RFK Jr.: How to Fix America's Health Crisis (Ultimate Human Podcast)
YouTube video by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sODZSAuxTTw). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

The food that we're eating is not food anymore. It's a foodlike substance that it was manufactured or created in laboratories. It is not nutrient-dense. It's nutrient anemic. And you're not releasing any GLP1. You're not getting any satiation. You're not nutrientdense. So your body's not saying, "Hey, I'm full. I'm satiated. I should stop eating." The tobacco companies, well, they would mimic the taste of things that are very appetizing. They would do it with chemical compounds. And they switched to doing that for food. and they started developing all of these chemicals that hijack your brain and trick your body. Well, we have an agency that stands between us and those people. So those things would never make it into the food supply. The FDA was no longer serving the public interest or public health. It it had ceased being a public health agency. That's the difficult part for an agency like yours to get into the private sector. First of all, the pharmaceutical companies are advertising products that are being paid for by the taxpayer and they advertise all these drugs on television. The person who's going to get the bill for that drug is my agency. There's so much going on in the media and in this Make America Healthy Again movement. What they can expect to see from a public policy perspective. Chronic disease is the destination of most federal expenditures in terms of healthcare. The ideology ultimately of all that disease is Hey guys, this is Gary Brackett and I'm telling you today truly is a very very special podcast. I know very often I'll say this is my favorite guest or I'm really excited to have this guest on. But this particular guest has a very special place in my heart and he's going to have a very special place in your heart too because of the level of conviction that this man has to make an impact on humanity. And by that I mean I don't care what side of the political aisle you're on. We all should be on the side of the future of our children. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is someone I've looked up to for a long time since I really understood his mission. And when you look at the broken health care system in America, we spend $4.5 trillion dollars a year on healthcare. We lead the world in six major categories. Infant mortality, maternal mortality, morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, multiple chronic disease, and a single biome. And I don't think anyone, including myself, knows the exact reason why. It's so multiffactorial. You know, why do we have the highest rates of childhood cancer in recorded history? Why do we have such a parabolic explosion in autism, learning disorders, ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, and why are these things affecting younger and younger ages? Why do we have metabolic syndrome which was reserved for people in their 50s and their 60s and even their 70s? Why do we have it in our teenage population now? You know, I' I've raised four children, and I know many of you watching this are parents, and you have to have a concern. What kind of environment, what kind of world is my child growing up in? What's going to happen to them when they get to the public school system? Not how are they educated, but how are they fed? How's their biome being cared for? What is their pediatrician doing every time that they put a vaccine on the schedule? Do they know the safety and efficacy of that? And so today's podcast, I'm recording this intro after the podcast because I wanted to just tell you how impactful it was, how he was able to break down the corruption in our nutritional research and the corruption in our food supply and the influence that big food and big pharma has over our public policy. The policy that determines how your children are fed, how your children are taught, and what our health care system covers and doesn't cover. Why are we so pro-chemicals, synthetics, and pharmaceuticals? And why have we gotten away from things like peptides and whole foods and exercise and vitamins and minerals and amino acids and nutrients, the thing that God gave us to make us thrive rather than the thing that man makes us to make us sick. And he did such a good job of of of describing the dependency that our sick care system has created. You know, sadly, so many Americans, tens of millions of them are dependent on the system. We don't independently have our own health care choices because we walk down the aisles and the food that we're consuming is actually what's leading to the medication that's required to treat the conditions from this causal relationship between food and chemicals and health. And so, I really hope that you enjoy this podcast today. you know, Bobby came to my house to join me at the UFC fights and to talk about some of, you know, what we could do together to help make America healthy again. And I just grabbed him and brought him in the room and I sat him down for this podcast. And it was one of the most authentic, genuine podcast I've ever done because I really felt the intention of this man. And I think you will, too. And no matter what side of the aisle you're on, I think you will draw some inspiration from this because we are about to have a healthier, happier, more thriving America. So without further ado, please welcome Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brea, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today was a giant surprise. I spoke this morning at the Health Optimization Summit in Austin, Texas. Boarded the plane, shot over to here to head to the UFC fights. and I'm joined um by a very prominent figure in the space, the leader and the head of the Maha movement, none other than Mr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. himself. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm happy to be here with you finally. I'm happy to have you. We've had like a a really kind of an amazing time so far, you know, with uh with the hyperaric chambers and um uh we basically did some nutritional IVs. Um and then we just decided to come in the podcast room and chop it up a little bit. Um, so there's so much going on in the in in the media and then this Make America Healthy Again movement in this space. Um, I I'd love for you to share with the audience what you are most excited about right now and what they can expect to see from from a public policy perspective, a legislative perspective to, you know, show that real change is coming. Yeah. So, President Trump named me as his Secretary of of Health and Human Services. Yes. Congratulations, by the way. The biggest agency of government. It's twice the size of the Pentagon. It's got a 1.9 trillion budget. Wow. And you know, the irony of that is we spend more on healthcare in this country than any other country in the world per capita. Two to three times what most European countries spend. And yet we have the worst health of any country in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden on earth and and that as you know bleeds over into infectious disease which has been really infectious disease has been the focus of most most federal expenditures in terms of research. Chronic disease is the is the destination of most federal expenditures in terms of health care. M we have a sick care system in our country and the the ideology ultimately of all that disease is corruption and it's the capture of these agencies are the industries they're supposed to regulate those industries the pharmaceutical industry and the medical cartel have transformed NIH CDC FDA and ultimately CMS which administers medic and Medicare into essentially sock puppets or the industry um and profit centers and they they've commoditized the American public and turned us all into patients. Yeah. Profitable um patients. Yeah. It's been very profitable for them. When my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old boy and and you know during that era, we spent zero on chronic disease at that time in history. There really were no cure. The first the first treatment for chronic disease was was ironically it was the pill. Yeah. was the first time you took a pill, you know, regularly. Well, the first the first treatment for chronic disease was the pill. What pill? Well, yeah, it was the first kind of long-term treatment that you took over a prolonged period of time. And we spend when my uncle was president, we spend zero on chronic disease in this country. Wow. Today, we spend um today it's 1 point probably 1.6 or 7 trillion dollars a year. It's about 90% of our healthcare budget. And we are we have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world. When it comes to snacking, Masa is flipping the script on what real food should look like. Masa chips are crafted with grass-fed beef tallow, one of the healthiest fats on the planet. These chips are packed with essential vitamins like vitamin A, D, E, and vitamin K2. All of which play a role in keeping your skin vibrant, your immune system strong, and your bones solid. But here's the real magic about Masa. Masa's corn goes through an ancient process called nyx stimilization which makes it way easier to digest and it amps up its nutrient profile. Plus, these chips are low in pufas, so you won't find any of the inflammatory seed oils that you find in most snacks. And instead, masa uses pure red sea salt, giving you a natural hit of minerals that keep your cells hydrated and your energy steady. So, don't just snack. Reach for Masa. It's real food, real health, without any of the junk. Grab a bag and I promise you'll feel the difference. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. During CO, we have the highest death rate of any country in the world. So, we is astounding. We had 16% of the CO deaths and we only have 4.2% of the world's population. We literally had the worst record of any country in the world. And it's it's a wonder that people are getting awards and recognition and kudos for managing co whatever we were doing. It was utterly wrong. And if you ask CDC, you know, why did we die at higher rates than we died at rates that were in some cases like Haiti had a a death rate. Haiti, if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, we were told the poor countries of Africa are going to be devastated by this because they can't get a hold of the vaccines. I mean, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere. It had a 1.3% vaccination rate. So, virtually nobody got a vaccine, right? They had a COVID rate of 14 deaths per million population. We had a death rate of 3,000 per million population. American blacks had a death rate of probably 3600 per million population. That is incredible. We had 200 times death rate of Haiti. We had 200 times death rate of Nigeria which had a 1.4% vaccination rate. Oh, and there's other reasons for that. Those are younger populations which were less affected by CO deaths. they're out in the sun more and they've got a lot of other you know advantages in that situation but you know there's something wrong with our country Africa as a whole at about 360 there were high morbidity death tied to deficiencies in vitamin D3 um it was one of there there was a direct inverse correlation between vitamin D saturation and uh and co mortality yeah so I mean and we're the only country in the world that has and in history of the world where obesity is al also correlated with malnutrition. So we have you know because the food that we're eating is not food anymore. It's a foodlike substance and a lot of it was that was manufactured or created in laboratories and that no longer uh it's it's like it is it is not nutrientdense it's nutrient anemic. M and you know I was I watched this happen because I was part of the tobacco litigation back in the late 1980s and the tobacco companies at that point were the most cashrich country companies in the world. They were the richest in terms of their cash resources immensely profitable industry and the litigation and the and the advertising that began taking place at that time. What time frame is this? These are the late ' 80s, the early 90s. So the the tobacco industry saw that the writing was on the wall that they were facing regulatory headwinds that their consumers were were were sloughing off, right? And they began to diversify. So and they diversified into the food industry. So by 19 by the mid 90s, the two biggest food companies in the world were R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris. That is astounding. And they took companies, thousands of scientists that were involved that were whose job it was to figure out ways to create to make tobacco more addictive and more attractive. Mhm. And they switched to doing that for food. And they started developing all of these chemicals that that hijack your brain and trick your body. Well, they would mimic the the tastes of things that are very appetizing and they would do it with chemical compounds intentionally intentionally to to attract your taste buds to uh to to you know to make them palatable and and appetizing and attractive and and your body eats those things but you know so there's a strawberry flavor but there's no nutrition in it there's no strawberry and your body thinks oh I I'm eating a strawberry. I'm craving a strawberry. But you're eating it and you're not getting any of the nutrient and you're not releasing any GLP1. You're not getting any satiation. You know, you're not you're not nutrientdense. So your body's not saying, "Hey, I'm full. I'm satiated. I should stop eating." Uh you're eating, you know, you're it's chemicals, so there's no nutrients in it. And so your body is getting starved and at the same time you're getting fat because you never, you know, you're never satisfied. You know, your body knows it's not being fed. Then they started putting stuff in food to to make it more addictive, like the sodiums and sugars. And they also put stuff in food that deliberately tricked your brain into thinking that your stomach wasn't full. So, one of the things they figured out was that your brain actually gauges the fullness of your belly by by counting the number of times you chewed. M so there's a there's there's some part of your brain that is saying okay if he chewed a certain amount he must be full and so they started putting food softeners into the food. Wow. To make it so that you had to chew less. You know if you eat a Twinkie you don't even have to chew it. You can inhale it. Right. Wow. It's so insane to think that it's that sinister. And I think the the the sad thing and I and I don't mean to derail you is that it's one thing to concoct this whole contrive this whole mechanism of creating toxicity and and chemicals to mimic um flavorings to circumvent satiety and and whatnot. But but I think where it goes lost on the public is they go, "Well, we have an agency that stands between us and those people, so those things would never make it into the food supply." and and and yeah, you know, my uncle Ted Kennedy conducted hearings in 1970 about agency capture at FDA and at that time and the conclusion of that hearing is that the FDA was no longer serving the public interest. It was or public health. It it had ceased being a public health agency. It was now an agency whose primary focus was maximizing corporate profit taking. And uh and you know, one of the and I I can point to a hundred um of those examples of agency capture, but probably the one most familiar to the American public because there was two, you know, big Netflix documentaries on it. One of them called dope sick is the was the opioid epidemic where people from Sackler Sackler family that own Purdue Pharmaceuticals captured a FDA official and persuaded him to eliminate the warnings about the addiction and to say and to say that that oxycodone on the manufactured insert was not addictive. Wow. And you you could argue that as a direct result of that, a million young Americans die. We're losing over a 100,000 young people every year from drug overdoses. And to put that in perspective, during the 20-year Vietnam War, we lost 56,000 American kids. We're use losing double that number every year from opioid addiction and overdoses. That's insane. And and that is a direct result of agency capture and agency corruption. And what you know we're trying to do now at the agency which we're doing is we brought in extraordinary leaders who are now going to do make sure that we do good science, gold standard science, which was what those agencies used to do. Mhm. And that we're going to purge the entire agency of conflicts of interest. You know, I'm all about optimizing performance, and lately I've been using the ion weighted vest during my workouts, and it's been a gamecher. It isn't your average weighted vest. It's designed to fit like a second skin, activating your core, improving blood flow, and even helping you with recovery while you train. What I love most is that the weight is perfectly distributed. It doesn't pull on your shoulders or throw off your alignment. Whether I'm doing strength training or cardio or just taking a walk, I'm burning more calories, building muscle, and pushing my endurance even further. If you're serious about leveling up your training and unlocking your full potential, check out the ion weighted vest at iongeear.com. That's a ngear.com. And you can use code ultimate for 10% off and start training smarter today. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. That is massive though. I mean, with a budget that size, with that voluminous amount of a payroll, without amount of entrenchment, right? I mean, I I I've got to think that a lot of these people are not going without it at a bomb. Yeah. Well, that's where Doge came in really is that we offered initially we offered a buyout for anybody who wanted to leave and we made clear that people should leave if they didn't share this new mission. Mhm. And we got uh a lot of people left the agency. Um and you know then we came back and there there's tremendous duplication in the agencies, tremendous redundancies. We had 100 comms departments. We have 40 IT departments, 40 procurement departments and and on and on and um and so we we we're reorganizing the agency to consolidate those things. one to eliminate the redundancy and streamline the agency. Most importantly to redirect and recalibrate its course so that everybody there knows that every day if you want your job you got to wake up in the morning and be thinking how am I going to end the chronic disease epidemic today? Yeah. And so everybody is going to be clear on that mission and um you know we think that we're going to make a huge difference in the first year but over four years we'll be able to correct the course. God bless you, man. And God bless that mission because I think when you become a purpose-driven agency and not a profit, you know, uh, protecting agency and and and I know that these government agencies are not driven for profit per se, but, you know, a lot of these officials move from the public sector into the private sector. It's obvious once you start to peel back the layers of the onion that if if you're a regulator and your responsibility is enforcement of a private industry that you have a known job offer in where you can move from being a government official that's going to make a few hundred,000 a year um into private industry where you're going to make a few million dollars a year. It's hard to not point to that as a conflict of interest. Oh, and seven of the eight FDA recent FDA commissioners have immediately gone to work for industry. Um, the CDC the longest reason the longest reigning recenc CDC director Julie Gerbering who dramatically increased the vaccine schedule and added billions of dollars a year in revenue to Merc went over to become the president or the vice president of Merc. That is a you know and that's typical you see lower level um division and branch chiefs in the agency also you know they kind sort of the common course is that they work at the agency until their pensions vest and then they move on to industry. So the last three or four years that they're at the agency, they're doing a lot of favors for industry and they're letting a lot of things go by because they're about to make that move and they want a soft landing at one of these companies. And their example then drives the it infiltrates all the lower strata of the agency because they see the boss doing this and they think this is the way that it's done for not going along. But there's there's a hundred other mechanisms for agency capture and you know those come from uh appropriations through the congress. It comes from reactions to the press. All the major institutions of our society have been uh captured by the industry. the press now gets uh get you know the the the mainstream television networks and some Roger Als told me one time that 75% of his advertising revenues on the evening news divisions were pharmaceutical ads I I believe that just by observation you know just as you can watch brought to you by Fizer brought to you by fizer if you eliminate big food and and and pharma from from I mean just you know I'll be bankrupt Oh, it would have been scumb you know those those companies are doing that partially because the evening news very attractive to drug companies because young people don't watch news. It's all older people and those are their customers. They're people who are taking all this whole, you know, arsenal, this battery of of drugs, but they also do it to control. Yeah. That's why you see defense contractors advertising on, you know, Good Morning America. Nobody's going to buy, you know, a a tomahawk miss on who's watching Good Morning America. They advertise because they want to control the content. And if you look at, you know, Anderson Cooper or uh you know any of these or Lester Holt or Jake Tapper, their salaries are being their paycheck is being paid by the network, right? But their salaries are actually coming from pharmaceutical companies and they know that, right? and they know that they can't that they got to tow the line and they got to say got to frighten us all about about infectious disease. They got to make us all do the you know comply with the with the pharmaceutical mandates and they're not giving us the real news. They're not asking the questions that they ought to be asking. There's no skepticism. And if you look at these news shows like 60 Minutes or even Anderson or Sanjay Gupta Yeah. from 20 years ago they were saying, "Yeah, there's problems with this, you know, with vaccines or these other drugs, right? They will never do that today." You know, that that to me seems like the that's the difficult part for an agency like yours to get into the private sector and effectuate the the private sector that way unless of course there was some kind of executive order that disallowed pharma from advertising directly to consumer and which do you see a day where that could be a possibility? There's a bad Supreme Court case recently that equated pharmaceutical advertising with freedom of speech and gave it endowed it with a limited first amendment protection. There's still things that we can do and we're working on that. So we think that we're going to be able to do something but I'm not going to talk more about that. Okay. And the issue here that people under understand because a lot of the people who support us are for freedom of speech. You know, absolutely. But this is a very different uh issue because first of all, the pharmaceutical companies are advertising products that are being paid for by the taxpayer. When they advertise all these drugs on television, the person who's going to get the bill for that drug is my agency and the taxpayer is going to end up paying for it. If you if you're selling selling cereal or coke or something that might not be so good for you, at least you know the consumer is paying for that themselves except if they're getting it from the we're going to end that. Yeah. I heard 25 states now have legislation to get uh sodas off of SNAP and some of them are looking at candy and you know other stuff. Yeah. 10 10 billion dollars I heard of the of the 120 billion roughly of the program. So, it's a huge risk for these companies. And you know, I listen, if you want to buy a Coke, you should be able to do it. You're America. You can do what you want. The taxpayers should not be paying for it. This is a nutrition program. And when 10% of the money is going for something that has nout nutrients in it, it's not a good outcome. The other thing about pharmaceutical ads is the company gets a tax deduction on them. We're paying for the ads and we're paying for the product. Right? Most people don't realize this, but your energy, mental clarity, and even your sleep, they're all impacted by toxins. Every single day, you're breathing in, drinking, eating, and absorbing mold spores, heavy metals, pesticides, and even plastics. Over time, they hijack your health. And that's why I created the ultimate detox challenge. As always, it's completely free, and it's happening live June 23rd through the 25th. On day one, Dr. Willby will be here on gut and immune health. Day two, Dr. Jessica Petros on mold, metals, and parasites. And day three is Dr. Josh Axe on full body detox and rebuilding your resilience. And of course, I'll be there the entire time. You'll get real tools, at home lab testing options, detox protocols, even supplement guides, and actionable steps to help you reset your biology the right way. This isn't about crash diets. This is real lasting transformation. Head over to detox.theulthum.com. Your body was built to heal, so let's help it do what it was designed to do. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. And so, you know, I mean, when you think about that, it's just it's it's mind-numbing. We're paying for the ads and we're paying from the product agency. Then we're paying for all the diseases that that product is causing. Yeah. And so, it's different than any other kind of product. And it's regulated differently. And those you know uh those regulations you know that that a drug camp company does not have cartlash from FD FAA to advertise any product it wants and have there there are conditions that we can place on it and you know those are some of the things that we're looking at now. Yeah it's it's fantastic. I mean it's probably safe to say that your popularity uh amongst those some of those agencies has has dropped. Do you Well, I have never been popular with those agencies. I mean the agencies used to do a good job when I was a kid you know um and NIH was the gold standard science agency in the world FDA was the gold standard regulator and in fact there were a lot of at that time this early 60s there were a lot of countries in uh in particularly in Africa and were getting their freedom for the first time from colonial rule and they were writing constitutions and you know none of them could afford to have their own regulators their health regulators or research institutions and so a lot of them said in their constitution if FDA says it's okay then it's okay in our country as well so there was this broad faith in American science and and American regulatory integrity at that point around the world I agree that no longer exists people now are very skeptical of our science and uh and our regulatory agencies and what we want to do over the next four years is restore global faith in American regulator You do that by I mean to to really address the corruption in in nutritional research. Do you do that by actually having taxpayer funded independent research that is what is influencing public policy and disallow the private sector from funding nutritional research especially that would actually have an impact on public policy. One is that NIH science, the NIH has $46 billion that it allocates to science every year and it does that through a grant system that gives grants to 56,000 researchers all around the world, mostly in the United States and a lot in Canada as well. And unfortunately that system has been corrupted through a number of different vectors. So that people who get the money tend to be people who have been approved by the industry through you know a variety of of levers and they are part of an old boys network that knows what they can say and what they can't say and what they can research and what they can't and they're not going to research anything that with results may diminish corporate profits. Right? The other thing is there's no replication. So there's a huge incentive to cheat on your science. So if you if you go to your funer with a hypothesis and say this is what I believe here's how I'm going to prove it and it's going to be an important decision and then the science does not confirm that hypothesis that's science. Yes. When the hypothes hypothesis that's science and ought to be published and it doesn't get published and because it's private funded we can say if it doesn't go in my favor I'm not going to alter it. I'm just not going to publish it. We do a study we'll but the private funding is coming from industry so they cheat I mean we call those guys by ostitutes because because they you know they know what the outcome is and they write the outcome before they write the study in many cases but that also happens in the public sphere and so what we're going to do and it happens because they know there's going to be no replication a lot of times the data sets are private you know you buy United Healthcare data sets they're only selling to you so you can't publish And so there's no replication. And if you know there's going to be no effort of replicating your study, you have a huge incentive to change. Oh, no question. And so what we're going to do is we're going to devote probably 20% of NIH's budget to replication. Every study has to be replicated. We're going to publish the peerreview for the first time. We're probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMAMA, and those other journals because they're all corrupt. Mhm. And even the heads of those journals like Marsh Angel who for 20 years was the head of the New England Journal of Medicine says that this that we no longer are a science journal. We are a vessel for pharmaceutical propaganda. No kidding. Because they control the journals. They buy the preprints, right? Which is and they they finite you. If you want to publish in a journal, you have to pay $10,000 to get the study published. So the pharmaceutical company concocts a study that shows the outcome that they want that statins work or that SSRIs work, you know, and then they'll publish that. They pay to get that published. Yeah. And they order reprints from the journal. The pre the reprints, as you know, are a it's a, you know, five or six page document that has the logo of the journal on it. there. They sell them for enormous profits and then they give them to the pharmaceutical reps, you know, hotl looking girls and the you know hotlooking guys who go to the doctor's office, take them out to lunch, give them the preprint to say this product works if you know why don't you prescribe it uh 500 times during the next month and then I'll be back here to see you right with with all these kind of implied promises of what what's going to happen. And that's how this system works. That is justounding. And so what we're going to do is change the system and say you can't, you know, Richard Horton who's the head of of uh the Lancet. Mhm. Who really disgraced himself during COVID with the, you know, the Lancet letter and all this. I remember. Um but um but he says the same thing. He says, "Yeah, we're not we are no longer science journals. We are about promoting pharmaceutical products and that's what we do." So unless these journals uh change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing there and we're going to create our own journals in health in each of the institutions and they will become the preeminent journals because and they're going to become the pre-minent journals because if you get NIH funding, it is anointing you as a good legitimate scientist. I love that that now our public policy research institutions can actually be the hallmarks of of properly conducted research and and a place that we can actually rely on information. I'm I'm there is nothing I hate more than having to to divert this podcast. I know we we we've got a UFC fight that we're going to. First of all, this was totally spontaneous. You know, you you came to my house today before the before the fights and uh we had some fun biohacking with you and your family. Um, and uh, you know, by the grace of God, you agreed to come in and sit down with me for a few minutes. And I know that my audience in the market really appreciates it. But Robert Kennedy, you you are doing God's work and um, and uh, there are a lot of people in this country that are praying for you and for your success and and you know, praying for you to to stay strong and stay on your purpose and your and your passion and your mission. I I was particularly touched by um your testimony to Congress when you were going through your hearings and one of the comments that you made um which I think just exacerbated your conviction to helping heal America was how you woke up every morning and you dropped your knees and you prayed um for the opportunity that uh God would give you to be in the position that you're in now. Now, here you are and and it's it's a great honor to to just sit across from you and have gotten a moment to ask you a few questions. I know that my industry, myself, my platform, all the like-minded influencers and and virtually everyone that I talk to in this country is is behind you. So, over the last 20 years in human biology, one compound I've trusted again and again is NAD+. It's critical for energy, focus, and cellular repair, but your levels drop around age 30. I used to administer NAD via IVs in my clinics, but now I take Rorow Nutrition's liposomaal NAD, the first oral formula that actually works. Their advanced delivery tech gets NAD straight into your bloodstream. I take one teaspoon daily and the results are real. Clean energy, sharper focus, and better recovery. You can try it risk-f free with the Ultimate 15 code at checkout for 15% off. Just put in Ultimate 15 at checkout. You'll receive 15% off and your cells will thank you. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. And you know, I thank you for what you're doing. And we're going to end the war at FDA against alternative medicine. you know, the war on stem cells, the war on chelating drugs, the war on peptides, the war on uh uh anything that you know is not going to make music to my ears. The war on vitamins. Yeah. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, peptides. I mean, these things that can humanity. Our position is that FDA has a job which just to do the science on these kind of issues and then tell the public what they've learned from the science but not tell people and not tell physicians what they can and not cannot prescribe. Yes. And that if you want to take an experimental drug that you know you can do that you ought to be able to do that. You shouldn't have to go to you shouldn't have to go to Antigua to get stem cells which I had to do for my throat. Right. and they helped me enormously. Why did I have to go to Antigua for that? You know, we don't want to have the wild west. We want to make sure that information is out there, but we also want to respect the intelligence of the American people. You know, the the the capacity of people who explore the outcomes that are going to benefit them the most. And of course, you're going to get a lot of charlatans and you're going to get, you know, people who get um who have bad results. But ultimately you can't prevent that either way and and leaving the whole thing in the hands of pharma is not working for us. You know Peter Gocha who was one of the founders of the Cochran collaboration the great scientists in the world and you know he just did a um a study recently that showed that the third largest cause of death in this country after heart attacks and cancer are pharmaceutical drugs. Wow. Yeah. Modern era medical era. So, so for people to say, "Oh, we have to be very careful about nutrients and vitamins." It's a sounding and that people may misuse them or stem cells or hyperbaric chambers. Mhm. For people to for you know, it's not the government's perview to tell people they cannot have access to those things because what they're giving us access in the narrow range of drugs that they want to products that they want to restrict us to are not making us healthier. We ought to rely on democracy and the good sense of the American people and the drive that we all have to take care of ourselves and God's gift to us of a healthy body that has its own set of defenses that we need to respect. We had a great conversation about this today, you know, about the greatest pharmacy, you know, in the world is right here and and the power that this has over this. Bobby Kenny, I hope you'll come back and we can continue to to to chop this up when we have some more time. I know we we're we're heading out to the fights right now and Trump's messing up our whole evening cuz he's they're closing the roads on us right before the UFC uh fights in Miami tonight, but uh but God bless you. Thank you for coming on the Ultimate Human. You're very welcome. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I mean, I think for all of us, it it means to live up to our potential, the potential that God gave us. And you know, I've said this, you know, a number of times that a healthy person has a thousand dreams. M a sick person only has one and right now 60% of the people in this country have only had a single dream and none of us you know our country cannot achieve its promise as an exemplary nation and the promise of giving everybody who lands here the American dream. The potential to fulfill their own potential if they're all sick all the time. So, I think what, you know, we need to do is to is to dial back, have a healthy population, and then let people make up their own choices about how they want to run their lives. Yeah. Well, God bless you. There you have it. That's the definition of the ultimate human. Till

Summary: The food that we're eating is not food anymore. It's a foodlike substance that it was manufactured or created in laboratories. It is not nutrient-dense. It's nutrient anemic. And you're not releasing any GLP1. You're not getting any satiation. You're not nutrientdense. So your body's not saying, "Hey, I'm full. I'm satiated. I should stop eating." The tobacco companies, well, they would mimic the taste of things that are very appetizing. They would do it w…


RFK Jr. speech: vows to eradicate chronic disease
YouTube video by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Q_c1UU66U). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

question to you is if it really is fundamental to what you believe how do you live with that how do you how do you address those issues as you're moving forward you want me to answer the question yeah you want me to answer the question no I'm asking you okay president Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again and I that the only reason why you're at HHS is that the only reason why then you're at the HHS to address that one issue president Trump has asked me because I'm in a unique position to end that and and that is what I'm doing and if we don't solve that problem Senator all of the other disputes we have about who's paying and whether it's insurance companies whether it's providers whether it's hmos whether it's patients or families all of those are moving deck chairs around in the Titanic our ship is sinking 60% increase in Medicaid over the past four years is the biggest budget line now and it's growing faster than any other and no other nation in the world has what we have here no other nation has a chronic disease we have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world we had during covid we had 16% of the covid deaths in a country we only have 4.2% of the world's population we had a higher death count than any country in the world and when CDC was asked why they said it's because Americans are the sickest people on Earth the average person who died from covid American had 3.8 chronic diseases this is an existential threat economically to our military to our health to our sense of well-being and it is a priority for president Trump and that's why he asked me to run the agency and if I'm privileged to be confirmed as EX exactly what I'll do [Applause]

Summary: question to you is if it really is fundamental to what you believe how do you live with that how do you how do you address those issues as you're moving forward you want me to answer the question yeah you want me to answer the question no I'm asking you okay president Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again and I that the only reason why you're at HHS is that the only reason why then you're at the HHS to addres…


Friday Funnies: Burn it All Down Baby!

For those not paying attention, CBS has now“fact checked” several of Trump's claims from last night’s speech - as false. They have announced this before the newly declassified documents he cited have been fully released and independently evaluated.Funny how that works…I'm old enough to remember the collective meltdown when Congress renamed Washington National Airport after Ronald Reagan. The mainstream media acted as if civilization itself were ending.To this day, plenty of people in DC refuse to call it Reagan National. It’s still just “National” or “DCA.” Because, well... we all know how “evil” Reagan was <insert eye roll here>.So now United has decided to join the culture wars?Ironically, we fly United almost exclusively because our home airport, Dulles (yes, named afterthoseDulles brothers), is basically a United hub.My response?F/U, United.Maybe it’s time to go out of my way to fly someone else for a while.So, China cracks down on AI companions, banning features that foster emotional dependence, not allowing children to have AI companions, and forcing major tech firms to disable many virtual companion services.So, unless we do what China just did and regulate AI companions - this will be the future of our youth…Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share it.ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.JGM


Who Is Nicole Saphier?

President Trump withdrew the Casey Means nomination yesterday afternoon, blamed Senator Cassidy, and within minutes named Dr. Nicole B. Saphier of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as his third Surgeon General nominee in fifteen months. The first MAHA-base reaction I have seen, online and in my inbox, has been something between “who?” and “Fox News pick - sellout.” I want to push back on the second reaction before it hardens, because the documentary record on Saphier is genuinely more interesting than the press coverage has so far conveyed, and the right MAHA reading of her is not the obvious one.This piece is a working assessment, not a verdict. The Senate confirmation process is going to surface more than the public record currently shows. What follows is what I have been able to learn in the twenty-four hours since the nomination, the parts of her record that bear directly on MAHA’s questions, and the things I think are worth watching as she goes through the committee.The fact that reframes the restSaphier wrote a book calledMake America Healthy Againin 2020.That is not a typo, and it is not a coincidence. The full title isMake America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion-Dollar Crisis. It came out from HarperCollins’s Broadside Books imprint on April 21, 2020, and it was a national bestseller. The argument is that American healthcare spending has spiraled past seventeen percent of GDP because the system reimburses acute-care intervention rather than prevention, and because Americans themselves have allowed personal-responsibility habits: diet, alcohol, sedentary lifestyle, to drive the chronic-disease curve that the federal architecture is then asked to manage. Her data points include the figures the MAHA movement has been citing for two years: roughly eighty percent of cardiovascular disease and forty percent of all cancer cases preventable through lifestyle change; nearly one in five American deaths associated with poor diet; the federal government spending over a trillion dollars annually on healthcare. She makes those points five years before “Make America Healthy Again” was the political brand of an HHS Secretary.The book is not Kennedy’s book. The causal emphasis is different. Saphier writes from a Fox-News-aligned conservative-health-policy register, and her policy targets are the Affordable Care Act, Medicare-for-all proposals, and third-party-payer fee-for-service incentives. Kennedy’s targets, when MAHA was forming, were environmental toxins, agricultural chemistry, pharmaceutical regulatory capture, and the autism epidemic. Both frameworks land on the same operational fact: that American chronic-disease costs are the principal public-health problem of the period and that the federal architecture is structurally mismatched to addressing it, but they get there through different doors.Here is the thing that matters for MAHA. The vocabulary was already in the conservative-health-policy bloodstream before Kennedy took it up. There was a 2020 conservative-health-policy book using exactly that title, with exactly that diagnostic premise, and it was a bestseller. The MAHA movement did not invent the framing; it organized a much broader political coalition around a framing that was already partly there. Saphier was one of the people writing in that register before the political brand consolidated.That is a fact worth sitting with.Her clinical record, brieflyBefore I get to vaccines and the question MAHA most cares about, the credential summary, because the press has not laid this out cleanly.Saphier was born in Phoenix in 1982 and raised in Scottsdale. Her father is an attorney; her mother is a licensed counselor who worked with children who had experienced abuse and mental illness. She did her bachelor’s at Arizona State University, then went to Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica for her MD, graduating in 2008. From there she did a five-year diagnostic-radiology residency at Maricopa Integrated Health Systems in Arizona, then a subspecialty Oncologic Imaging Fellowship at Mayo Clinic Arizona with a focus in breast imaging. She is a diplomate of the American Board of Radiology.Her current position is Director of Breast Imaging at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Monmouth, New Jersey facility, with concurrent service as Interim Director of Breast Imaging at MSK Basking Ridge. She has a substantive peer-reviewed publication record, co-author on multiple papers in the radiology and oncologic-imaging literature, including recent work on artificial-intelligence applications in breast MRI, deep-learning approaches to breast-imaging triage, and image-guided localization techniques.She also has the advisory-and-policy work that a serious Surgeon General nominee needs to have. She has served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer in Young Women. She sits on advisory committees to the New Jersey Department of Health. She is on the executive and legislative committees of the Radiological Society of New Jersey.Some critics will note that Ross University is a Caribbean medical school and that this is “lower tier” than the Ivy League pipeline. I would urge MAHA readers not to make that argument. The Caribbean-medical-school path is one of the most common pathways into American medicine for first-generation and non-traditional students, and Saphier’s subsequent career: five-year residency, Mayo Clinic fellowship, MSK directorship, board certification, peer-reviewed publications, is the record of a serious cancer specialist. The Ross University detail will appear in critical coverage; the appropriate response is the documentary record of what she did after.The personal-biography element that will recur in coverage is that she had her oldest son in high school, kept the pregnancy, and has framed the experience publicly as her own decision to choose life rather than abortion; a framing she has connected to her broader advocacy on patient autonomy and personal responsibility. She is married to Dr. Paul Saphier, an endovascular neurosurgeon. They have three sons together.She has been a Fox News Channel medical contributor since 2018, with regular appearances on Fox & Friends, The Five, Outnumbered, and Mornings with Maria, and occasional commentary on Fox Business and MSNBC.The vaccine question, told straightThis is the part MAHA readers care about most, and it is the part where Saphier’s record is most genuinely mixed. I want to lay it out as it is, not as either side of the coalition would prefer to read it.In February 2021, Saphier wrote a Fox News opinion piece supporting the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines for elderly and high-risk populations. She cited the Israeli population-protection data, by then the Israeli health ministry was reporting that the mRNA vaccines were 98.9 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 death among elderly populations, and made the case that prioritizing the elderly and long-term-care populations was the right epidemiological allocation. She was not equivocating on the vaccines for those populations. She supported them.In October 2022, when the Biden White House and CDC were pushing the bivalent COVID-19 booster as the answer for healthy children ages five and older, Saphier turned hard against the recommendation. She went on Fox News and called the booster rollout “a political stunt.” She argued that the safety and benefit data did not support universal pediatric administration, that ninety percent of children had already either had COVID or been previously vaccinated, that natural immunity was widespread, and that the demonstrated risk-benefit calculation for healthy young people did not support the recommendation. This was not a fringe position; it was substantially the same critique that came from Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, and Jay Bhattacharya during the same period. But it is on the public record under her byline, in her own words, in 2022.In February 2025, during the West Texas measles outbreak, Saphier did a Fox News Digital piece on MMR that is the single most relevant documentary item for understanding her current position. She endorsed the MMR vaccine as “important and lifesaving.” She also said that for parents who are concerned, it is acceptable to delay specific shots through the developmental window during which signs of autism would typically present, roughly ages one to three, so that parents can make their own decision with their pediatrician. She framed the conversation as one that should be between doctor and patient, and said that during COVID the CDC and many healthcare professionals “really took away” that conversation. And in the same piece, she expressed hope that the MAHA movement’s vaccine-safety-surveillance work would “give parents the confidence they need to continue with the vaccine programs.”Read as a totality, the position is what I would call moderate-MAHA. She is pro-individual-vaccine on the merits. She is supportive of parental autonomy on schedule. She is critical of universal pediatric mandates absent benefit data. She is explicitly sympathetic to MAHA’s vaccine-safety-surveillance reform agenda. She is not, in any reading I can construct from the documentary record, an anti-vaccine voice in the medical-freedom register that, say, Children’s Health Defense operates in. She is also not, in any reading I can construct, a CDC-establishment-defending voice of the kind Cassidy is looking for.Whether that is enough for Cassidy is the operative question. My honest answer is that I do not know. The COVID-pediatric-booster criticism is going to come up at her hearing. The “political stunt” line will come up. So will the autism-developmental-window framing. Cassidy is going to want to know whether she would, as Surgeon General, recommend MMR universally on the existing CDC schedule, and what she would say about a parent who chose the delay-through-the-autism-window path she has publicly endorsed. She has answers for those questions. Whether they are the answers Cassidy wants is what we are about to find out.What the nomination signalsIf you read the press coverage straight, the story is: MAHA’s Surgeon General pick failed; the administration retreated to a Fox News pick to get the seat filled. There is something to that reading, but it misses what is actually interesting.The nomination does several things at once.It preserves the chronic-disease-and-prevention framework that has been the most popular part of the MAHA agenda. Saphier wrote a book about it. Her appointment is a signal that the Surgeon General’s office, under this administration, is going to be organized around that framework regardless of who occupies it. That matters for the food-and-chemical regulatory work, for the medical-school nutrition-training initiative, for the Dietary Guidelines posture, and for the broader public-communications register the office sets.It moves the vaccine question off the front of the Surgeon General’s portfolio. Casey Means’s nomination put vaccines at the center of the confirmation fight, and the Senate Republicans most committed to the existing vaccine paradigm — Cassidy, Murkowski, Collins — refused to advance her. Saphier’s record is mixed enough on vaccines that it is harder to organize a “this nominee will undermine American vaccination rates” objection around her. That is a tactical retreat, but it is also a recognition that the Surgeon General’s office is not, structurally, the right tool for the vaccine reform fight. Vaccine policy runs through ACIP, CDC, FDA, and the litigation inAAP v. Kennedy. The Surgeon General sets public-communications register. Putting a moderate-MAHA radiologist in that seat is not the loss the framing presents it as.It also gives the administration a Surgeon General with a mainstream-credentialed cancer specialty, which is the kind of credential that travels well in mainstream press coverage and in physician-community engagement. The mainstream-medical community is not going to embrace this nomination — they will note the Ross University degree and the Fox News record, and the editorial pages will run their usual coverage. But Saphier’s clinical work at MSK is real, her peer-reviewed publication record is real, and her advisory-committee history is real. These are not small things. The press shop will be working with stronger material than they had on Means.The hard question, on the MAHA side, is whether the chronic-disease-and-prevention framework Saphier brings, distinct from Kennedy’s environmental and pharmaceutical-capture framing in its specific causal emphases, counts as a continuation of the agenda or as a narrowing of it. The honest answer is that it is some of both. The food-and-chronic-disease half of MAHA is fully consistent with the framework Saphier was already articulating in 2020. The vaccine-policy half, the medical-freedom register, and the environmental-toxin and pharmaceutical-capture critiques are not her register. She will not, as Surgeon General, be the voice for those parts of the agenda. That work runs elsewhere in the department, and it has run elsewhere in the department for the entire fifteen months of this administration.What I am watchingA few things are going to tell us, over the next sixty days, what this nomination actually means in practice.The first is whether Cassidy schedules a hearing. He did not schedule a vote on Means; he scheduled a hearing and let it die. Whether he treats Saphier the same way will be the immediate signal. The Trump Truth Social attack on Cassidy was unusual in its directness, calling Cassidy “very disloyal,” referencing the 2021 impeachment vote, endorsing Cassidy’s primary challenger Julia Letlow, and Cassidy’s response will tell us whether he is willing to be the Republican senator who blocks a second consecutive Surgeon General nominee. The political math has changed since February. Cassidy is in a primary fight, and the calculation that protected him through the Means hearing may not protect him through the Saphier hearing.The second is what Saphier says about MAHA at her hearing. She has been sympathetic in her published commentary, but the confirmation register is different from the Fox News register, and she has not been asked, on the record, the questions a Senate hearing will put to her. Will she defend the Kennedy ACIP reform record? Will she defend theAAP v. Kennedyinjunction-stay litigation? Will she defend the September 22 acetaminophen and folinic-acid announcements? These are not the Surgeon General’s portfolio in the strict sense, but they are the questions the hearing will use to test her relationship to the rest of the department. Her answers will tell us how she will function alongside Kennedy.The third is what happens with theAAP v. Kennedyappeal. The federal government filed its Notice of Appeal yesterday morning, sixteen days before the appellate window expired. The government’s posture toward the appeal — whether the administration treats the First Circuit as a serious recovery opportunity or as an institutional minimum required to preserve the record, will tell us how committed the administration remains to the original ACIP restructuring. Saphier’s nomination, on the same day, sits inside that broader administrative posture. If the administration is treating both the appeal and the Surgeon General nomination as commitments to be defended on the merits, that is one reading. If the administration is treating both as institutional housekeeping, that is a different reading. I do not know yet which it is.A note on the register I am writing inSome readers have asked me, on Substack and on X, why I do not write in the harder register some MAHA voices use. The answer is the one this piece embodies: the documentary record on Saphier is mixed in ways the harder register cannot accommodate. She is not the MAHA Warrior the administration nominated when it nominated Means. She is also not the establishment-physician sellout the harder register would have to make her in order to dismiss the nomination. She is a credentialed cancer specialist who wrote the MAHA case under the MAHA title five years before MAHA was a political brand, who has a mixed but defensible vaccine record, who is sympathetic to the parts of the MAHA agenda that have the broadest public support, and who is going to be the third Surgeon General nominee the administration tries to push through a Republican Senate that has already refused two.That is the actual situation. The right MAHA response is to look at it clearly, support what is supportable, ask the right questions at the hearing, and reserve judgment until the record on the floor is fuller than the record we have today.The chronic-disease epidemic in American children is not going to be solved by any Surgeon General. It is going to be solved by the broader political and cultural realignment that the MAHA movement is one part of. Saphier, on the documentary record, is part of that realignment. Whether she is the right person for this particular seat at this particular moment is the question her confirmation hearing is about to test.I will be watching, and I will write more when there is more to say.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: A working assessment of the new Surgeon General nominee, from a MAHA vantage point


The Senator the mRNA Industry Built

The Senator the mRNA Industry BuiltTwo weeks from now, on May 16, 2026, Louisiana Republicans will vote in a closed primary that has become the single most consequential intra-party election of the second Trump term. Senator Bill Cassidy, who has held the seat since 2015, is fighting for his political life against three challengers. They are Congresswoman Julia Letlow, who carries President Trump’s complete and total endorsement and the endorsement of Governor Jeff Landry; State Treasurer John Fleming, the former congressman; and Mark Spencer.The most recent Emerson College poll, released April 26, shows Fleming at 28 percent, Letlow at 27 percent, and Cassidy at 21 percent. Twenty-two percent of voters remain undecided. The senator’s path to the runoff is narrow and getting narrower.A development from the past 72 hours bears registration before the substantive argument begins. On April 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled inLouisiana v. Callaisthat the state’s current congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The day after the decision, Governor Landry signed an Executive Order suspending the closed-party primaries for U.S. House races only until July 15, 2026, or until the Legislature redraws the maps. Secretary of State Nancy Landry’s official statement made clear that all other races on the May 16 ballot would proceed as scheduled.Senator Cassidy’s public reaction to the governor’s decision is itself worth registering. Within hours of Landry’s executive order, Cassidy posted on X that “the governor’s decision to move ahead with the Senate race during a confusing time is disappointing.” It is an unusual move for an incumbent senator to publicly object to his own state’s governor for proceeding with his primary on the originally scheduled date.The reason it happened is straightforward enough: Cassidy is running third on the most recent polling, and a delay of his primary into July or later would have given him weeks to consolidate institutional support, allow national press attention to shift, and possibly insulate him from the redistricting drama that is dominating Louisiana political coverage. Governor Landry, who has endorsed Letlow, declined to extend that lifeline. The senator’s “disappointing” statement, directed at his own state’s Republican governor two weeks before voting, is the response of a man who knows the math.A great deal has been written about why this primary matters. Most of the coverage has focused on the obvious: Cassidy’s 2021 vote to convict Donald Trump in the second impeachment trial, the President’s resulting determination to drive him from the Senate, the spectacle of an incumbent Republican facing a credible primary challenge in a state Trump carried by twenty-two points. That is the political surface of the story.The deeper story, the one that should matter to anyone who has followed the MAHA movement’s first fifteen months in federal power, is something the political coverage has barely touched. Bill Cassidy is not just a Republican who voted to convict Trump. He is the senator most directly responsible, on the documented record, for the institutional containment of Secretary Kennedy’s MAHA agenda.He is the senator the mRNA industry’s principal lobbying organization has been engaging with since July 2023, before Kennedy was even nominated. And he is the senator who, in February 2026, used his Senate HELP Committee chairmanship to publicly confront NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya over the very mRNA grant terminations and contract cancellations that the President’s own Health and Human Services secretary had ordered.This essay lays out the documentary record. It argues that the record, fairly read, makes Cassidy’s primary defeat not just a Trump loyalty question but a substantive policy question, a question about whether the MAHA agenda will continue to be contained by a Senate health committee chair operating in alignment with the very industry incumbents the agenda was elected to confront.Louisiana voters have an opportunity, on May 16, to settle that question.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Cassidy Confirmation ConditionsThe contained-MAHA story begins on February 13, 2025, the day Bill Cassidy announced he would vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The vote was 52 to 48. Cassidy was the deciding Republican; without his vote, the nomination would have failed. The Senate health committee chairman had spent the preceding weeks publicly wavering, and his eventual yes was conditioned on what he described as “a series of promises from Kennedy aimed at protecting faith in vaccines.”Those promises, as Cassidy later detailed in his floor remarks and in subsequent interviews, included commitments that the Kennedy HHS wouldmaintain unchanged the existing CDC vaccine schedule, would not seek to remove vaccines already on the recommended schedule without conducting evidence-based reviews, would maintain the existing Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System rather than replacing it, would seek Senate input before making major changes to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and would refrain from using HHS authority to discourage childhood vaccination broadly.Every one of those conditions was structured to preserve, in its essentials, the pre-2025 vaccine-policy status quo, the status quo that the MAHA movement’s most committed adherents, including the millions of Americans who voted for Trump-Kennedy on the explicit promise of vaccine-policy reform, had been organizing against for fifteen years.The Cassidy conditions were not, in retrospect, the act of a skeptical senator preserving institutional integrity. They were the act of a senator with a specific structural relationship to the mRNA-platform pharmaceutical industry, exacting policy concessions on that industry’s behalf as the price of allowing Kennedy’s confirmation to proceed.The Alliance for mRNA MedicinesIn November 2023, more than a year before Kennedy was nominated, a new pharmaceutical-industry trade association quietly registered itself in Washington. Its name is theAlliance for mRNA Medicines (AMM). Its founding members numbered thirty-one. Its operational vehicle was Leavitt Partners, the Washington consulting firm founded by former HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, under George W. Bush. Its Executive Director, Clay Alspach, is a Leavitt Partners principal and former Chief Health Counsel for the House Energy and Commerce Committee under Representative Fred Upton, where he led the committee’s work on the 21st Century Cures Act and other major health legislation.The Alliance for mRNA Medicines did not exist to lobby for the mRNA platform’s continued commercial viability against competitive threats from other pharmaceutical platforms. It existed to lobby for the platform’s continued regulatory and political insulation against the mRNA-skeptical political movement that, by November 2023, was clearly emerging as a major force in American politics.AMM’s first inaugural Washington meetings, which the organization itself documented on its LinkedIn account on July 27, 2023, four months before its formal founding, were not held with random congressional offices. They were held with a specific list of officials whose positions on mRNA platform policy mattered.The list, as AMM publicly disclosed: SenatorBill Cassidy. Representative Brett Guthrie. Then-FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Peter Marks. Cancer Moonshot leadership. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy leadership. Senior staff for Senators Gary Peters and Bob Casey.Senator Cassidy was on that list before the Alliance for mRNA Medicines had its formal founding meeting. He was on that list because his position on mRNA platform policy mattered to the industry building the lobbying organization that would be deployed against the MAHA movement’s agenda eighteen months later. The senator and the trade association have been documented as engaging with each other since July 2023, before Kennedy was nominated, before Trump’s 2024 victory was assured, before Cassidy cast the confirmation vote that placed Kennedy at the head of HHS subject to the conditions Cassidy himself had extracted. It does not appear that his clear conflict of interest was disclosed to the Senate at the time of the vote, or the public at large.By late April 2026, AMM’s membership has grown from those original thirty-one members to more than one hundred. Moderna and Merck were added to the public membership roster in the period since the Kennedy HHS confirmation.The trade association has continued to engage with Senator Cassidy’s office throughout the period the MAHA agenda has been advancing. AMM’s news platform amplified Cassidy’s February 3, 2026 Senate HELP Committee hearing on NIH modernization, the hearing at which Cassidy publicly confronted NIH Director Bhattacharya over the cancellation of $500 million in HHS mRNA contracts and the termination of mRNA research grants the Kennedy HHS had determined did not meet evidentiary standards. At no time during this hearing, did Cassidy disclose his affiliation with AMM.This is a documented chronology. Every claim in the preceding paragraphs is sourceable to AMM’s own public communications, to Leavitt Partners’ corporate disclosures, to LegiStorm’s lobbyist-registration database, to the Senate HELP Committee’s published hearing record, to Cassidy’s own February 3, 2026 press release, and to contemporaneous reporting bySciencemagazine, by Holland and Knight, and by the trade press. None of it is contested.What is contested is what the chronology means. I will offer my reading.What the Documented Chronology MeansA senator the mRNA industry has been engaging with since July 2023 cast the deciding Republican vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS Secretary on the condition that Kennedy preserve the pre-2025 vaccine-policy status quo. After the confirmation, that same senator, chairing the Senate committee with oversight over HHS, has used his chairmanship to challenge the Kennedy HHS at every major decision point the MAHA agenda has required.When the reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted in September 2025 to end the universal recommendation that newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine on the day of birth, Cassidy publicly called the decision “a mistake” and signaled openness to legislation that would constrain the ACIP’s reform authority.When Vinay Prasad, the new FDA CBER Director, issued the November 2025 memorandum identifying ten of ninety-six pediatric VAERS deaths as related to COVID-19 vaccination, Cassidy described the memo as having “diverged from standard pharmacovigilance practice” and called for senate hearings on the FDA’s pharmacovigilance methodology under the new HHS leadership.When theAAP v. Kennedypreliminary injunction was issued by Judge Brian Murphy on March 16, 2026, Cassidy did not publicly defend the Kennedy HHS’s reform program; he registered concern about the injunction’s procedural findings while declining to take a position on the underlying ACIP reconstitution.When the Kennedy HHS announced the cancellation of $500 million in mRNA contracts in early February 2026, Cassidy convened a Senate HELP hearing which he publicly confronted NIH Director Bhattacharya on the record.This is not the conduct of a senator skeptically supervising an HHS Secretary he had reluctantly voted to confirm. This is the conduct of a senator using his committee chairmanship to advance a specific policy position, the position the Alliance for mRNA Medicines has been advocating since July 2023.I do not claim that AMM bought Senator Cassidy’s vote. I claim something narrower and harder to refute: the documented chronology establishes a pattern of alignment between Senator Cassidy and the mRNA-industry lobbying organization that is, on the documentary record alone, structurally consistent with the regulatory-capture analytical framework the MAHA movement was elected to confront.The senator is on the wrong side of MAHA. Supporters of the MAHA agenda represent a decisive majority of his Republican primary electorate, who voted for MAHA-aligned change in November 2024.The May 16 ChoicePresident Trump endorsed Julia Letlow on January 17, 2026, preemptively, before she had announced her candidacy. He called her a “Great Star” and a “TOTAL WINNER” and wrote, in characteristic punctuation, “RUN, JULIA, RUN!!!” Three days later, on January 20, Letlow announced her candidacy at a closed-door business breakfast in Baton Rouge. Governor Jeff Landry has endorsed her. The America First political infrastructure has aligned around her candidacyLetlow is, what Cassidy is not: a member of Congress who has consistently supported the Trump administration’s agenda across the issue spectrum, including the MAHA agenda’s component policy positions. She has voted for the major appropriations vehicles supporting the Kennedy HHS reform program. She has not publicly broken with Secretary Kennedy on a single major decision. She has not, to public knowledge, met with the Alliance for mRNA Medicines or its operational principals. She has the policy positioning Louisiana Republicans voted for in 2024 and the willingness to defend that positioning under pressure.State Treasurer John Fleming, the former congressman, is also running. Fleming has substantial conservative credentials and would not be a bad senator. But the analytical case for ending Cassidy’s career rests on the specific documentation this essay has laid out, and the analytical case for replacing him with Letlow rests on the endorsement structure: Trump, Landry, and the America First coalition has aligned around her candidacy specifically.A vote for Letlow on May 16 is the clearest available signal that Louisiana Republicans want their senator to be aligned with the MAHA agenda rather than aligned against it. A vote for Fleming, on current polling, risks splitting the anti-Cassidy vote in ways that could let the senator survive into the runoff with a structural advantage from incumbent name recognition.I make this case as the author of the recently completed “The Chronic Rebellion” (Authors Drs. Robert and Jill Malone), a definitive history book that comprehensively documents the MAHA movement’s first fifteen months in federal power. The research performed for the book strongly supports this assessment.  The case is not about Donald Trump’s grievances, though those are real and the President is entitled to them. The case is about the specific structural relationship between Senator Cassidy and the lobbying organization that has been working against the policy agenda the President and Secretary Kennedy were elected to advance.A senator who entered an alliance with the mRNA-industry lobbying organization in July 2023, who used his confirmation-vote leverage to extract conditions structured to preserve the pre-2025 status quo that lobbying organization was protecting. Who has used his committee chairmanship in 2025–2026 to publicly challenge the Kennedy HHS at every major decision point of the reform program.  This is a senator who should not be returned to the Senate for a third six-year term.Louisiana Republicans have the opportunity, on May 16, to end Bill Cassidy’s career by electing Julia Letlow. The opportunity exists in this specific election because of an unusual conjunction of factors: a presidentially-endorsed challenger with the coalition needed to consolidate the anti-Cassidy vote, a primary calendar that places the decision two weeks before the Memorial Day weekend, and Julia Letlow’s pro-MAHA record, which is supported by Republican voters.The opportunity will not return. Cassidy’s structural advantages: incumbent fundraising, committee chairmanship, NRSC backing, the support of Senate Majority Leader Thune, will not be matched in any subsequent election. If he survives the primary on May 16, he survives for six more years. The MAHA agenda will spend those six years contained by a Senate health committee chairman whose alignment with the lobbying organization opposing that agenda is documentary fact, regardless of whether the causal chain is established.The choice for Louisiana voters on May 16 is whether to let that happen, or whether to use the closed primary the state has scheduled to make sure it does not.I urge Louisiana Republicans to vote for Julia Letlow.Robert W. Malone, MD, MSMay 2, 2026The documentary record on the Alliance for mRNA Medicines and Senator Cassidy is laid out at greater length, with full source citations, in Chapter 13 ofThe Chronic Rebellion: How American Parents Built the MAHA Movement Out of Their Children’s Illness, forthcoming in 2026 prior to the midterm election.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareA Note for Louisiana Readers: Five Days Before the PrimaryThe argument this essay has made about Senator Cassidy applies, in different forms, at every level of American governance. The same trusted-association networks, professional-society infrastructures, and coordinated-policy-distribution mechanisms that shape federal vaccine policy also shape what happens in fifty state legislatures. The lobbying organization documented here is one node in a larger architecture, and that architecture operates as visibly in Baton Rouge as it does in Washington.On Monday, May 11, 2026, five days before the primary, I will be speaking in Baton Rouge at an event hosted byCitizens for a New Louisiana, the state-level government-accountability organization that has spent the last several years documenting how policy is shaped in Louisiana before bills are ever filed.The event is titledChampions of Change Baton Rouge: How Policy Really Gets Made. It runs from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at the City Club of Baton Rouge, 355 North Boulevard. I will be sharing the program withNoah Wallof the State Leadership Initiative, whose work examines how policy is developed, packaged, and distributed across all fifty states through trusted associations and professional networks, often moving in coordinated ways that are not immediately visible to the public.Wall’s analytical framework and mine converge on the same structural question: how do the institutional networks operating between elected officials and the citizens those officials are supposed to represent actually shape what becomes law? The federal-level chronology this essay has laid out is one answer. The state-level chronology Wall and I will discuss in Baton Rouge on May 11 is another. For Louisiana voters preparing to cast their ballot on May 16, the connection should be obvious: the same dynamics that produced a senator structurally aligned with the mRNA-industry lobbying organization are also operating, in different forms, at the statehouse. Understanding the mechanism is the first step toward changing the outcome.Tickets are $125 for general admission, with table sponsorship options available at $1,500, $2,500, and $5,000 levels. Seating is limited and the event has historically sold out. Information and registration are atnewlouisiana.org, or by calling Citizens for a New Louisiana at (225) 242-9742. If you are a Louisiana reader of this Substack, and especially if you are a Baton Rouge–area reader who has been following this analytical thread across multiple essays, I would be glad to see you in the room on May 11. We will have a great deal to talk about, and the timing, five days before the most consequential intra-party Senate primary in the country, could not be more relevant.In case you were wondering, I did not ask for and will not be receiving any honorarium or compensation for this appearance other than my travel and lodging expenses.  It has been my pleasure and honor to have traveled to Louisiana many times to support the MAHA moms and the Health Freedom movement (with and independently from Secretary Kennedy), and consider Governor Landry and good friend of both Jill and myself.  As a fellow equestrian, he always asks us about how our horses are doing.

Summary: Why Louisiana Republicans Should End Bill Cassidy’s Senate Career on May 16


Friday Funnies: The Turducken Dance

It may sound like a small gripe, but when did looking like you do not care become the norm?What is even more striking is who it shows up in. Young, single women. The group that, not long ago, took pride in presenting themselves well. Now you see the opposite. Little attention to appearance, little attention to health, little evidence of discipline in how they care for their own bodies. Poor diet, no exercise, and an overall posture of disengagement.It gets dismissed as rebellion or some cultural statement. I do not buy that. What I see, as a woman, is something much simpler. It is easier to give up than to do the work. Easier to opt out than to invest in yourself.Then comes the next step. Blame men for not measuring up. Raise standards while lowering effort. Walk away from dating. Walk away from marriage. Convince yourself you do not need a family. Replace it with a tight circle of friends and a pet or two for companionship.And call that independence.It is not independence. It is retreat.And it is profoundly sad.Participation trophies…What used to be called indulgence has been rebranded in softer language. Permissive parenting. Gentle parenting. Soft parenting. The labels sound thoughtful, even compassionate. The outcomes tell a different story. Expectations lowered. Boundaries blurred. Rewards handed out with little connection to effort or achievement. Whether it is children or even pets, the impulse to placate has replaced the responsibility to teach.Across homes and classrooms, a cultural shift has taken hold. Comfort is prioritized over discipline. Validation is handed out in place of accountability. Standards that once prepared young people to function in the real world have been quietly dismantled.We now have a generation of young adults for whom an easy A is the norm. Not earned through mastery, but granted for showing up. Participation, not preparation. Presence, not performance.At the same time, they are being told a story. From social media, from peers, and too often from the adults around them. That being unwell confers status. That victimhood brings recognition. That hard work is for those who failed to game the system. That society owes them. Not just opportunity, but outcomes. Resources, money, subsidized housing, endless concessions. The able-bodied are told their role is to provide, not to build. To redistribute, not to create.This is not the old “me” generation. This is something different. A worldview that assigns moral authority to grievance and treats dependency as virtue.The result is predictable. Young adults who are unprepared for the demands of real life. Unprepared for responsibility, for resilience, for the basic discipline required to sustain a career, a relationship, or a family. And deep down, many of them know it.Because opting out is easier. Easier to lean into anxiety, depression, or disengagement than to confront difficulty. Easier to remain on the couch than to step into a world that demands effort. For many, especially young women, the consequences are already visible. Delayed families. Fragile relationships. Metabolic disease. Careers that never quite launch.This did not happen by accident. It traces back to parenting. To the choices made, repeated, and normalized over years.Perhaps this generation will recognize what was lost and choose differently when it is their turn. Perhaps they will rediscover the value of discipline, responsibility, and earned success.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareHave a great weekend everyone!JGM

Summary: It's what for dinner


Sunday Strip: Y,al better Know Who Cooked It

Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.JGM

Summary: Know the rules...