institutions held enormous authority.

And the moniker became part of the mythology of network news itself. Each generation of network anchors seemed to inherit the same aspiration: to become the next most trusted man or woman in America. Trust wasn’t just something you hoped your journalism would earn. It became a measure of the institution’s power—and, in some ways, a measure of your success within it.

The problem was that the world that made that kind of trust possible was already beginning to disappear.

Because for one thing, the internet happened.

And the story we often tell is that it destroyed journalism’s business model.

Which, of course, it did.

People stopped getting cable.

Advertising collapsed. Newsrooms shrank. Local newspapers disappeared. Social media companies captured attention and distributed journalism without having to pay for most of it.

But the internet did something else too.

It created competition—not just for advertising or attention, but for authority.

Suddenly, being a journalist was no longer enough to guarantee that anyone would listen to you.

Anyone could publish. Anyone could build an audience. Anyone could offer an interpretation of events.

Some of those people were thoughtful and knowledgeable. Some were dishonest. Some were brilliant. Some were completely wrong—but they were publishing faster and more frequently than we were. I remember in the early 2000s, producing the news every day in a network newsroom for a show that aired at 6:30p, while blog posts were appearing in real time, sometimes on stories we were working on, sometimes from people we had never heard of. And people in our newsrooms were talking about them.

And, increasingly, we were jostling for space in the same information ecosystem.

For journalists, this was profoundly destabilizing. Our expertise was no longer protected by the walls of the institution. A person with no newsroom experience—heck, a person with no newsroom and no editor—could reach more people than an entire newspaper.

The instinct, understandably, was to focus on everything that had been done to us.

Facebook destroyed our business model. Google took our advertising. Social media amplified misinformation. Bad actors manipulated the public. People no longer understood the difference between journalism and propaganda.

Much of that was—and is—true.

But eventually, journalism had to confront a harder question.

What if some of the audience was trying to tell us something too?

That didn’t mean the audience was always right. Far from it. It didn’t mean that every criticism of the media was legitimate, or that people who had abandoned traditional news institutions had done so for reasons that made sense.

But here’s what stung: they didn’t have to listen to us anymore.

That was the part that was hardest to reckon with.

We had spent decades inside institutions that had made being heard feel almost automatic. Those “loyal ABC for life” viewers now had a smorgasbord of choices. Which meant they could ignore us. They could go somewhere else. They could listen to someone with a YouTube channel, read a newsletter, follow a blogger—or what often happened, simply stop paying attention altogether.

It meant that we could no longer simply assume that our authority was self-evident.

It was hard not to take it personally sometimes, like a bad breakup. Why didn’t people want us anymore? Did they feel our journalism didn’t reflect their lives? What had we missed by assuming that because we were doing important work, people would recognize its importance?

Why did some audiences feel that the people deciding what mattered in the news didn’t understand what mattered to them?

Why were some people willing to trust a stranger with a YouTube channel more than a journalist who had spent decades doing the work?

Those were uncomfortable questions. And they still are.

But the people and institutions that have survived the transformation have had to learn something fundamental:

Influence can no longer be assumed. It has to be earned.

Over and over again.

Journalists increasingly had to develop a relationship with an actual audience rather than an abstract public. Not the audience we imagined, or the audience we wished we had, but the people who were actually listening or watching. They could respond immediately. Criticize you. Correct you. Ignore you. Mock you. Or simply leave. You had to reckon with them as they were.

And, in the process, something else happened.

Many journalists discovered that they didn’t necessarily need the institution’s permission anymore.

They could start a newsletter. A podcast. A YouTube channel. They could build a direct relationship with an audience. They could take the skills they had developed inside an institution and bring them somewhere else.

I know this because I’ve experienced it myself.

After nearly 20 years in network news, I’ve gone from working inside some of the biggest institutions in journalism to building something with a tiny, independent team, a product that is in direct relationship with the people who listen.

When we started Why Should I Trust You?, we weren’t thinking, “We can build a media company now”. We were actually coming from a very old-school journalistic instinct: We want to understand why people believe what they believe.

The show has given us something the old media system rarely could: a direct relationship with the people listening. Not just an audience, but a relationship.

We can see what resonates. We hear from listeners. We’ve started group chats with some of them. We can put a question into the world and have people respond. We can sit across from someone whose views we may fundamentally disagree with and spend an hour trying to understand how they got there.

And there is something incredibly liberating about that.

We don’t need a network to decide that the conversation is worth having. We don’t need a programming executive to decide there is an audience for it. We can just make the thing.

And if people find it useful, they come.

That doesn’t mean institutions have become irrelevant. Quite the opposite. The skills we learned inside institutions—reporting, producing, editing, questioning, fact-checking, storytelling—are the things that make the direct relationship possible.

But the relationship itself is different.

It is more intimate. And more accountable.

And that is the somewhat hopeful paradox of this moment in journalism. A journalist who once would have spent an entire career trying to earn a place inside one institution can now build something of their own. An independent reporter can develop a loyal following. A newsletter can become a publication. A podcast can become a newsroom. A conversation that might once have been a 15-minute television segment can become an hour-long discussion that reaches thousands of people directly.

Sometimes a podcast can reach people more deeply than a television show ever could. Sometimes, more people listen.

We tend to tell the story of journalism’s transformation as a story of collapse. But it is also a story of adaptation.

When we talk about journalism’s crisis, we often talk about mass layoffs, corporate consolidation, the hollowing out of local news, billionaire ownership, and increasing political pressure on journalists—including serious concerns about government efforts to intimidate or censor the press.

All of that is real. But it’s not the whole story. The people doing journalism today have had to become remarkably inventive.

They’ve had to figure out how to reach audiences where they are. They have experimented with new formats, new platforms and new relationships. They have learned to live without the monopoly that once made their work powerful.

The irony is that journalism may have adapted to the new information environment faster than the business model that is supposed to sustain it.

Yes, journalism has gotten better at reaching audiences in this new environment. What it hasn’t figured out is how to reliably pay for all of it. And that is definitely a problem.

But that is a very different problem from journalism becoming irrelevant.

And public health has shown plenty of adaptability, too.

There are standout public-health professionals who have built audiences of their own, communicating directly on social platforms, appearing on podcasts, listening to critics outside their institutions, and finding new ways to break down complicated science to people who might never walk into a public-health meeting or read an agency report.

Some of the most interesting adaptation is happening at the individual level—people figuring out how to carry the expertise of public health into a much more fragmented information environment.

But individual adaptation is easier than institutional adaptation. Journalism has had three decades to wrestle with what happens when the institution and the individual begin to separate. Public health, particularly due to Covid, appears to be confronting many of those same questions much more recently.

Its institutions now face the harder task of figuring out how to support that adaptation without abandoning the standards, infrastructure and scientific rigor that make public health valuable in the first place.

And that’s where the journalism analogy gets interesting.

Not because public health needs to become journalism. But because journalism has spent three decades living through what happens when people stop assuming they have to listen—and has learned a few things about adapting without abandoning the underlying work.

And that is where the déjà vu begins.

Public health is going through its own crisis of institutional authority.

The details are obviously different. Public health is not journalism. Its mission is different. Its responsibilities are different. It is built on a repository of knowledge rooted in decades of evidence and science—knowledge that informs real interventions and, ultimately, saves lives. And the consequences of getting things wrong can be far more immediate and profound.

That is precisely why institutions matter.

Public health cannot simply become a collection of individual voices competing for attention. Science requires infrastructure. Evidence requires standards. Data has to be collected, evaluated and updated. Someone has to be responsible for distinguishing a promising idea from a dangerous one, and for coordinating a response when the stakes are high.

The weakening of institutional authority, in other words, is not automatically something to celebrate.

But there is something familiar to me about watching people inside an institution that has historically held enormous authority grapple with the realization that authority is no longer automatic. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve gravitated toward covering public health at this transformative moment.

I’ve heard this song before.

The information environment fragments. Expertise gets flattened. Institutions get questioned. And people discover they have choices about whom to listen to.

There are real risks in that.

And yet journalism’s experience suggests that losing the assumption of authority may be less catastrophic than it looks.

In some ways, it can be clarifying.

For much of the twentieth century, institutions benefited from a world in which people had relatively few alternatives.

Three networks.
One local newspaper.
A radio station or two.

There were only a handful of people with access to the tools of mass communication. People didn’t always have to choose whom to listen to.

Now they do.

And that is unsettling if you are inside an institution accustomed to being listened to.

But it also forces a question that institutions could once afford not to ask: If people have a choice, why would they choose us?

The lesson isn’t that public health needs to become more like social media. It isn’t that the loudest voices should win, or that every criticism deserves equal weight.

The lesson may simply be that expertise does not speak for itself.

Public health still needs institutions. It needs scientific expertise. It needs standards. It needs people who are willing to say what the evidence supports even when the answer is unpopular.

But those things alone may no longer be enough to earn trust.

That doesn’t mean the question is simply: How do we get people to trust us again?

And it certainly doesn’t mean, How do we tell people what they want to hear?

Maybe the harder questions are:

• How do we make our scientific reasoning more transparent while making people feel heard and understood?

• How do we make institutions more legible to the people they are supposed to serve?

• How do we listen without allowing expertise to be replaced by popularity?

• How do we maintain scientific standards while recognizing that authority can no longer simply be asserted?

• And perhaps most importantly:

How do we build institutions that people are willing to choose—not because they have to, but because they have demonstrated, over time, that they are worth choosing?

Journalism hasn’t figured out all the answers. Far from it.

But after nearly three decades of living through this transformation, one lesson seems clear: you can spend all your time mourning the loss of the world in which people had to listen to you.

Or you can confront the much harder challenge of understanding why they might choose to.

That doesn’t mean abandoning institutions.

It means making them worthy of being chosen.

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It’s not scientific, but it sure feels like ever since Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearing this summer, with tensions running hot and old grievances resurfacing, there’s been a retrenchment of sorts into partisan camps. Rapprochement between traditional public health and its detractors suffered a setback.

So it was especially interesting, at this moment, to sit down with a heavy hitter in academic public health who’s making the case for exactly the opposite: engaging more, not less, across partisan and ideological lines.

Enter Sandro Galea, dean of the Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis. The school launched just last year and received a $200 million gift from the Bursky Foundation this spring. For Galea and the university, it’s an opportunity to build from the ground up (and model) a public health school for our post-pandemic world.

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Galea, who is an immigrant from Malta, trained as an emergency room physician before realizing his calling in public health while working for Doctors Without Borders in Somalia. He went on to chair the epidemiology department at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health before becoming dean of Boston University’s School of Public Health, where he served for a decade. He’s been prolific in publishing research on the social structures of health and is a fierce advocate for challenging those structures.

Today, among the things Galea is building at Bursky is the Purple Public Health Project, an effort he’s leading with associate professor Salma Abdalla. He describes it as a multi-faceted effort to both inspire his field to engage across political divides and provide resources to help. They believe that listening and taking opposing views on board is both a means to rebuild trust and a path to expand the tent of public health. It’s through engagement, they argue, that public health’s values and data can help make more people healthy. And they aren’t alone in these efforts. Hopkins, Harvard, Boston University, and Brown’s Pandemic Center (as well as others) have put resources into rebuilding trust in this incredibly divisive post-COVID era. What’s unique here is the scale of support and the opportunity to bake in lessons learned from the start of a program, all while the field and the public writ large are asking questions in real time.

As any listener of Why Should I Trust You knows, we’ve hosted more than 30 discussions featuring dialogue between traditional public health, medicine, and science and followers of MAHA. In other words, we too choose to engage.

In fact, on October 27th, WashU Bursky Public Health will host Why Should I Trust You? as we tape an episode in front of a live audience. Here is more on the event:

Suffice it to say, we were eager to discuss with Galea how he sees this moment and the approach he is advocating.

“So we have been building the school in this moment of time of real questioning in public health,” he told us. “We leaned into this and saying, let’s build a school where we recognize that the world asks for us, asks of us to think differently, to do things differently, to do things in partnership, and to make sure that what we do aligns with pathways for action that create a healthier world, and those four have been animating directions for us.”

In 2021, he wrote in his Substack The Healthiest Goldfish that “broadly speaking, public health is aligned with the left, and there is no sense dancing around this.” In a 2026 post announcing the Purple Public Health initiative, he wrote: “the uncomfortable truth is that we are now seen by many … as functionally an extension of progressive politics.”

We asked him about it directly.

“I think it’s sort of factually correct that what most of public health — and by public health we should be clear, I’m talking about the complex of academic public health, people who write about public health, and the practice of public health through organized public health practice — that a lot of the principles, philosophies of public health have aligned with the Democratic Party in this country.”

But Galea’s says this alignment is not inevitable.

“I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t want their children to be healthy. Health is a unifying force,” he said. “It’s about creating a healthy world for all. If that’s fact one, and if fact two is that, well, actually everybody subscribes to that mission, then public health should be a unifying force, and it should not be a force for those who vote blue. It should be a force for everybody.”

So why is public health aligned with the left and not both left and right?

“In no small part, the reason why that alignment or misalignment has happened is because what currently is the Republican Party has adopted positions that are really antithetical to creating health for all. For example, we know that vaccines — childhood vaccines — save millions and millions of lives, and it is very difficult to align then with a movement that says no, they want to remove those vaccines.”

And yet, he insists, beneath the headlines are individuals who are not a monolith or stridently anti-vaccine. When KFF polled supporters of MAHA on why they support the movement, the most common answers were wanting people to be healthier (19%) and removing harmful substances from food (15%). Well down the list were vaccines and medical choice, which 4% of MAHA supporters said was why they supported the movement.

“These headline-grabbing challenges are exceptional and extreme cases. Most people, most of the time — be they red or be they blue — actually agree on most of the core tenets of public health. So I’ve been quite interested in figuring out ways in which we can get public health to bridge these gaps.”

The Bursky School, he says, is a chance to build an institution around that principle. “We want to be a school that can speak to everybody. Not so easy to do, but that is at the heart of the kind of school we’re trying to build.”

Here’s Galea making the fuller case for the Purple Public Health Project:

A hopeful vision, but what about the administration cutting and disrupting scientific research funding, reducing spending on Medicaid and other safety nets, and upending the childhood vaccine schedule without supporting data? Doesn’t this argue for public health digging in, fighting back, and not engaging with its supporters?

“I think, as with most reductionist approaches, it is missing the answer. The answer is not one or the other. The answer can be both. I think it is reasonable, viable, and legitimate to say we want to have a conversation — many conversations — with people we may disagree with on very fundamental issues, and they have legitimate reasons to feel differently than we do. At the same time, we are very clear about the things that are core to improving the health of populations, and we are unequivocal about that. In my experience, with the exception of some people on the fringes of any particular issue, most people are in good faith, willing to engage in conversations with people they disagree with, even if its clear about what we agree.”

“I think there’s one argument which says, no, you can’t talk to people, you have to fight. My question is always: what are you trying to achieve? If what you’re trying to achieve is just increased fighting and fractioning, sure, you can do that. But I don’t think that’s what we’re trying to do. What we’re trying to achieve, again, is health for all.”

We pushed to find the point where his tolerance for engagement actually ends. Are there people public health shouldn't talk to at all? He discussed whether engagement can mean complicity.

“There are lines that we should not cross. There are lines that none of us should have a moral stain that we cross. But let’s face it, that’s not what we are talking about in the main. These arguments are about areas which are deeply felt, but many of them areas where reasonable people can legitimately disagree, and where I think it’s okay for us to engage in conversation — even if we say, look, we feel strongly that the science says vaccines are saving millions of children’s lives, it threatens the health of young and future American population if we reduce the number of people who are vaccinated, and there is no evidence for many of the conspiracy theories that have driven skepticism in vaccines at the moment. I think we can say that clearly and strongly, and still have conversations.”

Galea is clear there are bad-faith actors and combating them is important. But he argues the vast majority of the country want to do the right thing.

We discussed a major take-away he took from the pandemic response. He said it’s a theme he builds on in his soon-to-be-released book Why Health?: What We Need to Think About When We Think About Health.

“It’s really my effort to make sure that we, in public health, given our responsibility set, recognize that it is not good enough for us to say our job is to save lives, and we’re going to do it at all costs. Because our job is to save lives — but saving as many lives as we can for as many people as possible is a much more complicated endeavor than doing what gives us short-term, immediate gain. And I think If there was one lesson that emerged from COVID it is that. We know that if there is one core driver of health in the long term is the well-being of the economy, and people having livelihoods and stable incomes. If you’re destroying all that, you may be saving lives on the ledger today and costing lives tomorrow.”

This, he says, extends to decisions around in-person school closure during the pandemic.

“Students who were kept out of school, broadly speaking in this country, are going to be carrying with them a six-month delay in their social, emotional, cognitive learning. That’s going to manifest as health consequences decades down the road. What we learned in the cauldron of COVID is that a narrow focus on saving lives, reductively defined, actually requires a much more complex and sophisticated thinking about the full set of forces that generate health today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, a decade from now.”

With another pandemic a very real possibility in our lifetimes, we asked what he hopes will be different next time. The dean of a school teaching the next generation is optimistic.

“My fundamental hope next time is that in the rooms where decisions are made, somebody says we should be thinking about this expansively. We should recognize that health ultimately is a social construct that balances a whole set of values, and that we should be thinking about decisions we are making from that frame. And how is that going to happen? That’s going to happen by training the next generation and making sure the next generation understands that. I am optimistic, because I think this is a generation perhaps forged in the heat of a really challenging moment over the past decade, has been looking for these answers. I would like not to live through another epidemic or pandemic in my life — I suspect we all feel that way. But if we do, I am hopeful we as a country will handle it better.”

And despite the divisions, political polarization, acrimony, and existential threats to his own field, Galea says he is optimistic about the American people themselves.

“I don’t think people are inimical to institutions. I think people simply want institutions they feel they can trust, they feel are institutions that listen to them, they feel are institutions that accurately represent the science, and that create space for thoughtful disagreement about issues around which thoughtful people can legitimately disagree. I suppose I enter this conversation, I enter my mission, with that assumption that most people, most of the time, are trying to do the right thing.”

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This essay is an attempt for me to wrestle with why.

It’s not because I don’t think the moveable middle exists. I do. There are plenty of people who aren’t deeply attached to either political party, who don’t have strong ideological identities, and who can be persuaded on particular issues.

What bothers me is what we seem to be learning from the existence of that group.

I’ve heard the phrase come up repeatedly in articles, at public health conferences and meetings, often to describe people who aren’t as entrenched on certain issues because they don’t engage with the most extreme versions of the online discourse surrounding them. And therefore, the thinking goes, they are more available to persuasion — on taking vaccines, on trusting public health agencies, on believing in evidence-based medicine.

There is some research behind this idea.

A 2025 analysis by Deloitte, for example, recommends that health campaigns “court the ‘moveable middle’” by targeting persuadable audiences. It describes one HHS campaign as targeting people who don’t hold “questioning views” on a specific health issue, while deliberately not focusing resources on “laggards” who were vehemently opposed and unlikely to change their views or behaviors.

A 2024 report from the MacArthur Foundation looking at attitudes toward immigration defines the “moveable middle” as an “elusive and enigmatic” portion of the population that does not have a vested interest in or committed position on immigration.

I understand the logic.

There are people who don’t have strong feelings about all kinds of issues. I know that because I am one of those people on certain things. We all are. And if someone doesn’t feel strongly about something, it seems reasonable to assume they might be easier to persuade.

But is that in fact the right conclusion to draw from the phrase “moveable middle”?

Or are we treating “the middle” as though it tells us more about people than it actually does? We see someone who doesn’t fit neatly into a political camp and start making assumptions about what that means: that they are less ideological, less committed, more open to persuasion, perhaps simply waiting for the right messenger or the right argument.

And if we’re being honest, I think many of us have a picture of this person in our heads.

Maybe she’s a 67-year-old woman named Patty who lives in suburban Wisconsin. She doesn’t follow the news particularly closely. She doesn’t have strong opinions about most political issues. She’s more concerned with what’s happening in her own life than with the latest political fight online. She trusts people she perceives as authorities and, with the right information from the right person, we imagine she might change her mind.

But why are we so sure that’s who the middle is?

Patty might exist. But so might a 42-year-old father who has spent years thinking about his daughter’s health and has strong opinions about vaccines, pharmaceutical companies and public health — opinions that don’t fit neatly into either political camp. Or a 35-year-old woman who distrusts government but strongly supports environmental regulation. Or someone who voted for Trump and simultaneously believes the government should be doing far more to address chronic disease.

They may all land somewhere in the “middle” depending on the question we ask. But they are not the same person, and they certainly don’t require the same strategy.

Someone can be in the middle because they don’t know what they believe. They can be there because they don’t care very much about a particular issue but care deeply about something else. They can be there because they’re exhausted by politics. They can be genuinely ambivalent, seeing compelling arguments on both sides.

Or they can be there because they hold deeply felt beliefs that simply don’t fit neatly into the ideological categories we’ve created.

That last group is the one I think gets flattened by the way we talk about the “middle.” It may increasingly include the roughly four in ten Americans who identify with large parts of the MAHA movement.

Heterodox Is Not the Same As Uncertain

Quiet is not the same as moveable. And being outside a political coalition is not the same as being available to join another one.

I think this distinction matters because the way we categorize people shapes the way we try to reach them. If we assume someone is “moveable,” we look for the message that will change their mind.

But if someone has strong convictions that don’t fit our existing political map, the task is different.

We have to understand what they actually believe. And that project is a necessary step before we figure out how or whether we need to move anybody to anywhere.

Maybe instead of asking, “How do we move the middle?” we should first ask, “Why is someone in the middle in the first place?”

Because there are many reasons someone might appear to be there. I’ve outlined some of them already but I want to bullet point it here for further clarity:

“Why Is Someone in the Middle in the First Place?”

• They might not know enough about an issue to have formed a strong opinion.

• They might simply not care very much about this one thing, but care deeply about other things — which could itself tell us something important about how persuadable they actually are.

• They might be genuinely ambivalent, seeing compelling arguments on both sides.

• They might have strong values that pull them in different directions.

• They might distrust the institutions or people delivering the information.

• Or they might have very strong beliefs that simply don’t fit neatly into the ideological categories we’re accustomed to using.

Those people can all look remarkably similar in a poll.

They are not remotely the same audience.

And what you do with each of them should be different.

• If someone doesn’t know much about an issue, give them information.

• If they don’t care about the issue, you first have to give them a reason to care.

• If they are genuinely ambivalent, helping them understand the tradeoffs may actually change their mind.

• If they are distrustful of an institution, giving them more information from that same institution may not solve the problem.

And sometimes the question isn’t even what the message should be. It’s who should deliver it.

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to find the right words, the right argument, the right piece of information. But whether someone hears those things may depend just as much on whether they trust the person delivering them.

The most carefully constructed message in the world is unlikely to move someone who has no reason to trust the messenger. And sometimes the person best positioned to change someone’s mind isn’t the person with the most expertise on the issue. It may be the person who understands their experience, shares their community, or has earned their trust in a completely different context.

So understanding the audience isn’t just about figuring out what to say. It’s figuring out who, if anyone, is actually in a position to say it.

And if we don’t know the answer to that, we may be spending far too much time refining the message and not enough time understanding the relationship between the messenger and the person we’re trying to reach.

And if they are heterodox — if they have strong beliefs that simply don’t fit neatly into either political camp — persuasion may not be the point at all.

Understanding may be.

This seems particularly important when we talk about health.

Take someone who strongly believes vaccines are important but also strongly believes pharmaceutical companies have too much influence over American medicine.

Or someone who supports childhood vaccination but believes public health officials went too far with pushing mandates during COVID.

Or someone who wants government to do much more to address chronic disease but believes government has become too entangled with the industries it is supposed to regulate.

Where do those people go?

They may show up as the “middle” on a survey.

But they aren’t necessarily uncertain about what they believe.

They may actually be quite certain.

They just don’t share the ideological package that we have come to expect.

So Now What?

Why do these distinctions matter? Because the objective shouldn’t always be to move people toward our position. Sometimes it should be to figure out whether we can move together, even when we have core disagreements.

That is a different kind of politics.

It requires listening for the values underneath someone’s position rather than immediately trying to change the position itself.

We shouldn’t confuse someone who doesn’t fit our political categories with someone who is waiting to be persuaded.

And we shouldn’t assume that the existence of a large group outside the ideological extremes means our job is to pull them toward one of those extremes.

Sometimes the more interesting possibility is that they are telling us something about the inadequacy of the extremes themselves.

This is one reason I find health conversations we have on our show so interesting.

There are millions of Americans who care deeply about chronic disease, obesity, food quality, environmental exposures and the influence of corporations on health. Some have found a political home in MAHA. Some have not. Some voted for Donald Trump. Some did not. Some trust Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some don’t. Some are deeply skeptical of public health institutions. Others simply think those institutions haven’t paid enough attention to the problems they care about.

It would be a mistake to treat all of those people as either “moveable” or “entrenched.”

But it would be an even bigger mistake to assume that because they don’t fit neatly into the traditional public health coalition, they are simply people waiting to be persuaded into it.

Some of them may be potential allies.

And that changes the question.

Instead of asking only, How do we convince them?

We might ask:

What are they seeing that we aren’t?

What are they getting right?

Where do we already agree?

And where does the evidence tell us we need to disagree?

That last question is important too.

Coalition-building does not require pretending that every idea is equally valid. It doesn’t require abandoning scientific standards or refusing to call out misinformation. It doesn’t require treating every person or organization as a legitimate partner.

It requires being more precise about where the disagreement actually is.

Because sometimes the disagreement is about the facts.

Sometimes it is about the values we prioritize.

Sometimes it is about whom we trust.

Sometimes it is about the solution.

And sometimes we agree completely on the problem but have spent so much time fighting over the politics around it that we’ve forgotten we agree at all.

That, to me, is the opportunity hidden inside the idea of the “middle.”

Not a population of empty vessels waiting to be filled.

Not a group that needs to be pulled from one ideological camp into another.

But a large and complicated group of people whose beliefs don’t always fit the categories we’ve built — and whose concerns may contain important signals about where institutions, political parties and movements have succeeded or failed to connect with the public.

Maybe the goal isn’t to move the middle.

Maybe it is to understand it well enough to know when to persuade, when to listen, when to back off completely, and when to build a coalition.

Because those are four very different things.

And if we’re serious about changing people’s lives — whether we’re talking about vaccines, chronic disease, food, climate, immigration or anything else — we need to get much better at knowing which one we’re actually trying to do.

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The criticism of what went down this week has been loud: a president declared a new vaccine schedule, absent the underlying science to justify it, the legal process that’s required to produce it, or a pipeline to support it (single-disease shots to replace the combined MMR vaccine).

The support for the EO was just as loud. That side argues it was a bold move to rein in America’s vaccine schedule, which had grown beyond the bounds of reason and out of step with peer nations. Supporters say it strengthens a parent’s decision-making agency and right to be exempted from school vaccine requirements and point to what they see as gaps in research on the cumulative effect of the current schedule.

What the EO did not do, for either group, was bridge any divides.

Listen to the episode!

Amidst the fallout of the EO, there also remains a group of American parents who are delaying or skipping vaccines for their kids out of fear and mistrust. KFF finds that one in six young parents today have delayed or skipped at least one vaccine for their child.

Did the EO do anything to address them?

On Tuesday, we sat down with a group of fairly diverse viewpoints, to get their reactions: Dr. Deb Houry, one of the CDC’s most senior leaders until she resigned from the agency last year in protest; Nancy Fuller, a mother of an adult son living with autism and epilepsy from Ohio, who considers herself a MAHA mom; Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh, an integrative pediatrician, advocate for parental informed consent, and Substack author; and Dr. Craig Spencer, an ER doctor with the Brown School of Public Health.

Different backgrounds, but on the EO, all landed on the same verdict: disappointment.

But did they see a way forward?

Three of our four guests approached this as health professionals. Nancy Fuller did not.

“I’m a mom that has 24/7 care (for her son) over the last 33 years, and that gives me a different vantage point because I think many of moms and parents in my position never got answers on how could this happen,” she shared.

“Then fast-forward 30 years of looking for answers on my own, and never hearing from the government, from public health, from my physicians, as to what could have been the underlying cause of this.”

“And then a Kennedy comes along and says, ‘I hear you, parents. I think we need to have change, I think we need to explore and do more studies to get to the safety, so everybody feels comfortable going forward,’ that resonated with me and a lot of people.”

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As for this week’s order:

“I was really sad. And I was very sad because I feel like strong-arming this situation without good new science on safety as to why we should be making these changes, strong-arming it isn’t going to win.”

“I don’t think we had answers yesterday. Even though I resonate underneath all of the intentions with why they think questions need to be asked and why I have questions that are unanswered, I resonate with that. I don’t resonate with how it was handled.”

Instead, she said she wants the painstaking research done first, before considering a new schedule. Not the other way around. If the event at the Oval had been focused on a scientific search for answers, not a transformed vaccine schedule, it would have been affirming, she said.

“Articulating that there are concerns that you’re acknowledging, and then because of those concerns, we’re investing this much money in this commission to draw these type of objective studies or comparisons that we can do to deliver something that everyone can really feel comfortable with, it could have, in my mind, been a win because then they would have heard voices of people like me, and said, ‘Yeah, I’ve had 30 years of these concerns, and you hear me, and you’re going to invest.’”

But research, of course, is not a magic fix to our trust breakdown. We asked Nancy what she hears when doctors say there’s been extensive peer-reviewed research over decades investigating whether there’s an association between childhood vaccination and autism, and they have not found one.

“I am not certain that all the studies that have been done to date have reconciled in my mind that there is not a link,” she said.

Nancy spoke about her suspicions. “I do have my own suspicion from various things I’ve read about funding of so many studies that concerns me, and who’s behind the studies. Therefore, it creates a lot more suspicion in my mind that I can trust everything that’s been done in the past.”

Again, more research will not be a panacea.

Having said that, in different ways, each guest we spoke with circled back to research, not an executive order, as a key to building trust.

Dr. Deb Houry:

“I’m one of those kind of grounded, practical people, and so for me, even things just like separating out MMR into three components, you can’t just make that happen. And so when I see an executive order, it’s something I want to be able to implement, so I kind of scratched my head. Okay, there’s a bunch of things here that you can’t make happen; you can certainly study them, but that will take many years.”

Dr. Joel Warsh:

“It doesn’t matter if you make an executive order, if none of the doctors know what to do with that, or even agree with it. They’re just going to push back. And I really want to see everybody sit down at the table and have discussions, pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine people in the middle, and discuss where their differences are, and hopefully move forward to bringing that science forward.”

He continued, “And I would really love to see that infrastructure put in place for the long term instead of just this fighting back and forth, which seems to be all that we’re seeing these days. And then ultimately the parents pay the price because they’re left scratching their heads, saying, ‘What do I do?’”

Dr. Spencer raised that public health needs to do more to communicate about research to all parents, including Nancy.

“Your comments are something that I think all of my colleagues in public health should listen to to understand what this moment is and how it appeals to parents like yourself that feel like they don’t have the answers they want, and how we can do a better job of helping you feel like that research gets to you, those answers get to you.”

As for the EO, he said: “So much of this is just operationally not going to work. It’s not an executive order that determines vaccines. Nor should we want it to be an executive order that determines vaccines. I think we can all agree, Joel, Craig, Nancy, Deb, all of us, that we do not want an executive order being the thing that determines the vaccine schedule. It’s the CDC, it’s the ACIP.”

In other words: research.

At the Oval Office signing, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya highlighted a research project that is underway: the agency’s $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative is funding more than a dozen research projects, studying genetic and environmental contributors to autism. It’s not focused on vaccines, but rather on a wide range of potential factors. The initiative barely makes a blip in the sea of headlines over splitting up the MMR vaccine and legal battles over the administration’s sidestepping ACIP to change the vaccine schedule.

After the details of the new vaccine schedule were discussed, Bhattacharya spoke about the initiative and the realities of scientific research.

“Science takes time,” he said. “It’s very frustrating.”

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The subject was slavery. But beneath the debate over the morality of slavery was a larger question: How does lasting political change actually happen?

That is when Lincoln uttered this famous line:

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.”

I bring this up in the context of the conversation around coalition-building to create change. Why build coalitions, particularly with people with whom you might have fundamental — at times irreconcilable — differences?

At a time when so many of our fault lines are drawn between pro-democracy and anti-democracy, pro-science and anti-science, pro-government and anti-government, pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine, the very idea of finding common ground can feel dangerous.

It can feel like drawing a false moral equivalence between people acting in good faith and people who are actively trying to undermine institutions that protect society.

And I understand where that fear comes from.

When you have watched people attack scientific institutions, undermine trust in vaccines, or dismiss the expertise of doctors and researchers, the instinct to draw a hard line is understandable. The stakes are too high to pretend that every disagreement is just a difference of opinion.

There are ideas and actions that should not be normalized. There are claims that are simply not supported by evidence. And there are people whose goals are fundamentally incompatible with a healthy democracy.

But I also don’t believe those are the only fault lines.

I believe many of us are being divided in ways that prevent us from seeing where collaboration can actually produce better outcomes.

Our modern history is littered with examples of coalitions made up of people with very different worldviews but complementary strengths.

Some groups are better at moving public sentiment — at understanding what people are feeling, what they fear, and what motivates them to act.

Other groups are better at building institutions, conducting research, and translating evidence into policy.

Those are different forms of power.

You need both.

I think about the example of President George W. Bush.

Today, many in public health rightly praise his creation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which is estimated to have saved more than 25 million lives since it launched in 2003.

Virtually every person I have met in public health recognizes the extraordinary impact of that program and the devastating consequences of efforts to weaken global health infrastructure.

But there is another thing George W. Bush did in 2003.

He launched the Iraq War.

That war was based in large part on intelligence claims about weapons of mass destruction that later proved false. It resulted in enormous loss of life, including hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and thousands of American service members, with many more wounded.

For many people, the Iraq War remains one of the most devastating foreign policy failures in modern American history.

And yet, I have rarely heard someone argue that because of the Iraq War, George W. Bush should receive no credit for PEPFAR.

They are able to hold two truths at once.

A president can be responsible for a deeply damaging policy decision and also be responsible for one of the most successful global health initiatives in history.

The same was true of the coalition that made PEPFAR possible.

George W. Bush worked with conservative evangelical groups and LGBTQ+ advocates — communities that often disagreed deeply with each other on many other issues — because they found common purpose around saving lives.

They did not erase their disagreements.

They did not suddenly share the same worldview.

They found a shared objective important enough to work together.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. worked with President Lyndon B. Johnson to help pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That cooperation did not stop Dr. King from later becoming one of Johnson’s fiercest critics over the Vietnam War.

Working together on one issue is not the same as endorsing everything a person or movement represents.

Two things can be true at once.

The same challenge exists today in the health space.

There are people who supported an administration that weakened much of the scientific infrastructure that made this country a global leader in research and public health.

There are also people who supported that administration because they felt ignored by institutions, wanted more attention paid to chronic disease, worried about the influence of corporations on health, or believed the existing system was failing them.

Those people are not all the same.

And if the goal is improving health outcomes, dismissing all of them may mean losing the very people whose voices are necessary to create change.

This is where Lincoln’s words matter.

When Lincoln said that “he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions,” he was not arguing that every popular idea is correct. He was making a different point: lasting change requires more than institutions making decisions. It requires people believing in, understanding, and ultimately embracing that change.

Public health has often been strongest at the institutional side of that equation — generating evidence, building systems, and creating interventions that save lives.

But public sentiment does not move simply because evidence exists.

People are persuaded by people they trust. They are influenced by communities they belong to.

That is the capacity for persuasion that grassroots health movements like those associated with MAHA have demonstrated.

It does not mean every claim made within these movements is accurate. It does not mean every leader associated with them should be embraced.

It means that if we care about changing health outcomes, we cannot ignore the forces shaping what people believe and why.

The activists associated with MAHA have built communities around concerns that resonate with many Americans: chronic disease, obesity, food quality, environmental exposures, and institutional trust.

The people involved in these movements often have credibility within their communities because, in many cases, they are those communities.

That is a form of power.

But influence alone is not enough.

Public health brings something equally essential: scientific rigor, evidence-based research, surveillance systems, institutional expertise, and the ability to translate knowledge into effective interventions.

The answer is not to replace one with the other.

Coalition-building is not about pretending every disagreement can be overcome or that everyone belongs in the same coalition.

It is about knowing which boundaries protect the values we care about — and which boundaries prevent us from solving the problems we say we want to solve.

The question is whether we can build a coalition that combines the ability to move public sentiment with the ability to follow evidence.

A coalition that listens without surrendering scientific standards.

A coalition that collaborates without pretending disagreements do not exist.

A coalition that recognizes that lasting change requires both the people who can change minds and the institutions that can turn those changes into reality.

Because history suggests that the biggest transformations do not come from people who all think alike.

They come from people who find enough common purpose to move together.

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We wrote a piece last week supporting Dr. Craig Spencer’s argument in Public Health Needs MAHA — not because we believe the MAHA label belongs to any one political movement, but because he made a compelling case that public health must find new ways to listen, communicate, and engage with the broader questions around prevention, chronic disease, food, and trust that have brought millions of Americans into this conversation.

What followed was a response from many, particularly within public health, who felt this perspective was wrong because to them, MAHA is associated primarily with one thing: Donald Trump, Russ Vought, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s efforts to dismantle long-standing public health and scientific institutions. And that anyone embracing the MAHA label is now inevitably associated with those policies and their consequences.

I’ve been reflecting on all of these thoughts over the last week. Here is where I have landed:

It is true, you can’t have a movement purporting to want to make America healthy again while simultaneously rolling back EPA enforcement actions against polluters. You can’t have a movement purporting to want make chronic disease a priority while simultaneously cutting chronic disease surveillance, nutrition research, and chronic disease prevention. You can’t make historic cuts to Medicaid and not realize it will reduce access to preventive care, diabetes treatment, mental health services, and medications. You can’t have a movement dedicated to regenerative agriculture while unilaterally jacking up the production of the world’s most popular pesticide and putting in place liability shields to protect those pesticide makers.

Once a slogan like MAHA becomes inseparable from a particular governing agenda, it loses its ability to unite people who share the underlying goals but reject that agenda. At that point, the label narrows the coalition instead of expanding it.

But what is also true — and what I believe Craig got right in his piece — is that lost in this debate is a broad coalition of Americans whose concerns about health no longer fit neatly into either camp. You can see it in the polling: widespread frustration with healthcare costs, bipartisan concern about food additives and pesticides, declining confidence in institutions alongside continued trust in personal physicians, and support for vaccines coupled with a desire for greater transparency.

And this is why it’s time to come up with a new movement, with a new name.

• Americans want a healthcare system that is more preventive and less transactional.

• They want healthier food and stronger oversight of the industries that shape what Americans eat and drink.

• And they want scientific institutions they can trust—not because those institutions demand trust, but because they earn it.

• Most Americans continue to vaccinate themselves and their children, yet many also want more space to ask questions about safety, scheduling, and uncertainty without assuming those questions place them outside the bounds of good faith.

Yet these same people don’t respond well to being told never to trust the experts, that vaccines hurt more than they help, that doctors are all in the pocket of big Pharma. They don't want institutions that are immune from criticism. They want institutions that are worthy of trust. Because lasting progress almost always requires institutions capable of operating at scale. Otherwise we are all just nibbling around the edges.

The challenge is that no existing movement has fully made space for this coalition.

Traditional public health has often been strongest at protecting populations from infectious disease and environmental threats, but it has struggled at times to meet people where they are when they ask questions about chronic disease, food, prevention, and a healthcare system that often feels rushed and transactional.

The healthcare reform movement has rightly focused on costs and access, but it has often centered affordability over the broader questions Americans are increasingly asking about how to build healthier lives before people become patients.

And the wellness movement has sometimes embraced important questions about prevention and root causes while also creating space for claims that sometimes outrun the evidence.

The result is a vacuum. Millions of Americans are looking for a movement that can hold two ideas at the same time: that institutions need to be challenged, and that institutions are necessary; that science should evolve, and that science remains our best tool for understanding the world; that prevention matters, and that evidence still matters.

This movement doesn’t have a political home today.

Who is going to pick up this mantle? Who is going to build a health movement that can challenge institutions without abandoning them, embrace uncertainty without abandoning evidence, and rebuild trust not by demanding it — but by earning it?

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The criticism we hear most often about our pod is simple: ‘You let misinformation go unchallenged’. People ask whether we’ve confused curiosity with a type of complicity.

To answer that, I want to start with the ‘why’ of Why Should I Trust You? – explain why we started the show.

What follows are my own reflections and does not necessarily represent the opinions of my co-hosts. I hope it will shed some light on how I view this journey.

Why We Did This

When Tom, Maggie, Dr. Mark and I first started thinking about Why Should I Trust You? we were imagining it as a multipart docuseries that would serve as a reckoning about the Covid pandemic. It was the summer of 2024, and we were a mere 6 months away from the 5 year anniversary of what was one of the defining tragedies in modern American history. We were going to try to raise money from documentary film studios and health foundations and produce a series of 5 one hour-episodes looking at how Covid ripped us apart as a country, resulting in a crisis of mistrust and how we were going to move forward. Tom and I had been journalists and producers for decades and had experience in doing stuff like this. If we were lucky, maybe a Netflix or a Peacock or a Hulu would pick it up.

At first, we called dozens of public health experts, doctors, and professors. I remember us only talking to the experts at first. At the time, it seemed like the most obvious place to start. We asked them why they thought there was mistrust for science and public health. Almost all of them said: “Misinformation.” That there was a calculated attack on the field of medicine, public health and science and that that was the main driver of mistrust. These scientists and doctors were raw, they were angry and many seemed truly at a loss for how to move forward.

Mis/disinformation is real. It accurately describes a form of weaponry that was used to generate mistrust and even harassment towards many experts. I have read things said about scientists and doctors that are at best wrong and at worst, dangerous lies and threats that have frequently needed law enforcement intervention.

But two things happened that made us change course, start over, and to be perfectly honest, shift my world view entirely from how I was looking at this project to what it has now become. One was something Dr. Francis Collins told us in a conversation. And the second was the election of 2024.

‘Don’t Preach To the Choir’

Dr. Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, was kind enough to have several conversations with us over zoom as we were developing this docuseries. He told us about his experience during the pandemic, what he thought he did right, what he thought he did wrong, what worried him moving forward.

As we were hanging up a zoom call, I remember him telling us: “By the way, if you’re just going to make another film that is only going to be seen by liberals or only by public health experts, don’t bother. We can’t keep preaching to the choir. We have enough outlets that do that. You need to reach a different audience. The ones who don’t trust us.”

I remember thinking about that for a long time.

I am a lifelong Democrat. I have worked in mainstream news, which has skewed liberal. I live in Brooklyn, NY and everyone in my friend and family circle with very few exceptions pretty much thinks like me about stuff. At this point, I was only reading and listening and watching things that were in my left-coded media ecosystem. It truly never occurred to me to think about reaching a different audience. Making the film and getting it out there seemed good enough.

‘We Need To Make This A Podcast’

Then came the election of 2024.

I remember sitting on the couch with my husband along with my best girl friend, watching the returns, while slowly eating a bowl of popcorn that was beginning to taste like styrofoam. Kamala Harris was losing.

A few hours later, it was over.

Over the next few weeks, I read the news. The post mortems. The lessons learned. One lesson kept coming up: We aren’t reaching people who aren’t like us. That this election is a referendum on institutional consultant-class ways of thinking. That the Democrats were increasingly a party of the educated and well-off.

And something else had happened related to our work: it became clear that Donald Trump was going to pick RFK Jr. as his head of Health and Human Services.

Tom and I talked. We said, screw the film. We need to have something nimble, agile, capturing this moment of anti-establishment fervor, that was about to explode onto the health space due to the rise of RFK Jr. and a movement we were just beginning to learn about, Make America Healthy Again.

So we said, let’s do a podcast. Only this time, we aren’t going to start by only talking to science and medical experts. We are going to talk to regular everyday people to learn about how they make health choices in their lives, why they didn’t trust mainstream health, and what they were looking for from systems. We were intrigued by this MAHA movement. A whole movement organized around mistrusting the health system?

We decided to be very direct: we would call the podcast Why Should I Trust You?

Our First Episode

The first person we called was someone I had read about in a news article: a 50-something year old woman from Atlanta, Georgia named Melinda Hicks. She was a lifelong Democrat who in 2024 voted for a Republican for the first time. Why? “Robert F. Kennedy Jr,” she said. We asked her if there were other people she knew like her. She laughed. She said: “Oh yeah. Tons.”

Pretty soon, we were talking to dozens of people just like Melinda: lifelong Democrats who voted for Trump – because of their love of Robert F Kennedy Jr. And their deep frustrations with the medical and public health system in the US.

We talked with them for hours at a time, on the phone. I wanted to understand how they got to where they did. What media they consumed. What was their life like? I told them about my life. About my kids. About my relationship to vaccines and medicine. I opted to take vaccines because I believed they worked and had no issues taking them. But I had a lot of problems with the health care system. I didn’t have good insurance and avoided going to the doctor. Many of them said that they did too. They described wanting to think about health in their lives, and not just when they are sick. But when they are well. To be in control of what they put into their body. To a tee, people would bring up health in a way I wasn’t used to talking about. About soil, about vegetables, about pollutants, about corporations trying to take advantage of them. Hospitals and exam rooms weren’t the focus of their health vision. School lunches, farms, alternative medicine and grocery stores were.

Many of them were avid listeners of Joe Rogan’s podcast. So I started listening. During one 3-week stretch, I listened to about 40 episodes in a row. It occurred to me that the Joe Rogan Experience could easily be described as a health podcast – it seemed like nothing animated that man more than the topic of health and Covid. I calculated that about 60% of the 40 episodes I listened to had long stretches of conversation devoted to the pandemic and his experience with it, more often than not, his anger towards scientific and medical experts.

Melinda Hicks was our first guest on the podcast. A MAHA mom. Not a scientist or a doctor. We debated that for a long time. How do we want to debut our show? We decided to go with Melinda because we wanted start off by reflecting the sentiment that there is a group of people out there in America who are increasingly losing trust for public health and the healthcare system in this country. And they now have a movement organized around that mistrust headed by a charismatic figure who speaks to them. Many of them said at the time they didn’t love the fact that Kennedy aligned himself with Trump. But they said they felt so alienated by the Democrats during Covid and during this election that in many cases they said they “held their nose” and pulled that lever for Trump.

Do We Platform Misinformation?

Which brings us to the central criticism of our show: do we platform misinformation?

Over the last 18 months, we have hosted over 30 conversations between MAHA and public health, or other groups of people that are sometimes seen as in opposition to each other on issues regarding health. We have built relationships with scores of doctors, public health, scientists, community health workers, nurses, lawmakers, farmers. Many of these folks are grassroots supporters of MAHA. Many very much are not. I am proud that we have built a space where people from very different viewpoints feel welcome to come share their thoughts. At a time when people are siloed in their media echo chambers, we have a show that people across partisan divides listen to, and then share within their networks.

The conversations are not easy. Many of you have heard them. Many of you tell us you get frustrated when you listen to them. For instance, someone says they are nervous that vaccines caused their son’s autism. Why don’t we correct them right away, that vaccines don’t cause autism? Someone says they don’t believe in studies or expertise from certain scientists, that truth is subjective and someone’s lived experience is just as important. Why don’t we jump in and say ‘no it’s not’? Why do we talk to known spreaders of falsehoods?

I understand that every minute someone spends making a false claim is a minute in which listeners may absorb something inaccurate. That responsibility weighs on me every episode.

As a journalist, I have a few choices. One is to go full Mike Wallace and challenge them from the get go. You come in with a prepared set of questions, you go through it. You challenge and even argue. You leave. You potentially never see them again. When we interview powerful leaders, we have taken this approach while maintaining civility. We believe it is absolutely within our right to challenge and hold the powerful to account.

But with people who don’t wield power, my option is to maintain a radical curiosity. My first instinct is to understand why someone thinks what they do before deciding how and when to challenge what they’re saying. Because I worry if we misunderstand why trust broke down, we’ll build the wrong solutions. We can publish all the correct information in the world, but it won’t matter if people have stopped listening.

Our goal isn’t to create a space where every claim is just aired and goes unchallenged. It’s to create a space where we first understand why someone believes something before deciding how best to engage it. Sometimes that means questioning it in the moment. Sometimes it means bringing in another host to move the conversation in a new direction. Sometimes it means adding context ourselves. Sometimes it means acknowledging that a claim is unsupported while continuing the conversation because the belief itself tells us something important about the breakdown of trust. Understanding a belief is not the same as endorsing it. But if we never understand it, we have little chance of changing it.

And thinking back to Dr Collins’ challenge to us to build a new audience: the truth is in order to build relationships and truly appeal to a different audience than your own tribe, people have to see themselves in what you do. That means talking about the issues, experiences, and yes, inviting guests that sometimes align with their values and not mine, all shaping how they think about health—not just driving it towards the conclusions we hope they’ll reach.

Behavioral scientists for years have said that trust is not built through information being given. But through relationships built.

So then I find myself asking what does it mean to build a relationship? Can you build a relationship with someone if you’re constantly fact checking them? Where I think I land on this is sometimes an immediate correction closes people down before you understand them. But sometimes immediate correction is absolutely necessary. The challenge is discerning which moment you’re in.

If I am not listening to their answers and am always in correcting mode, I am not staying present in the conversation. If I immediately debated one mom’s concern about vaccines, I wouldn’t have been able to hear about a negative experience at the doctor that cemented her doubts about vaccines (She and I later spoke off the podcast about why I believed vaccines were safe and we had a really healthy conversation. But I also told her I knew she loved her son very much. And it was clear she wanted to do everything she could to protect him).

If I immediately jump in to correct someone about their fears about myocarditis and the vaccine, I miss the part where they talk about how they actually stopped going to a doctor because it cost too much under their insurance. If I’m always ready with the factcheck, I miss the chance to truly learn something way bigger and potentially more instructive for public health and others.

There was an instance where one guest was stating a claim that was patently false about what happened inside one’s body when a particular vaccine entered it – I steered the conversation by saying ‘I know there are scientists who dispute that. And I know you will likely stick to what you are saying. I’d like one of the scientists to respond but I suggest we then move on’. That moment reminded me that intervention isn’t binary. It isn’t only “say nothing” or “cross-examine.” Sometimes the right editorial choice is to acknowledge the dispute, make listeners aware there is one, and continue exploring why the person believes what they believe.

Sometimes it feels like I live inside the tension between journalism and trust brokering. The two don’t always seem compatible. One seems centered on information building and sharing. The other is centered on relationship building. Sometimes I’m doing both. Sometimes I’m doing more of one and not the other. To me, both are vital.

I’m Still Learning

What our show does is strange. We know it. We are one of the few places where people who think vehemently differently from one another actually come to the same platform to share space. Sometimes it’s awkward. Sometimes it’s tense. Sometimes we laugh. A few times we have cried. We mostly always learn something. But more than anything, we marvel that we actually even did it.

I am still learning. There are interviews I would probably do differently today. Not because I’ve abandoned the philosophy of listening, but because I’ve learned there are moments when listeners need more context than we provided. Do I go back and listen to some episodes and wish I had intervened and asked a question instead of letting someone go on a long monologue about something, often riddled with questionable facts, for quite so long? Absolutely. Are there certain episodes where I think we didn’t let the public health side of things explain their point of view quite enough and we encouraged them to listen more than intervene, because that was a big piece of feedback from pandemic days, that institutions needed to listen more. Yes, in the early days of our show that was definitely the case. I remember talking with a few public health folks afterwards saying: “I think you all can definitely talk more, don’t be afraid. Be honest, share your truth.”

I know we rub many of you the wrong way. The show may not be for you. For me, creating something that can actually be listened to by people from different sides of the political aisle feels vital and urgent. We don’t live in shared realities anymore. For instance, when the CDC shooting happened, friends in public health asked me to text my “MAHA friends” to see what they thought about it. Public health was understandably raw, after the historic destruction of scientific infrastructure – and now a shooting?

I texted a few friends in MAHA asking them about it. What surprised me wasn’t what they thought. It was that they hadn’t seen it at all. Because the story hadn’t shown up on their timelines. Their media ecosystem showed them other news. As soon as they heard, those MAHA friends did in fact post about it and expressed their shock and anger over it.

For people as different as MAHA and public health to actually listen to the same show because they both feel their values surfaced at different times, at times feels impossible but it mostly feels like a step in the right direction. It’s led to a few MAHA supporters telling us they are beginning to trust public health again. It’s led to a few collaborations we are proud of. But most of all? It’s led to so many relationships and trust pathways. Meet ups with new people. Group chats and trips on the road with all kinds of new faces and perspectives. For now, we keep on keeping on. We have big dreams and ambitions. Stay tuned.

That’s the work we’re trying to do. We won’t always get it right. But I think it’s work worth doing.

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Did you view yesterday’s Senate hearing as a trap, meant to snare the 85-year-old retired infectious disease veteran, opening the door to a post-pardon indictment?

Or did you feel that if he really did nothing wrong, he had nothing to fear from answering?

In the hours after the hearing, we recorded an episode with two friends of the podcast, David Wallace-Wells and Katelyn Jetelina.

Katelyn is an epidemiologist and founder of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist.

David is a science columnist for the New York Times who has extensively covered the pandemic and its long-term fallout (including interviewing Anthony Fauci).

Listen to the episode

David was surprised by Dr. Fauci taking the Fifth, and thought it was “pretty cowardly and a kind of a disservice to the country”. Katelyn was not surprised. “They were looking for any reason for him to go around his pardon from Biden.” In the clip below, each explains their reaction.

And then there are the senators pressing ahead with their questions and point-making despite Dr. Fauci pleading the Fifth. Were they dutifully documenting their case and making the best of the situation, or simply engaging in made-for-social-media theater?

For David, the hearing was revelatory, all these years later.

“I do think something was revealed that is sort of important and profound, which is the degree to which we are living in so many different realities in our memory and arguments about COVID,” he told us.

For us, every discussion of COVID and the pandemic response on the show reveals how much this subject is not only the subtext for the collapse in trust today; it is the text. It is still a live-wire subject in millions of living rooms just as it was yesterday in the hearing room.

Yet, despite the death of more than a million Americans and the upending of society, the nation has never put together a 9/11-style commission to go back, in a bipartisan approach, to try and better understand where our response succeeded and where it failed.

And the national convening for any reckoning with COVID now appears to be a hearing room full of cameras. And yesterday, what we reckoned with was how divided we still are.

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So we’re reading through many of the responses to our friend Craig’s piece called Public Health Needs MAHA.

Our main takeaway is many folks in public health vehemently dislike MAHA because to them, the entire movement IS the actions of Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, whom they see as being 1) single-handedly responsible for the greatest destruction of a federal scientific infrastructure that since WW2 has produced life-transforming innovations which are the envy of the world 2) anti-vaccine and 3) undermining scientific expertise.

• Donald Trump absolutely has done #1. It is without a doubt one of the biggest stains of his presidency.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in our estimation, is #2, though frankly what’s noteworthy at this moment is that despite this, the nation’s vaccine infrastructure HASN’T been dismantled and Americans remain pro-vaccine. We also have fighters inside public health to thank for that.

• Kennedy has absolutely undermined scientific expertise to the point where good science now needs to be defended because so many people just automatically assume scientists are in the pocket of big Pharma. We have advised friends inside MAHA that this is not a good move. We have said this to Dr Oz when we interviewed him recently.

But what is also clear is that public health all too frequently equates the millions of people who support some part of this movement with the actions of the administration.

What they don’t see is that all these moms and dads and young people support Robert F. Kennedy Jr because he has given voice to a desire to have someone fight for their health, which they don’t trust is being cared for by a financially-incentivized medical system. They are frustrated by their experiences inside that system. And for whatever reason, the persistent, hard work and messaging of public health and that of specific administrations with initiatives such as the Let’s Move campaign just never connected with them. We’re not denying that local campaigns and projects have had their amazing impacts – that is real. But national movements can also be real and result in mindset change on a deeper level. Because they rely not just on policy, but on organizing and on culture. Just ask the people who fought for Tobacco Free Kids or Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Policy + politics + culture = change.

Many we speak with inside MAHA grassroots are frankly ambivalent about the phrase MAHA. They wish they weren’t called that anymore. They didn’t choose it. They chose to fight for health. And a label was slapped on them to promote a convenient political alliance. These days, many tell us they are quite disappointed with the lack of policy wins with this administration and yes, even with their leader Kennedy.

We have heard public health voices say that, like Kennedy, these supporters abandoned the Democrats.

Let’s be clear. The Democrats abandoned them. Two former Democratic presidential candidates have come on our podcast saying as much (Sen. Cory Booker and former congressman Tim Ryan). The party decided that this movement of Americans had to be stopped because of the anti-vaccine beliefs of some of its followers. That meant the party lost potential allies in the fight for the environment, healthier food, nutrition, access to preventive care, and against the systemic causes of chronic disease.

And let’s talk about vaccine hesitancy. Despite overwhelming support for vaccines, one out of six young parents in this country skips or delays vaccines for their kids. Twenty percent either don’t have too much or any confidence at all in the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule.

What are you going to do, kick them out of your clinics? Remove them from your conferences? Label them all anti-vaxxers and wait for them to leave the public sphere? Pretend they don’t exist? Consider for a moment the possibility that shunning them might only reinforce the message they hear about you: that public health is elitist, institutionalist, and doesn’t have your back.

Lashing out at a movement of people who have begun to break with this administration, and enter a search for a new political and ideological home, one that prioritizes many of the things you prioritize, seems to us like a mistake. Definitionally, you need to demonstrate that you see a difference between MAHA leadership and supporters of an insurgent health movement that yes, maybe you don’t totally see eye to eye with, but you recognize that they have tapped into something that we need to finally admit, the rest of us have not.

And rather than pile on a public health veteran who is calling for others in his field to find common ground with MAHA where it is possible, while rejecting the dangerous, unscientific elements, perhaps it is time to do a little mindset change ourselves. We cannot afford to keep waiting for the exact right cast of characters to come along in order to listen to the country as it is and fight for them.

41% of the US population say they identify with the MAHA movement’s platform. You can and should fight Trump’s and Kennedy’s destructive policies, while still bringing these supporters into a dialogue. They are not a monolith. And neither are you. It’s the smart thing to do.

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"I just believe that there are two parallel sciences running in this world. There's the old science that was the real science, and then you have the new science, where it's: 'Just take it, it'll save your life. Damn the consequences of what the side effects are. You need to take this, and you need to do it now.'"- Lori O’Connell

This week we gathered a group of individuals whose views on vaccines ranged from accepting to cautious before the pandemic. Today they are far more skeptical of vaccines and those who recommend them. We wanted to understand what happened during the pandemic that changed their minds, and what their point of view is today, several years out. We set out not to debate or fact-check but rather to listen in an effort to surface their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. This group came ready to share in a very open and honest way.

Joining the conversation:

Aaron Everitt is a friend of the show and lives in Colorado. He writes the Besides the Revolution Substack and volunteered for the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign.

Lori O’Connell lives in Darlington, Pennsylvania, in the western part of the state near East Palestine, Ohio, the site of the toxic train derailment.

Jeff Hutt lives on the Gulf Coast of Texas near Corpus Christi. He was national field director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign.

Daniel DeLuca, also a frequent guest of WSITY, owns a bar in the college town of Athens, Ohio. He worked on the Kennedy campaign in Ohio and is now a leader with MAHA Ohio.

Teresa Dixon lives in Frederick, Maryland. She is a retired IBM computer professional and an Army veteran.

Listen to the conversation!

Feelings about vaccines before the pandemic:

-Jeff Hutt: “I was real neutral on it.”

-Lori O’Connell: “There are vaccines that my children did not receive because I felt that a natural immunity to certain illnesses was far more important than putting something in their body that I didn’t know what the total makeup was. So I’m very cautious when it comes to vaccines.”

-Aaron Everitt: “Our two oldest kids, we kind of went through the whole vaccine schedule just as it was kind of required, and then I think as time went on, we started to ask more questions about why we were doing each of these individual multiple layers of vaccines, and it really kind of came down when they were in teenagers. There was a conversation around and it was even kind of preteen. They were talking about a sexually transmitted disease vaccine, and my wife and I both just kind of said we’re not interested in that. We don’t want to do it, and that really raised a lot of questions with the doctor at that time, which made us kind of start to shop for a different doctor because of the way that we were sort of pressured, I guess, in that particular space.”

-Teresa Dixon: “I’m 74, and when I was growing up, there was like six or seven vaccinations that we needed to get, and one was the mumps, the measles, and things of that nature. And I still got them, so I wasn’t sure about it. So that raised questions for me as a kid. And then later on, they started adding more and more vaccines to the children, and now I have a nephew that’s got autism, and that stood me up to pay attention.”

-Danny DeLuca: “Before COVID, I never even questioned; vaccines didn’t even come up. I would just take them.”

The COVID vaccine and rollout:

-Lori O’Connell: “I don’t consider COVID to be a quote vaccine, and that’s only because to me, old school vaccines eradicated the illness. The COVID vaccine did not eradicate it.”

-Danny DeLuca: “I’m not against vaccines. It was just this specific COVID mRNA that drew a lot of questions for me.”

-Lori O’Connell: “I think that the rollout, as quick as they rolled it out, was part of the biggest reason that I questioned it. After you know, it took years to roll out other vaccines.”

-Danny DeLuca: “When it came to this mass production, as far as I know, I didn’t see anything at that time that had been done on this level before with mRNA. There wasn’t a lot of statistics on it, and again, I could have been wrong.

-Lori O’Connell: “How can you assure without the proper testing that that was a safe vaccine to take-and you know we again my whole family, grandkids, kids, no one took it, and we’re all here today.”

“This is where most of my distrust has come in”:

-Aaron Everitt: “I’m not a very big fan of making decisions when time and duress are pressured upon me. I don’t like what that does. I think it really makes us choose things that we wouldn’t otherwise choose if we were given an honest and open opportunity to look at it.”

-Teresa Dixon: The one thing that I have not heard mentioned is that all the things that have evolved because people did not take the vaccine, like our military getting kicked out, things of that nature. You couldn’t go to school unless you had the vaccine. You couldn’t do a lot. You couldn’t go to work. I mean, even the nurses that were treating this had to have the vaccine a year later in order to continue to work. And I know this is a political aspect of it, but it’s something that I think really should be discussed because this is where most of my distrust has come in.”

-Jeff Hutt: “The way the COVID vaccine was rolled out was if individuals don’t take the vaccine, you’re going to be part of the problem, and to me, that’s really where the line is drawn. I think individuals should evaluate science through their own perspective and how they think best suits them.”

-Lori O’Connell: “You said that nobody forces you to put a vaccine in your body, but yet they do because your children can’t go to school unless they have a vaccine record.”

-Danny DeLuca: “I think a lot of the problems with Americans specifically was being dictated, being told that they have to do this.”

Seeing things ‘with my own eyes’:

-Lori O’Connell: “If I don’t see it with my own eyes or hear it with my own ears, how do I know it’s true? I mean, yes, anybody could put a paper out. Anybody could say this, that, or the other thing, and that, you know, necessarily is not, you know, the truth.”

-Danny DeLuca: “Because my immunity is usually strong enough, I didn’t really see a reason in getting it. And now, afterwards, I’ve seen a lot of people with myocarditis and issues like that who did take the vaccine.”

-Danny DeLuca: “I’ve hired over 300 college students in my life, and it never came up one time. And after, after COVID, there was three kids who had to have heart surgery because of it. And that was something you know. Maybe it was just bad luck. Maybe their genetic. All three had bad genetic pool. I don’t know. But you know, causation and correlation aren’t necessarily the same thing. But when you see something like that, it’s it’s hard to ignore.

-Teresa Dixon: “And in the past few years since COVID, I took one vaccine, and that was for pneumonia. And guess what? I got pneumonia, and I thought this is crazy.”

-Lori O’Connell: “Things didn’t match up, and it made me question. And if it doesn’t make sense, I don’t believe that it’s true. If it makes sense, I’m gonna be more apt to agree and say, okay, yeah, okay, like the polio vaccine. I mean, I worked in home care. I took care of people that had polio and were affected by it. I have a friend who had polio and was affected by it, but I also see that it eradicated a horrible illness. So, did I take the polio vaccine? Absolutely. Did my kids? Absolutely, because it makes sense; I saw with my own eyes. They come to me and say, “Oh, we got this vaccine that we just developed based off of what happened in COVID for this new pandemic. No.”

-Lori O’Connell: “Medicine does have its place; science also has its place, but it is our personal, I believe, our personal responsibility to do the research, put the time and the effort into looking into these different things to make that conscious decision. You can’t make a good decision without information, and if you rely on one source for your information, I’m sorry, but I think that’s a mistake.”

“Two parallel sciences”:

-Lori O’Connell: "I just believe that there are two parallel sciences running in this world. There's the old science that was the real science, and then you have the new science, where it's: 'Just take it, it'll save your life. Damn the consequences of what the side effects are. You need to take this, and you need to do it now.'"

-Aaron Everitt: “’My own belief’. We hear a lot of that in this call. Like it’s my own belief. It’s my own thinking. It’s my own stuff. But you also hear that from the medical industry that it’s there’s sort of like or this kind of movement to the science is almost its own entity of something that has to be believed in, and I think you know, historically speaking we don’t we haven’t done this very well.”

-Jeff Hutt: “A lot of us who were at before COVID were very open to vaccines and open to doctors, and I think what has happened is medicine has, in these studies that you’re referring to, to a lot of people, they begin looking at them as tobacco industry studies, and a lot of people feel that the studies that you’re quoting or where you’re getting your information from is biased science promoting a certain agenda. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily true. And I know that a lot of these things are peer reviewed, but I think what it comes down to is really you can have science say one thing, and you can have people believe something that is not what medical science says.”

-Lori O’Connell: “If what they’re putting out matches what I’m researching, and it coincides, okay, then I do believe. I always believe this. If it doesn’t make sense, it’s not true. You have to rely on your own brains a lot. You have to realize on your own. You have to rely on yourself as far as what you’ve learned.”

A ‘slow degradation’:

-Jeff Hutt: “I think that there’s been a slow degradation of the American trust in the health industry, and I think this really you can maybe look at where this started with the tobacco lobbyist and how smoking cigarettes were healthy at one time, and I think that’s just cascaded over until we have until we’ve gotten to this point.”

-Jeff Hutt: “I think that the onus is not on us as individuals in America, but is actually on doctors and the institutions that support them.”

-Jeff Hutt: “It seems like sometimes the distrust is put on us, which I don’t think is fair. I think the distrust has been generated by organizations. I think trust has been mistrust has been generated by the medical field itself too.”

-Jeff Hutt: “The ownership to bring back trust is on the medical field; it’s not on the American people.”

“I still have the power to say no”:

-Teresa Dixon: “You have the government overseeing things. You’ve got money overseeing things. What drug can we give you that’s going to benefit the doctor or benefit the pharmaceuticals? There’s a lot of distrust in that, but as far as I’m concerned, I still have the power to say no that I don’t want to take the vaccine if I’m afraid.”

-Lori O’Connell: “I have the control over my health. I still have the right to say yes or no. I have the right to be able to research anything that my doctor recommends for me or says to me. I can say, you know what? I want to look into that before I make that commitment. I still have that right, and I will continue to practice that right to be able to say yay or nay.”

-Lori O’Connell: I do question a lot of these vaccines that they put out. I don’t take any. I have a compromised immune system. I choose to handle that naturally. My doctor would like me to have the shingles, the pneumonia, the flu, all those. I said no. I’ll take care of it, and I do.”

“I don’t actually have anybody that I can go to”:

-Teresa Dixon: “I had COVID twice as well. And when I went to the hospital, they did absolutely nothing but give me one of those things to put on your finger, and check my oxygen level. And I thought, well, what kind of care is this? So I started doubting a lot of things that caused me to stand up and listen, and I ended up listening to a lot of other talking heads on the radio and everything, on Zoom meetings like this, and just to be out there, I I listened to X 22 Red Pill 78 The Prain Medic, and Dan Bongino, and I really got indoctrinated with it, and I thought, whoa! And after the vaccine came out, I wouldn’t touch it. I still won’t touch it.”

-Aaron Everitt: “We have this giant skepticism around the whole thing. Just the whole industry has just felt. There, I said the word. It feels like an industry. It feels like there’s something else there besides just the do no harm ethic, and that is really complicated for a lot of us. I think that’s where we feel lost in much of this. Is I don’t actually have anybody that I can go to.”

-Lori O’Connell: “What we were taught growing up in science versus what they rolled out. You know, it makes you question. My husband always says, “Trust but verify.” So, if I trust something that is said, I’m going to verify it. I am going to verify it because I want to make sure that what I’m trusting is actually true. And we have the World Wide Web at our fingertips now. There’s a lot of reliable sources out there that you could do research.”

A future pandemic:

-Danny DeLuca: “It’s going to be really hard, especially if we have another pandemic, especially with AI coming out the way it is, it’s going to cause a lot of trust issues, and people are going to see things online through AI and believe them, even though it’s completely computer-generated at that point. You know, so if there’s a next pandemic, there’s going to be a lot more trust issues than so. Like doctors aren’t just going to be fighting against people who had issues from this one. They’re going to be fighting with issues of just society in general at that point, and with illiteracy rates increasing across America and in the world of people just not reading as much as they used to. There’s going to be a lot of trust issues moving forward.”

-Jeff Hutt: “I think the next one, what’s going to come down to, is just my looking at what I’m hearing from the medical industry, and if it makes sense to the science that I learned as a young person growing up through elementary school and college, and if it conflicts with that, I’m going to be questionable, and I think a lot of people are going to be questionable.”

-Danny DeLuca: “I could trust the people who were there if they were willing to say, these are based off what we have. These are suggestions. These are things we think that are best for you.”

-Aaron Everitt: “What is my responsibility as an individual to the society, especially as it relates to my medical interventions? What are my responsibilities to the society? Until we really answer that, the only way we’re going to be able to deal with it is in our system is politics, and that means that we’re going to find ourselves deciding who it is that we trust in politics to be either the bully or the protector of my individual rights and my individual choices.”

Trusting doctors:

-Aaron Everitt: “I know that that time is coming, in which doctors will become a much more significant part of my life potentially. But I’m also just kind of at the place of like, well, this may just be the journey I end up going through, and whatever comes my way, we’ll deal with, and we’ll deal with it in a manner that is kind of a hybrid of a bunch of things, and it may not just be going to a doctor’s office.”

-Teresa Dixon: “When it comes down to it, I do believe in doctors. I go to them. I go to them, and they help me immensely. But these pandemics are kind of scary stuff, and I’ve heard a lot of bad things about it that make me want kind of back off of everything and just go to my friends and you know I’ve I’ve got some good friends that are that are very helpful.”

-Jeff Hutt: “I really think that what we’re talking about is people probably have trust in their individual doctors. I know the doctors that I know I have I have trust in, but it’s just we go into the we we go into the conversations now with our doctors, questioning the information that the doctors are getting, and questioning what the doctors are actually promoting.”

-Danny DeLuca: “If a doctor tells me something, most likely even today, I’m still going to listen to them, and I’m still gonna believe what they have to tell me. I mean, I have a great relationship with my personal family doctor, and I’m not, you know, they’ve been in the field a way longer. They know a lot more than I do, and I’m gonna definitely take what they have to say, and maybe I’ll ask another doctor if I really have a question and see what their opinion is. But if I ask three doctors and they all say same thing, then you know that’s kind of obvious to me.”

“I’m open to that”:

-Lori O’Connell: “If you begin to research things and you see more things lining up. Okay, now if I had seen research from the past where you know viruses in bats had been transferred to other people in the past, I might be a little more apt to say, okay, that’s a possibility. I might question that, but I couldn’t find anything in my research that had any, anything, anywhere that said, in history, was a virus passed from a bat to a human being.”

Tom: “What if I told you there’s somebody on this Zoom right now that has spent their career studying viruses being passed to humans from bats.”

Lori: “I would love to, if I could read their information, I would read it and I would take that into serious consideration. I’m open to that.”

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Today on the podcast, we spoke with two influential but very different voices in health today: Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Craig Spencer.

Dr. Malone is a physician and scientist with a long career inside and outside government, researching and developing vaccines and working on biodefense. During the pandemic, he became one of the most prominent critics of the COVID vaccines. He recently served on ACIP, the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. He has millions of followers, writes a popular Substack titled Malone News, and appears on a range of media and podcasts including The Joe Rogan Experience. Dr. Spencer is an emergency physician who spent years treating patients on the front lines of disease outbreaks, including Ebola, which he contracted in 2014. He teaches and practices public health and writes for major media publications, including the New York Times (here is his recent piece) and The Atlantic (here is his brand new piece), and appears on network, cable television, and WSITY.

These two disagree on many consequential, even life-and-death, questions in public health. They also represent very different perspectives and reach very different audiences. But today, with the Ebola crisis unfolding, we spoke with them both about the outbreak and America’s and the world’s response. More often than not, on this, they were aligned.

Listen to the full episode

The idea for the joint conversation came about after Dr. Spencer read a Substack piece by Dr. Malone, titled “The Political Epidemiology of Preparedness”. Spencer found himself agreeing with much of the piece. In it, Malone writes, “The tragedy unfolding in eastern Congo reveals how geopolitical priorities shape public health preparedness, outbreak response, and ultimately whether a controllable epidemic is stopped early or allowed to become an international emergency.”

In short, Malone argues that this outbreak is a policy failure. He describes a system that funds preparedness only when a threat arises and drops it when that threat subsides; the reality that if a pathogen does not threaten wealthy nations there is little economic incentive to develop pharmaceuticals to combat it; what he sees as a geopolitical clash taking place over the minerals in the region which takes priority over the lives of the residents; and the impact of America’s dismantling of USAID, withdrawal from the WHO, and freezing of funds for Gavi – the partnership that helps poorer nations acquire vaccines and helps manage the world’s Ebola vaccine stockpile.

Below are some clips from our conversation with Dr. Spencer and Dr. Malone.

In this clip, Dr. Malone discusses how his Substack was an attempt to reach the halls of power in Washington. He discusses America’s historic drawback on aid commitments and how he views the outbreak’s epicenter as an ‘economic conflict zone’ contested by two superpowers. Dr. Malone talks about his break from MAHA, which he says is “just as censorious as any other political organization”:

Dr. Spencer describes America’s approach to the outbreak as akin to shooting ourselves in the foot. The two agree on the ethics of helping those in need. Dr. Malone discusses HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to withhold U.S. funding for Gavi (the global vaccine organization) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s move to oversee the relationship with that organization and America’s investment in it. He also talks about his break with the MAHA movement and states there will be new leadership at HHS soon.

Dr. Spencer discusses the effectiveness and shortcomings of international aid organizations and the lessons learned and then forgotten from the deadly 2014 Ebola outbreak. The two discuss the US approach of trying to wall off the disease. Dr. Malone discusses the impact of DOGE and how he sees political priorities ahead of the Midterms influencing the administration’s shortsighted approach to this outbreak.

Dr. Malone and Dr. Spencer talk about what is the best argument to make to MAHA about the international aid. Dr. Malone talks about how much of the movement is committed to ethical behavior and transparency but he believes the words “radical transparency” have not been translated into action but rather have turned out to be “window dressing”. He says Americans are good-hearted and that the decisions of Washington, D.C., do not reflect that spirit. He expresses his belief that America is at its best when it acts from the heart.

Dr. Malone discusses his time serving on the ACIP committee. He says neither the previous committee nor the one on which he served was truly independent. He also explains why he would not serve again if the committee is reconstituted.

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This week on the show, we spoke with two farmers who were invited to the Oval Office to be on hand as the president signed an executive order supporting regenerative farming.

It just so happened that a few hours before they made their way into the White House, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in a case involving Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) over the warning labels on its widely used glyphosate-based herbicide. The Court ruled in favor of the company. We did an episode outside the Court at the People vs Poison rally, when the case was argued, and an episode right after the ruling came down, capturing the reactions of Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME), and former Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH), along with influential grassroots MAHA leaders Zen Honeycutt and Kelly Ryerson.

It was a big win for Bayer and the administration, which had endorsed the herbicide-maker’s position and even helped argue it in court. It was a major loss for MAHA and the regenerative agriculture movement. All of this added a layer of complexity to the pro-regenerative-agriculture executive order signing ceremony scheduled for later in the day. Politico reported on what occurred in the meeting.

Listen to our full episode

We were joined this week by two farmers who attended that Oval Office gathering:

Will Harris is a fourth-generation cattleman and the owner of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, where he works the same land his family has farmed since the 1860s. In the 1990s, he transitioned from industrial agriculture to regenerative livestock farming.

Dr. Jonathan Lundgren is an agroecologist and the founder of the Ecdysis Foundation and Blue Dasher Farm in Estelline, South Dakota. He earned his PhD in entomology and spent more than a decade as a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture before getting his hands into the soil as a farmer.

In the clip below, Will and Jonathan describe what it was like in the Oval Office that afternoon, standing alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of HHS, Brooke Rollins of USDA, their top advisers, Zippy Duvall of the powerful Farm Bureau, and, of course, President Trump himself.

Jonathan recounts how Duvall, whose organization represents millions of members, made his case to the president against the executive order, and how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his case in support.

In our full interview, we go deeper into regenerative farming, why its supporters believe modern farming approaches are driving us toward an ecological crisis, and how they respond to those who argue scaling up regenerative agriculture is both unnecessary and unrealistic.

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As soon as the news hit on Thursday that the Supreme Court had handed down its decision in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, we gathered Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME), and former Representative Tim Ryan (D-OH), along with influential grassroots MAHA leaders Zen Honeycutt and Kelly Ryerson.

Moments before, the justices sided with Bayer-Monsanto in the case over glyphosate and warning labels. The decision is a major blow to many in the Make America Healthy Again movement, who view the weedkiller’s key ingredient, glyphosate, as a health threat. The High Court ruled that federal law gives the EPA the final say over what goes on the product’s warning label. The EPA does not believe the popular farming herbicide, when used as directed, poses a cancer risk. State juries have reached a different conclusion, determining the company failed to adequately warn users of the risk, setting off an historic wave of lawsuits. The issue is also a red-hot dividing point between the MAHA movement and the Trump administration, which took the company’s side.

Listen to the episode!

For Zen Honeycutt, a MAHA leader who has fought hard against glyphosate and liability shields, it was betrayal. “I think for myself and countless of other mothers, the main thing that goes through our minds right now is betrayal,” she said. “We were promised by this administration that they would address pesticides in our food. Those were Trump’s exact words.”

“And what we’ve got instead is a complete reversal of anything that we would have expected.”

“It’s an absolute disaster for human health.”

Kelly Ryerson, another MAHA leader, was just as raw. “I’m devastated,” she said.

“This is absolutely the opposite of what we would have anticipated, given the campaign promises and certainly with the advocacy from Secretary Kennedy, who certainly is equally devastated as someone who has committed his life to these pesticide issues. It is an entire betrayal. I also have my heart is breaking for all the farmers that I work with, who now are the ones that are on the front line, would be regularly exposed to these chemicals and have no road for recourse whatsoever.”

For former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), the ruling stung precisely because glyphosate had offered a rare opportunity for collaboration. “We thought that this was the one area in an insane Washington DC where there would actually be some common ground around glyphosate,” he said. “No one agrees on everything, but we thought we could agree on this and actually move the needle on it.”

“The corporate power is so real, it’s real in Congress, as our friends know, there’s a shitload of money flying around, and then you get to the Supreme Court, where it’s not even transparent. It’s like a black box.”

He continued.

“So this is really a battle between the people versus these huge corporate interests, and the only thing that you have to combat huge corporate interests is the government, in elected leaders.”

One of those elected leaders, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), did not hide his anger.

“I live in a community that is a cancer cluster, and that corporations in the past, who polluted our river, literally polluted our soil so much that you can’t plant in the in your own backyard in Newark. I know what it’s like to have these big corporations and the generations of damage they do and lives they take.”

He spoke about corporate influence throughout government today.

“This is not a left or right issue, this is the growing force of corporate power over our government, all three branches.”

“Understand that our Supreme Court is no different than the other two branches. They take huge amounts of gifts from the wealthiest Americans, from billionaires, from people who have interests before the court, and so it doesn’t surprise me, it agonizes me and pains me, but doesn’t surprise me that they’re siding with the big corporations that are poisoning us, multinational corporations against the people, and this sends a message that should be a wake-up call to all Americans about what we’re up against.”

Maine representative Chellie Pingree, a Democrat, who watched the case’s oral arguments in the spring, pointed out the contradiction of this administration saying it stands with MAHA but siding with the company in this case. “You can’t say you’re in for MAHA if you are literally in there arguing the case for the other side,” she said.

She pointed to the agency that issues the warning label in the first place.

“We’ve been pushing the EPA, and I think now we just have to push down hard. If this is all about the EPA label, and they’re, you know, so far behind in redoing the health warnings on that label, we just have to push and push and make sure people understand that’s one of the places where the holdup is.”

We asked Zen Honeycutt what she’d like to say to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime opponent of glyphosate, who is now a part of the Trump cabinet as Secretary of Health and Human Services. After President Trump signed an executive order supporting glyphosate production, Kennedy publicly supported the President’s action.

“We’ve communicated and we’re both understanding where we’re feeling right now. And he’s not in charge of the EPA, so this was not his decision, clearly. And he’s not president, so this is definitely a major setback.”

She continued.

“My heart aches for the amount of distance that we have rolled backwards as far as justice goes. And I know this is absolutely not the way that he wanted things to go and was not what he was expecting.”

Honeycutt talked about President Trump.

“I honestly do not believe that we were duped as some people were saying, from the get-go. I believe that Trump, from the beginning, meant what he said when he wanted to find the reason for autism and children, and he wanted to help childhood chronic illness and he wanted to leave a legacy. I think in just the past few months, there has been some corruption and coercion. I have theories about Epstein files and Israel, and all kinds of influence from Bayer and different things that could be happening right now, I don’t know about. But I just really believe Trump made a turn along the way, that it was intended from the beginning. And that Kennedy trusted because he had reason to trust. So, I continue to trust Kennedy to know that he is doing the best he can.”

A plan to legislate around the Court

Senator Booker pointed to the record of those who have taken Monsanto to trial and to what he sees as the remedy. “There’s a lot of case law here that supports the people; they were winning case after case, and state after state,” he said. “They were getting justice through the courtroom. This court has slammed that shut, has ignored precedence, and has again chosen the wealthy, powerful multinational corporation over the people that they’re poisoning, and we can and must fix that.”

The Senator told us that he sees the next venue for this fight not in the courts but in Congress. He plans to introduce an amendment to the Senate’s Farm Bill that, in his words, “undoes the Supreme Court case.”

“We can actually win this, but we have to now put even more activism and tell them the Supreme Court got the decision wrong. You need to restore the legal pathways for people to fight this in the courts, and we can do that in the Farm Bill.”

“They’re interpreting the law. We are the lawmakers, and so we need to put an amendment on here and get bipartisan support for it, and force Ag [Agriculture] committee members and the House and the Senate as a whole to decide whose side are they on. Are they on the people being poisoned or on the poisoner side?”

This is clearly a difficult path. If it passed the Senate, it would need to be reconciled with the House and signed by a President who just backed Bayer-Monsanto before the High Court.

Back in April, we asked Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) about the difficulties of a congressional path around the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the bill he spearheaded, requiring the Jeffrey Epstein files to be released, faced a similar uphill climb in Congress and few thought President Trump would do an about-face and sign it. The bill passed, and the President signed it. Massie credited public pressure.

“Let this be the moment we say enough is enough, and really organize around it,” Senator Booker told us. “The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

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Americans might not know who the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is. They might not know the head of CMS oversees $1.7 trillion in health spending, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. They might not know that the job administers health coverage for nearly half the country. But they likely do know Dr. Oz.

To most, he is Dr. Mehmet Oz, host of The Dr. Oz Show, a daytime TV staple that ran 13 seasons. The show wrapped just as the physician was trading TV medicine for national politics, running for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat as the Republican nominee before losing to Democrat John Fetterman in 2022. But before any of that, there was the surgeon. Dr. Oz rose to prominence as a cardiothoracic surgeon and medical innovator, serving as a leader in academic medicine.

This week, we sat down with Dr. Oz, who serves under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Trump administration. We spoke about how he sees his mission at a moment of profound change in federal health policy and in the relationship between Americans and experts.

Listen to the full Dr. Oz episode

Oz’s work on two fronts has been highly visible lately: highlighting fraud in Medicaid (and Medicare) and explaining the changes to Medicaid resulting from the One Big Beautiful Bill, which made President Trump’s tax cuts permanent and was signed into law last July. He characterizes both as efforts to preserve Medicaid, a program he says he loves, to ensure it survives for the people he believes it was intended to serve: the most vulnerable Americans.

As it pertains specifically to Medicaid, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that, compared with existing law, the new law will reduce federal Medicaid spending by about 900 billion dollars over the next decade and result in more than 7 million additional Americans being uninsured by 2034. We asked him about this.

We also pushed past the numbers to questions such as whether he feels the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which led to roughly 20 million additional Americans gaining health care coverage, was ultimately a good thing. And finally, we wanted to know what one of the country’s most famous medical experts makes of this moment when Americans’ trust in experts and expertise is declining.

Below are some excerpts from our conversation.

Tackling Medicaid provider fraud without hurting patients:

The concern among some that highlighting Medicaid fraud serves a larger agenda:

The role of experts and expertise in an era of rising mistrust for both:

The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of what the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law last year, may mean for the future of Medicaid:

Assessing the results of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which extended health insurance coverage to 20 million Americans:

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Senator Cory Booker has a message for his party: stop fighting the Make America Healthy Again movement and start finding common ground with the people who support it.

That won’t go down easy with everyone.

But it is an admonition with a backstory.

In our deep-dive intro, we discussed the senior Democratic Senator’s history of fighting for access to healthcare, as well as his career’s work to reduce hunger, ultraprocessed foods, and pollution, issues that impact everyone, but profoundly the lives of the poorest Americans. Along the way, we paused on one accomplishment from Booker’s time as mayor of Newark, New Jersey. It is not an earth-shattering achievement, but it is emblematic of his message for Democrats today. He spearheaded the arrival of a supermarket on a vacant, blighted lot. Working with the Republican governor, he brought fresh produce to the middle of a food desert. Overcoming differences and crossing a political divide, working toward a shared goal against profound, systemic challenges, to improve a community’s access to affordable, healthy, fresh food.

Listen to the episode!

Back to today, and Senator Booker’s call to stand with the people of MAHA. As you will hear in our conversation, that does not mean compromising on profound disagreements. Instead, he said, it means finding shared goals such as better nutrition and a reduction in toxic exposures. Booker wants to build a coalition with any American fighting to disrupt a system that he says is using taxpayer dollars to subsidize cheap, unhealthy foods that make us sick, then bills the taxpayer a second time to care for a nation growing sicker and sicker as a result.

It is important to note that Booker voted against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead HHS, citing “views on a number of issues that are deeply concerning to me,” and he and his party disagree with parts of the movement on issues such as vaccines. He also argues the Trump administration is betraying MAHA’s supporters, citing its support of glyphosate and its makers (listen to our episode from the Supreme Court during the People vs. Poison rally, at which Booker spoke) and reductions in spending on critical health and food safety nets.

His message to fellow Democrats is blunt: don’t surrender these issues to Republicans. As he put it recently, “A movement called MAHA caught fire in the vacuum we left behind.”

Booker sees the state of America’s health as an existential threat. But his concerns for the nation are broader: He is sounding an alarm on the health of our democracy itself. Here is an exchange from our conversation on his idea for on an anti-corruption agenda:

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Way back in 2023, Scott Pelley of CBS News effectively introduced America to AI. He did a piece for 60 Minutes, seen by more than 8 million people, in which he traveled to Google to learn about their AI “chatbot” called Bard.

It was as if America had nominated an experienced newsman with all the gravitas and authenticity one could muster to make contact with the aliens that had just landed in a farm field.

He asked the AI to finish the 6-word short story widely attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never Worn.”

In seconds, it spun an entire story about loss, life, and humanity. Only, it wasn’t authentic humanity, of course. Because that only comes from being human.

“I am rarely speechless. I don’t know what to make of this,” remarked Pelley.

Neither did we.

It was essentially the first time we saw proof that a profound disruption was coming.

This week, as we launched a new topic under our “Why Should I Trust You?” umbrella, examining the collapse in trust surrounding AI, it is notable that “disruption” of a different kind came for Pelley. He was fired by CBS News amidst turmoil in the news division.

Brinda worked with him and recalled times in the field with Scott when young people recognized the newsman and were full of admiration. This was despite him being a creature of TV news, a medium that they very likely only saw chopped up on TikTok.

They felt he was authentic.

For our maiden voyage into the trust minefield that is AI, we gathered a group of Gen Zers, today’s cohort of 14 to 29-year-olds.

Listen to the episode!

With so much prognostication about what AI will mean for all of us, these young people were focused less on the messages of promise and peril and more on the messenger.

We played them a clip from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent graduation speech in which he spoke about AI and was booed.

Schmidt cast AI as inevitable, telling the grads it “will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have.” He said he understood their fear and then admonished them not to treat the future as a fait accompli. “To speak of the future as though it has already been decided is to surrender the one thing that actually matters. You are surrendering your agency.”

We asked the young people we assembled if they are feeling much agency right now.

“It felt like a mind game. Give the illusion of enfranchisement,” remarked Elizabeth Frost, age 26. “The undertone is really, you know, accept it and buy in, as someone who clearly stands to profit from this.”

Khushi Patel, age 22, says her generation wants agency over this technology but that’s not going to happen.

“It feels extractive. I think it’s almost this narrative of like we’ve used your data to build this thing, we’re recognizing the perils of it, and the previous generation built this technology, and now you’re kind of responsible for having to clean it up.”

Rotimi Kukoyi, who just graduated from college, added: “AI is mostly being done to us.”

In other words, how is this generation going to help shape AI if they can’t get an entry-level job because of AI?

The group also offered more straightforward reasons for the booing.

Matt Geistler, a 25-year-old who works in retail, said those who work with their hands are feeling slightly more insulated. “We’re probably not as worried about AI right now. But anybody who’s working with computers in any sense at all, whether it’s accounting or data input or engineering or software development, whatever it is, things that you do go to school for, you have to realize that these people are scared about their jobs and their future prospects.”

Rohan Licht, 18, added: “The people will say they’ll cure cancer in x amount of years, but it’s like there’s no roadmap to how that’s going to happen.”

He continued, “Maybe it’s because they don’t have the answers, but there’s no clear answer as to what the good is, and the bad is staring us in the face.”

Elizabeth Frost added, “My generation has accepted that many of us went to college to pursue degrees for fields that don’t exist anymore. We also accepted before that, that labor wasn’t a safe option for us either, because our jobs were being automated, and so I feel like we’re just always being asked to accept the next thing, and that’s where I feel there’s an energy building in Gen Z that we really want to do something and have a guiding hand over this, because for so long it’s just been jerking us around.”

Sawyer Everitt, a music major and violinist, summed it up, “I just honestly think it’s terrifying to think about something else doing the thinking for you.”

“I think that’s very important, and something that is just at a very base level of human existence, and to take that away is really quite scary.”

Scott Pelly’s reaction in 2023 might still be the most honest a messenger can give today. “I am rarely speechless. I don’t know what to make of this.”

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Parkinson’s disease is the fastest growing neurological disease in the world. Cases have doubled in the past 25 years. More than 1.1 million Americans are living with it right now, with 90,000 new diagnoses every year.

So what is behind these rising numbers? Genetics? Toxins or other environmental exposures? Better diagnosis? An aging population? Could it be a combination of these or something else?

We set out to try to get a better understanding of what to believe and why people are trusting different explanations.

And that brings us to the herbicide paraquat, which is used on American farms.

Peer-reviewed studies have found an association between paraquat exposure and increased risk for Parkinson’s disease. And while more than 70 countries have banned it, America has not. However, the EPA, which states “Paraquat is highly toxic. One small sip can be fatal”, along with a big review by California regulators, has looked at the research and concluded the evidence is not sufficient to establish causation.

So, what are we to make of this?

This week, we put that question to Dr. Ray Dorsey and were privileged to spend time talking with Steve Brandenburg.

Listen to the episode

Dr. Dorsey is a neurologist, a leading Parkinson’s researcher and director of the Center for the Brain and Environment at Atria Health and Research Institute. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and co-author of the book The Parkinson’s Plan: A New Path to Prevention and Treatment.

Steve Brandenburg is a retired video producer who worked for the agricultural industry, filming in fields where he says paraquat was sprayed. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2018.

We strongly encourage you to listen to the episode to hear Steve’s incredible story of determination and hope.

We also discuss the rise of Parkinson’s diagnoses and the latest research on paraquat and the disease. In addition, we talk about how Vermont just became the first U.S. state to ban the herbicide.

Which brings us to Dr. Ray Dorsey, whose conviction and clarity on this subject are something you need to hear for yourself. Below are three points he made to us.

Dr. Ray Dorsey: “If you don’t get exposed to these chemicals, you are highly unlikely to develop the disease.”

This week, we set out to do a news-driven episode built around the two big stories consuming the two biggest parts of our audience, MAHA and public health.

So we brought in two old friends from the MAHA side, along with one new voice. And we brought in one old friend from the public health side, along with one newcomer.

The newsy episode conceit on a newsy week may have been predictable! The conversation was anything but.

In the hours after Republican Thomas Massie was defeated in his Kentucky primary, following a major political push by President Trump, emotions throughout our MAHA web of contacts were raw.

That carried over to when we started rolling the next morning.

Listen to the episode

Aaron Everitt, a MAHA supporter, substacker, and volunteer for the Kennedy presidential campaign, explained how Massie earned the heartfelt respect of MAHA:

“He was pretty compelling, because he understands agriculture, regenerative agriculture, for sure, but also just has these instincts about money and debt, and how dysfunctional Washington ultimately is. He’s probably one of the only voices that really consistently called that out over his career.”

Aaron continued:

“I think he touched some things that really made people frustrated by him, and Trump was able to characterize him in a way in which those that watch Fox News — all the demographic over 70 — were able to understand. They heard one particular side of this conversation, and they were the ones that got out and voted, and that’s how primaries work in the United States. The Boomers pick our people, and that’s because they’ve got a lot of time on their hands, and they also are activists, and so that’s what we kind of are in this moment. I think, you know, it’s super sad. He’s my favorite Congressman. I think he’s got way too much to offer to have this be the end of his career.”

Brinda asked if she could share from a text Aaron had sent her the night Massie lost.

Brinda read: “You said: Brinda, I’m losing it.”

Aaron laughed. “Oh, part of me just has this underlying and undercurrent of remorse about the whole thing, you know. Politics is such a terrible deal.”

Brinda: “Remorse about what, Aaron?”

Aaron: “Well, you get to pick (from) two, right? So I still wouldn’t have done anything differently than I did, given how things all played out. But I feel responsible to some degree that I felt like I was an advocate for Trump, when actually, at the end of the day... I never... I was an advocate for Kennedy. I wanted him to be the president; I wanted him to win.”

Tom asked Aaron if he was done with the union between MAHA and MAGA.

Aaron: “It’s been crumbling for a while.”

Tom: “I know it’s crumbling. You wrote about it so eloquently. But is this the last straw? Is this it? Where are you?

Aaron: “Yeah, I mean, it didn’t take much for me to be done, honestly. The war stuff is really what got it for me. I’m an anti-war person. I’ve got four boys, that are all college age kids, that are all right in the thick of this thing, should this go as it seems like nobody knows how this is going to go. And it just seems ill-placed, mistimed, and a bad decision.”

Elizabeth Frost, a co-founder and leader of MAHA Ohio who was the Ohio State director for the Kennedy campaign, looked back to the days of that campaign before he endorsed President Trump:

“I feel like I’m watching this coalition that got ripped apart when MAHA aligned with Trump, and Kennedy endorsed Trump, so on and so on. We really lost the fire under a lot of people.”

She said that political union flew in the faces of about half of those working to elect Kennedy.

“They were campaigning against Trump. They were campaigning against this type of behavior, they were campaigning against war, they were campaigning against oligarchy.”

And to her, Thomas Massie is emblematic of all those stands:

“To think, that if Massie didn’t hold his seat in Congress during the argument over the Big Beautiful Bill, during the argument over the Epstein files, over all of these matters of transparency — we would know so much less right now, I believe, if it weren’t for Thomas Massie.”

She believes this moment could revive that original coalition.

Jeff Hutt, the former national field director for the Kennedy 2024 presidential campaign and member of the Republican Liberty Caucus, said he is a huge admirer of Thomas Massie. Having said that, he believes MAHA needs to stop looking to the federal government for solutions and focus on the local level:

“I’ve always been a little skeptical of the federal perspective when it comes to MAHA. My favorite area to engage in politics county level and below, because I really think this is where the power in our lives really lie.”

He seemed to be signaling to the movement where to direct their energies if they were feeling powerless after the Massie loss:

“The political agency of Washington, D.C., that’s just a facade that Washington has tried to convince us we have. Political consultants, which I am one, try to convince people that their vote really matters, but at the end of the day, you really get outside of a state rep and maybe a state senate election, and you don’t really have much power on government, but you have a lot of power on what you can do on a county commissioner or county level and below.”

Another direction MAHA could move is to the left. Would MAHA shift and align with Democrats? Elizabeth Frost of MAHA Ohio put it this way:

“The damage that was done between MAHA and I think the institutional Democratic Party is very real. And it’s almost like two bad relationships, right? It’s like, okay, I got out of one bad relationship, and I accidentally went into this next bad relationship because they don’t do the things that you did, but now I’m being hurt or mistreated here. Does that mean I go back to the other guy, or does that mean we rethink it all?”

She continued:

“One thing I do know is that we have this grassroots energy right now, that if someone can answer that question and really harness that, I think it’s going to be incredible. But I do think that there needs to be someone, or some organization, that can provide people with direction right now on how to channel all of this emotion that they’re feeling. Not just about Massie, but about glyphosate, about agriculture in general — there are so many things that not just MAHA, but MAHA-minded voters, are really motivated to see change right now.”

Remember that KFF polling shows MAHA-motivated voters tally about 40% of the electorate.

Jeff, the former national field director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign and member of the Republican Liberty Caucus, weighed in:

“There’s really two MAHA when we talk about it, there’s kind of a MAHA grassroots and there’s institutional MAHA, and institutional MAHA is connected with Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and because they are, it reflects down on the rest of us. What I would really like to see, and I’ve always wanted to do this, is that we form a caucus, kind of a fulcrum caucus, and that we’re looking to vote for parties and candidates who best represent us. In the next election, I’m personally hoping that we see a lot of MAHA voters cause pain to the Republicans for this. If we can cause pain to the Republicans, we can signal one, to the Republicans, this is what happens when you make promises to this group of independent-minded voters and you don’t deliver. It will also allow Democrats — because a lot of our home, the MAHA home, they were Democrats originally. So there is a natural place. And I think the best thing we can do is we look at actual candidates themselves, we don’t get ourselves wrapped up into a party ideology and we force these political parties to change their platforms to come after our vote.”

Tom: “Jeff, yes or no question. Is RFK Jr. the leader of MAHA?”

Jeff: “No.”

“Nicole Shanahan is. I think she redirected that Kennedy energy back into what became MAHA. I really think she is an unsung hero. For me, it’s unfortunate that since the election she’s kind of moved onto the sideline, but I have nothing but great things to say about her.”

As we said, a predictable conceit on a newsy week, but anything but a predictable conversation.

We pivoted to the two infectious disease outbreaks that have been making headlines, while the Massie news was playing out. We are talking about Hantavirus on the cruise ship and the deadly outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The conversation quickly turned to these outbreaks in the context of the Trump administration dismantling USAID, the agency that delivered foreign aid and development assistance around the world.

Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician who himself once contracted Ebola while serving in an outbreak overseas with Doctors Without Borders, blasted the current administration for slashing the agency:

“The message that I want people to hear is that those cuts have made a difference. They reflect really poorly on the U.S., our standing, and how people think about us and trust us, and they have a huge impact on people who, unfortunately, are going to die in places that otherwise wouldn’t have, if the U.S. had continued to provide some of the support that it had for a really long time.”

Craig made clear he does not believe the agency was flawless:

“When it comes to things like USAID, I completely agree — there’s been a lot of mission creep, there’s been a lot added on, there’s a lot of money being spent on things that probably didn’t have the impact we wanted. The problem was that it was built around a shell of really impactful and really important programs that not only helped people transmit the mission of America being great because America was good, but it also protected Americans. It was a national security investment.”

Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious diseases doctor and founding director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, argued that USAID was a bargain:

“Pennies on the dollar, it did provide us with security, it gave us eyes on the ground, it gave us early signals. There’s a study that came out that after USAID was pulled out, the conflict levels in many of the places that were dependent on the aid — because it happened so suddenly — that conflict has gone up.”

She continued:

“That insecurity affects us indirectly, because the more chaos you have, the more agents of chaos you might find that may then regionally destabilize the area, and then affect us more broadly as a global community.”

We asked Jeff, a MAHA supporter and a member of the Republican Liberty Caucus who lives in South Texas, for his thoughts on the dismantling of USAID.

“I used to actually work for USAID as an 18-year-old living in Singapore,” he told us.

All were surprised. In a good way.

He continued:

“I loved how you explained it — like, for pennies we got so much. I thought USAID was a great way to expand American soft power without doing it politically, and we could actually target these areas, such as Africa. I’ve always believed that Africa is somewhere where we need to have a soft hand in helping them out.”

He added:

“This is where we see that short-sighted political jabs really have huge consequences in the long term.”

Craig, who survived Ebola while serving patients in an outbreak back in 2014, discussed the plight of the American doctor who has become infected with Ebola in today’s outbreak:

“I can’t stop thinking about the fact that we have American medical missionaries who got infected with Ebola, and the United States response was to send them to Germany and the Czech Republic as opposed to bringing them home. This makes me so livid for so many reasons. The argument being proffered is that it’s because it’s a shorter flight. I, frankly, think that’s bullshit.”

The Washington Post reports that the White House resisted approving the return of the American doctor to the United States. He was transferred to Germany for treatment. The White House told the Post their story was inaccurate, that the doctor’s health was the only priority, and Germany’s state-of-the-art facilities were the closest and best option.

Nahid described her experience working in an Ebola outbreak in Africa, back in 2014:

“It changed me as a human being. I lost half of the people I took care of, not because this is a hard disease to take care of, but there’s just not enough stuff, not enough people. People are dying in your hands, kids were dying in your hands, they were crawling towards you for help, because there’s just not enough people.”

She continued.

“So you come out of that and you’re out there, you turn on the television, you, I’ve cleaned off, I look on television, and the news is covering a tweet from Donald Trump that says, keep them there, don’t bring them here. This was when he was not the president, and that’s what Craig is alluding to, is that – is this a response from the White House which is basically saying keep these people out, rather than anything that’s based on our own capacity, or even what’s good for these Americans?”

Aaron sees Washington as moving wildly off course:

“We have exercised our power with a punch rather than with kindness, and I think if you look at it from my perspective, from a faith perspective, that’s the absolute wrong way to win people over to your side of the aisle, to your persuasion about life, about how you live a free life.”

We ended the conversation on the outbreak itself.

Craig reflected on a moment of unexpected connection:

“I did a bunch of interviews in media last week on Hantavirus, and my main message was: stop freaking out, people — this is not it. And I did an interview and posted something on LinkedIn that Elizabeth Frost reposted, and put a comment on that was a message to the MAHA community, being like: the answer is not to minimize or look away, but instead prove that we can respond rapidly and adequately while learning from yesterday’s mistakes. It meant a lot to me, to one, to have this relationship with you, to two, to have you share this with your own community.”

He closed with a call for common ground:

“I know that we disagree on a lot, but there’s a lot that we agree on. We share the same values. We love our country, we love our colleagues, we love our citizens, and we love the people that work to protect us, whether here or abroad.”

“I would love it if we come back to exactly what we do here: Remind each other of our shared values. What we really care about when it really matters.”

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