[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.] 

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, Sept. 25, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast, and things might’ve changed by the time you hear this, so here we go. 

Today, we are joined via videoconference by Sandhya Raman of CQ Roll Call. 

Sandhya Raman: Good morning. 

Rovner: And Anna Edney of Bloomberg News. 

Anna Edney: Hey, everybody. 

Rovner: So we’re going to do something a little different today. I got a chance to speak on Wednesday with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. I asked him to respond to the White House announcement on autism and last week’s rather muddled meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. So we’ll play that interview first, and then we’ll come back for our panel discussion. Here’s the interview. 

I am so pleased to welcome Dr. Demetre Daskalakis to the podcast. Until last month, Dr. Daskalakis was the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases in Atlanta. He quit, along with three other senior career CDC officials, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired their boss, Susan Monarez, for refusing to approve in advance changes to the childhood vaccine schedule. Dr. Daskalakis, thank you so much for joining us. 

Demetre Daskalakis: Thank you so much for having me. 

Rovner: So, for those who haven’t been plugged into the public health doings over the past month, remind us what exactly your job was at CDC and why you felt you needed to resign following the dismissal of Dr. Monarez. 

Daskalakis: So CDC is made up of centers, and so I ran one of the centers, called the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. CDC’s not known for its pithy titles. So what that is is the center that is responsible for a lot of what you think about when you think about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases. That includes the resources that go out to local jurisdictions. 

Rovner: And when Dr. Monarez was fired, what did that signal to you? 

Daskalakis: Yeah. I think the last eight months had been hard. I think that we had other things that happened before Dr. Monarez’s resignation. I think we saw the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices be zombified into something that was not science, we saw recommendations around covid vaccine come out on Twitter rather than through any scientific process. So those were the things that were on the way. But as ACIP was made zombified — and what I mean by that was CDC has nothing to do with it, these folks who have been installed, who are frankly anti-vaxxers for the most part, they’re the ones that are driving the agenda, the membership, all of it — so it wasn’t really doing anything of scientific consequence anymore. 

But when Dr. Monarez was there, we had a scientific leader whose job it was to really be a diplomat to Secretary Kennedy and Health and Human Services, but also to really make sure that the science is what leads the policy. And so, when I saw that organization, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, become some strange ideology machine, and then also saw that I wouldn’t have a scientific leader at CDC who would be able to defend the science, the game was over for me, because I couldn’t see any way that we would be leading with science. Instead, I could only see ideology. I read RFK’s books, and I know what’s coming, which is the dismantling of vaccines for the United States. 

Rovner: So can you talk a little bit about how the career scientists and doctors at the CDC normally interact with the political appointees at the agency and the political folks at the top of HHS, and how that was so different in this administration? 

Daskalakis: Yeah. I worked with — now that would be — four CDC directors and two secretaries of health. And so, the way that we normally interacted as career scientists was that we would produce materials; if there were questions, we would create memos and other materials to be able to present to our politicals around those issues. We would be responsive to any issues that they wanted to talk about. So for instance, if somebody said, “I want to talk about the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine,” we would create briefing materials and opportunities for the politicals, both at HHS and CDC, to be able to have time with career scientists to really learn about the story. And that’s not what’s happened in this newest regime. 

Now, let me be clear, Dr. Monarez did ask for briefings, and she did get them, so that is not the person I’m talking about. Above that, the secretary had never been briefed by anyone from the National Center of Immunization and Respiratory Diseases while I was there, so he never heard about measles, never heard about bird flu, didn’t hear about covid, though he made decisions about covid, didn’t hear about any of the things that we normally brief about. Didn’t hear anything about seasonal flu, RSV, and covid. We had been briefing folks on a monthly basis, because this was the epidemic that we have every year. So to say that there’s a glitch in the matrix is an understatement. This is an extremely atypical environment, where the head of people’s health for America doesn’t talk to people who know the science. 

Rovner: So I want to ask you about the ACIP meeting, but since then, we’ve had the White House announcement on the causes of autism and a potential new treatment for it. Can you give us your take on that entire event, both the press conference announcing it and the documentation, such as it was, that was provided afterwards? I have to say, I watched all of the covid press conferences with President [Donald] Trump in 2020, and this made even my eyes cross a little bit. 

Daskalakis: So let’s rehash what happened with the acetaminophen and autism issue. So they took one study and elevated that study and did this Orwellian doublespeak around it, where they said that it showed that there was a link, quote, “link,” between acetaminophen and autism. The study didn’t show that; the study showed that there was an association, and so an association does not mean cause. And so, my example that I use is when you are meeting people who have lung cancer and you ask them if they have matches in their pocket, they very often do. It’s not the matches that cause the lung cancer, it’s the tobacco; it’s the smoking. 

So very similarly, there’s an association with acetaminophen, that’s the matchbook. Autism is a spectrum and it’s not a disorder or a disability for some people, it’s just part of their normal neurocognitive story, but it’s like the equivalent in my analogy of lung cancer. And so, there’s something in between there that we don’t really see, and that could be genetics and other environmental exposures. So they put all of their eggs in one basket that should make nobody feel comfortable that they have the answer for autism because they found an association that people kind of already knew about and made an announcement, mainly because the secretary promised a September announcement. And so, science can’t be rushed, this was a rush job, and I don’t like my policy fast and loose, and that’s what you’re seeing, fast-and-loose policy. 

They also talked about leucovorin, which is a drug that I think many people use or know about, usually used in cancer chemotherapies that involve some kind of antifolate, so it is a rescue. So if people are getting a medicine that makes their folate low, the folinic acid is kind of like super folate that really replaces the deficiency. And so, they made big statements about this being a potential treatment for autism, but then subsequently in the writing that they put out, they were very focused on a very specific circumstance of people who have some sort of cerebral folate deficiency. 

So that’s the big picture. They announced a bunch of stuff, and it didn’t go through any process, we don’t know the quality of the data, the entirety of the data was not reviewed in any systematic way, and then announcements were made without any process of actually demonstrating what work was done to get there. We’ve all been in math class — the answer to an equation isn’t just 25, you have to show the work to get there, and so it’s like they just said, “The answer is 25.” 

Rovner: And in this case, this could cause all kinds of actual consequences for people, particularly for pregnant women who have pain or fever. 

Daskalakis: Which is associated with poor outcome for the pregnant woman, as well as for the fetus or the child after they’re born. So there’s that reality, that it’s not inconsequential, and then you have someone saying, “Avoid it, don’t do it, at all costs, don’t do it,” and then what the FDA puts out that says, “Should use judiciously.” 

So I’m going to answer the second part of your question, what did I think of the press conference? I’m going to be honest, I don’t blame the president for anything that he said. I blame RFK Jr. and the other people on that stage. Their job is to make sure that their principal knows what they’re talking about, and so they have failed their job because what happened was we had a principal who was talking about things that were, I think, beyond his scope. And then also, we thought we were just talking acetaminophen, and then all of a sudden, in a non sequitur, we heard about the vaccine schedule for kids with some very strange places that we visited, including the notion that hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted infection, and rather than the birth dose that prevents vertical transmission, mother to child, as well as household transmission, we should wait until age 12, which will manifest itself as liver cancer, liver transplant, and cirrhosis for a lot of children, especially those who maybe are at higher risk because of their social circumstance. 

So that’s what I thought. I was, like, poor guy, he’s being briefed by people who don’t know anything, and so maybe they should take care of him. 

Rovner: All right. Well, I want to also ask you about your reaction to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ meeting last week, where the committee voted to change recommendations for both the measles-mumps-rubella and chickenpox vaccines and the covid vaccine. At the end, it felt like everyone was confused, including the members of the committee. What stood out to you about that meeting? 

Daskalakis: I felt like an oracle, because in my resignation letter, I told you this was going to happen, and it’s exactly what I thought. And so, what happened was they did no process and just did stuff. And so, let me just give you what normal is, because that’s really important, and then I’ll walk you through each one and tell you why they were abnormal. 

So generally speaking, something happens, and there’s a question related to vaccine policy, there’s a new vaccine, there’s new data around safety, something happens. And that’s elevated either by ACIP members, CDC, or the working groups that live within the ACIP that do all the work on the side before the meeting. So that question comes to the work group, and the CDC folks work really hard and poll all the data in the world about the question. They in effect work to do what is, for lack of a better word, a meta-analysis, a study of studies, and they go through a process called GRADE, where they look at all the data and say, “This is good data, this is OK data, there’s bias,” really to contextualize all of the data. They then put that onto a clear table that tells you what’s happening. Now, they did that for a couple of things. 

The next thing is that there are long discussions. They’re long because they’re complicated, and they go through something that’s called an Evidence to Recommendations Framework. Now, that’s jargony, but what it means is that there’s this process where they ask, “Is this an important public health question? What are the implications for equity? Do the risks and the benefits … what is the equation there? Is there more harm or more good? Is this something that is going to improve the health of people? And is this cost-effective?” There’s a lot of domains, but they go through it really methodically because they want to get all of the domains that are needed for decisions. Once they do that, they produce a recommendation. That is taken to ACIP and it’s discussed. And then they vote. 

So what happened was that they didn’t do it, because RFK Jr., I know this from the inside, said, “I want on the agenda hepatitis B birth dose and MMRV.” What you saw there was politicization of the committee, ideology dominating, conspiracy theories being elevated to the level of data, and then decisions being made based on that. So if the data’s no good, if the foundation of the house is rotten, that house shouldn’t be standing, so that’s what we saw. 

And I want to go back to that hepatitis B thing. So they may go and do something that’s more process. But one of the reasons that I left was that CDC is not allowed to dictate who is on the work group anymore. So if they stack the work group with people that are anti-vax people, who are naysayers, who are not basing conversations on data, but on the anecdote or unvetted studies, it won’t matter, because that process will also be rotten if there’s not a diversity of opinion and scientific expertise on the work group. So that’s what happened at ACIP. 

Rovner: So following some pretty unusual public health actions just in the week since you’ve resigned, what’s your biggest concern about public health going forward? 

Daskalakis: So I think that there’s a couple of things that happened that I didn’t talk about yet that are very concerning. I’ll tell you that the book that I picked up to start reading when I finished my time at CDC was [George] Orwell’s “1984,” and the reason that I picked it up was because really soon after I left, I have nothing to do with stopping it or starting it, but just saying temporally speaking, CDC changed their webpage, that was the “About CDC” webpage, into, in effect, what is a manifesto as opposed to a description of an agency that is supposed to be balanced and scientific. So it really, in effect, speaks about compliance to ideology as the principal motivator for what CDC is and will do. There were other things wrong with that document, but we don’t have the time to go into that one. 

And so, I feel like — first chapter of “1984” that talks about ministries that are using doublespeak to be able to say what they do, I think we are now living it. And so that’s my fear, that everything that’s going to be coming out of CDC is going to be colored by ideology, or that data is going to be released from CDC without scientists able to explain it so that it can be used for other means or that will allow folks who are more ideologically motivated to be able to make conclusions based on inadequate analyses. So that’s what I’m worried about. 

Rovner: So how do we proceed from here, both public health professionals and Americans who are just looking for health guidance? 

Daskalakis: Yeah. I think we’re at a dark time, but I also think that there’s going to be light in the darkness, it just may not be today. So the first thing is trauma-informed care, your feelings are valid: This is not normal, something not good is going on, and it’s hard to figure out who to trust. And so, my recommendation to people is, and I know that this is a hard one because not everybody has access to care, is if you do have access to care, you really need to lean into your doctors — doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists — taken widely and broadly, health care professionals. So even if you don’t have a primary care doctor, you have a pharmacist, and so go to that pharmacist and talk to them. It’s not as good as having one word for the land, as had been standard for CDC, but in this environment, I think you need to go with people that you trust. 

I’ll also say one of the things that should be a red flag for everybody out there is — I’m a doctor, I take care of patients — and I do actually believe that the relationship between a clinician, a health care provider, whoever they are, and their patient is very sacred. And so, whenever you hear anyone in the world trying to destabilize that relationship, saying that, “Doctors don’t know what they’re talking about, don’t listen to the pediatricians,” that is not someone you should be taking medical advice from, because they’re actually at their core trying to get you to not listen to the people who are your best allies and advocates in the health space. 

Rovner: Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, thank you so much for joining us. 

Daskalakis: My pleasure. 

Rovner: OK. We are back with our panel, and I want to ask both of you about your reactions to the ACIP meeting and the autism announcement. But let’s turn first to the breaking news about the potential government shutdown that’s less than a week away. Last night, the Office of Management and Budget, which traditionally sets the rules for who stays on the job in a shutdown and who doesn’t, issued a memo of the sort I’ve never seen before. Rather than directing agencies to prioritize which activities are needed to preserve, quote, “life and property,” and thus who’s required to work without pay for the duration and who gets furloughed until funding is restored, this memo basically says if the activity doesn’t have another source of funding and it’s not within the administration’s priorities, agencies should prepare to fire not furlough workers. This is obviously a big ramping up of this shutdown. I know this just happened, but what kind of reaction are you guys seeing? 

Raman: This to me just seems very, very highly unprecedented. We’ve had shutdowns, we’ve had near shutdowns, many of them in the past, and it has not escalated to this at any time that I’ve seen. 

Rovner: Forty years, I’ve been doing this 40 years, I have never seen anything quite like this. We’ve had rifts and we have shutdowns, but we’ve never had them combined. 

Raman: Yeah. And so, I think it’ll be really interesting how the next few days play out. The Senate is in for a couple of days before we would hit the shutdown, if there’s anything they can come together on. It is really difficult when you escalate to this level when they’ve been trying to negotiate so far. It’s hard. The House isn’t supposed to come back until Oct. 6. 

Rovner: Oops. 

Raman: So if the Senate changes anything or wants to change anything compared to what the House had passed, they’re stuck. Either the House has to come back in or they shut down until they come to a compromise on something. So I think from everyone that I’ve been talking with over the past few weeks, it seems like we’re really headed to a shutdown. It’s possible they get a few Democrats to fold and go with what’s there, but I think this last move, and then also President Trump saying that he was going to meet with Democrats earlier this week, and then saying, “No, I don’t want to,” they’ve been saying there’s not good-faith efforts to negotiate, so they’re in a pickle at this point. 

Rovner: Let’s get real: This is about not whether we’re going to have a shutdown, but who gets blamed for the shutdown. Traditionally, it’s been the Democrats, and the Republicans keep saying this, who say, “Look, we’re just having a clean extension of funding, we’re just going to basically roll out the clock, kick the can down the road, so we can continue to negotiate over funding for next year. Why won’t Democrats go along with that?” And Democrats are responding, “Well, we went along with it in March, and look at what’s happened in the interim, and our base didn’t like that, so we think we should fight this time.” And then, you had the president agreeing to meet with Democratic leaders, but then the Republican leaders in Congress telling the president, “No, don’t meet with them.” It’s all strategy at this point. You’re nodding, Anna. 

Edney: Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking, I think a lot of times, talking about this administration, people are saying, “There’s no plan.” But I do see the 3D game of chess at this point, and that letter very clearly mentioned if the Democrats shut down the government, that was lobbying that into the court of the Democrats saying, “This is your fault if it happens.” And I do think that the Democrats were burned last time in the sense that it seemed like they might allow a shutdown and then backtracked pretty quickly and the base just didn’t like it, and I think we’re seeing a lot from the, I don’t know what exactly to call them, thought leaders on the more liberal side saying, “Just do it, let it rip.” If it shuts down, they’re going to try to find a way to blame it on the Republicans. 

So I think it’s a game of chicken at this point, but there are real consequences. These are people’s jobs who aren’t necessarily going to all want to come back to the government if things suddenly, it works out. These are activities that we rely on for everyday life that will be hurt. 

Rovner: Yeah. We’ve already seen the administration trying to hire back some of the people that they laid off earlier this year because it turns out they were needed to do important jobs. I saw House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark this morning on CNN describing this letter as, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” This really is playing with the lives of government workers who basically have come to these jobs because either they believe in them or because they usually have been stable jobs. They might, may be able to make more in the private sector, but government jobs tended to be secure, and boy, that’s not what’s happening right now. They don’t seem to be guilty parties in all of this, and yet they’re the ones who are being used as pawns. 

Raman: I think one thing that I have been thinking about in reading that OMB memo is that it says that the rifts are going to affect people that aren’t also really aligned with carrying out President Trump’s priorities and mission. What does that entail? Within HHS, what falls in that bucket? We have some ideas based on previous executive orders and things that he’s made some remarks on, but there’s plenty that we don’t know. 

Rovner: They could theoretically shut down the entire NIH [National Institutes of Health] or the entire CDC, which I think Secretary Kennedy might not mind. 

Raman: How that would go about, I don’t know. I think that we’ll all be really looking to see what kind of contingency documents they put out. They usually put those out before, when we’re in this waiting period about a shutdown, and it would definitely be very different than the ones that we’ve had in the past for a department down or agencies. What that’ll say, I just don’t know. 

Rovner: Yeah, that’s right. To be clear, the OMB memo is to the agencies saying, “Send us your contingency plans.” Normally, that would’ve happened by now, it usually comes out a couple of weeks ahead of a potential shutdown and everything. We’re playing brinksmanship here. Anna, you wanted to say something before we move on? 

Edney: Oh, I don’t remember what that was. But just on the last point, I think the agencies, they usually have that contingency plan at the ready, but they can’t — I don’t think that this would’ve been the one that they had drawn up. I think they have to tear that up and start over again. And like you mentioned, the CDC, the NIH, you can, through this mandate, possibly see how you could just wipe out an entire agency. 

I think on the FDA side, I just wanted to add, there are some user fees on that side that may keep the drug review side afloat, anything where they’re looking at approvals and things like that is funded, at least for a while. If this devolves for months and months, that’s not the case. But there are a lot of other parts where they’re doing inspections and keeping the drug supply and the food supply safe that could be impacted. 

Rovner: Yeah. And we should point out that this does not affect things that have mandatory funding, like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and, as you say, user fee funding, like the review activities at FDA. 

Well, while we’re on the subject of things that are unprecedented, let’s turn back to that ACIP meeting and the White House autism announcement. One of the things that ties them together is the fact that both leave the public with more confusion than clarity over what to do about vaccines and Tylenol and, once again, leaves Americans wondering who or what they can trust. What’s the biggest takeaway from each of you? Anna, why don’t you go first, about both the autism announcement and the ACIP meeting? 

Edney: Yeah, I think there just is a ton of confusion. I can’t count how many times people are like, “Remind me again, who can get a covid shot and who can’t? And what are we doing with RSV now?” There was a lot of talk before the ACIP meeting about hepatitis B and that even the ACIP members were confused. 

So I think that one thing that I think this makes crystal clear is that when I know that this administration and many of the people at the top in health care don’t appreciate the medical establishment and they don’t feel that it is operated in a way that is open to modernization. But you can’t just break it all and then start over, these are guidelines and things that people rely on, and it has to be, I think, a much more thoughtful process than what we’re seeing right now. You have a lot of people who are pregnant or have young children who are freaking out, because they’re like, well, I took Tylenol for three days because I had a fever, and I think that it creates more fear-mongering, because the guidance really isn’t that different, what the FDA actually said isn’t that different from what was already out there, you’re just really scaring people now. 

Raman: So I think I would say something along similar lines, the mixed messaging and the confusion of that both events is pretty stark. So I think the thing that struck me with ACIP is just the second day, we have a re-vote on something that you voted on the first day, and if you watch just one, you would assume that what happened there is done, and then going back, it’s just very unusual and makes it even more confusing. 

And I think the second thing that struck me was that we had this whole shake-up of ACIP in general to be like, we don’t want conflicts of interest, we want people that are able to vote on everything. And then, here, when we have the votes, we have someone on ACIP not be able to vote on something because they’re disclosing a conflict of interest. So it struck me that we went through this whole process that was to eliminate that, and then here we are back to that, which people have been saying for a long time, it’s difficult to find anyone in this space that doesn’t have other things that are connected to vaccines. 

For the autism announcement, the thing that was really interesting to me was that this was done on the White House level rather than just HHS is having an event, it’s with some agency folks there, and then them putting out information, whatever they’re talking about. This was predominantly Trump speaking in a much more aggressive, this is what is what tone, compared to the agency folks who mostly were downplaying a little bit of what he’s saying. He repeatedly said, over and over again, “Don’t take Tylenol, don’t take Tylenol, no Tylenol for pregnant women.” And then, even when you look at the FDA release that came out a little bit after really downplayed it, it said that there was an association, but there wasn’t a causal relationship that they had found between acetaminophen and autism in children. It goes back to that mixed messaging, where even if the majority of scientific professionals are saying that this goes against what a lot of the research that they’ve been doing, you’re going to be confused. 

Rovner: Yes. Another thing that seems to tie together both the ACIP meeting and the autism announcement is to basically put all medical responsibility on individuals, which many consider to be blaming the victim and increasing stigma by basically saying, “Whatever you decide, whatever happens is your fault.” I feel like we’ve careened from maybe too much reliance on experts to too little. That was certainly the president’s message at that press conference, it’s like, “Well, this is just common sense.” It’s like, I thought we were supposed to be relying on gold-standard science. 

Edney: That was a very stark point, where it was like, what do you mean you feel this? It’s like, I think you’re supposed to know that through research and scientific data. 

But I wanted to go back, you mentioned blaming the patient, I think specifically on the autism side, this is something we see with expecting mothers a lot, because I interviewed professor Emily Oster about the autism announcement, and she dives very deep into data on a lot of things parents are concerned about, and she was telling me about “refrigerator moms” in the 1950s, and I didn’t realize this, but apparently women were blamed for different mental illnesses if they were too cold, not freezing-cold, but emotionally not available for their children enough, and so they must be causing their schizophrenia and there was a big link to that. And that continues, they’re telling the women, “If you have a fever or enough pain that you would consider popping a Tylenol, then that’s on you, just either deal with it or be responsible for the fate of your child.” 

I think that’s what the medical establishment has been trying to avoid, is giving women options, and there are a lot of reasons you need to take care of that fever or you need to take care of that pain, and some of them have to do with the health of the child, the baby that they’re carrying, so … 

Rovner: Right, fever is also a potential cause of problems. 

Edney: Exactly. 

Rovner: All right. Well, in a health-related story that doesn’t seem like a health-related story, the Trump administration late last week announced a new $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas. Now, those are usually associated with tech workers, but it turns out that an awful lot of medical professionals, particularly doctors from other countries, use them to come here to fill residency positions that American medical school graduates don’t fill — often low-paying primary care slots in rural areas. And, according to reporting from your colleagues at Bloomberg, it seems that medical personnel might be exempt from this new fee, but it’s not clear how many hoops hospitals might have to jump through to get those exemptions. At best, it doesn’t feel like this was very thoroughly thought through, particularly for an administration that says that rural health is a priority. 

Edney: Right, yes. I think they may have been a little surprised by the amount of pushback from the hospital and doctor associations, saying, “We really rely on these to get doctors to rural areas.” And they almost immediately tried to massage that and say, “Oh, well, they could be included in exemptions.” But that’s all we know, “can be included” is not extremely reassuring. It’s not saying, “We’re giving you a blanket waiver for doctors,” or anything like that, and nobody knows, like you said, the hoops they might have to jump through. I would say it’s a start, and maybe they’re thinking about it, more aware of it, at this point. 

Rovner: Sandhya, is there any pushback from Congress? Can the president even do this? 

Raman: I think the pushback I’ve seen has been broader, not just on how this is going to affect hospitals that clearly cannot afford this in the same way that maybe some of the Big Tech companies may be able to. But I will be really interested when they come back just how lawmakers might look at this, because hospitals are the biggest employer in so many congressional districts, that if they’re pushing back, I could see people that normally don’t push back on this kind of thing saying, “If the biggest employer in my district is going to tank because of this,” it rises up as an issue for them. 

Rovner: On the other hand, we haven’t seen a lot of pushback from Congress for things that we expected to see pushback on, so I guess we’ll have to watch that space. 

Raman: Yeah. 

Rovner: Well, finally this week, there’s good news and bad news on drug prices, which President Trump has vowed to reduce by, and I looked this up to get the quote correct, 1,400% to 1,500%. He said it many other ways, by the way. The idea of his, quote, “most-favored-nation” executive order that he issued last spring is to get drugmakers to lower U.S. prices to those charged in other countries that have price controls that we don’t have. Well, Trump is getting half of what he wanted, according to Axios. Several large drugmakers say they’re going to equalize what they charge here and overseas, but not by lowering prices for Americans, rather by raising them for Europeans and others. On the other hand, there’s still a few more days until the Sept. 29 deadline for them to do this. Anna, are you hearing anything new on this? 

Edney: I haven’t heard anything new. I think we just saw, like you mentioned, what Bristol Myers Squibb did, which was a newer schizophrenia drug they raised, they said they were going to introduce that in the U.K. [United Kingdom] at the same price in the U.S., extremely convenient for the pharmaceutical companies to be able to have this reason to raise prices elsewhere. But then, of course, they can find reasons not to bring them down so far in the U.S., and we’ve seen — the only other company I can think of was Eli Lilly did this earlier this summer, saying they would do the same for their drug Mounjaro, and there was maybe some hoarding that started because people in Europe don’t want to pay the higher price. 

Rovner: Mounjaro being a diabetes drug that is also the weight loss drug. 

Edney: Right, right, yeah, so the weight loss drugs have seen a lot of ups and downs. But you’re right, there’s only a few days left, and it’s interesting that it hasn’t leaked … any kind of plan that the pharmaceutical companies are talking about or anything like that. Sometimes, I feel like because this administration is operating more by telling people through letters and demanding it at the podium rather than doing actual regulations — remember, the most-favored-nation policy did not work out well after challenged in court the first administration. So I think they’re often happy to get half of what they asked for in a way. But this could be tough, because it lets Trump say, “We’re no longer carrying all the water,” but it doesn’t let him say, “We decreased prices for the American people.” So we’ll have to see … 

Rovner: By 1,400% to 1,500%. 

Edney: Right, right, get those economists to figure that out. But we’ll just have to see what’s going on even … so much. The shutdown may take all his fire. 

Rovner: Yeah. This is one of those issues that is bipartisan, that it is popular on Capitol Hill, and that lawmakers keep saying they’re going to do something about, but so far, we’re not seeing it, are we? 

Raman: I think that there’s so much that they have on their plate right now and just so much that they have been at odds with each other right now, it’s something that would’ve gotten more attention in normal times, has just gotten really delayed at this point. 

Rovner: These are definitely not normal times. 

Raman: Yep. 

Rovner: All right. Well, that is the news for this week. Now, it’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s where we each recognize a story we read this week we think you should read too. Don’t worry, if you miss it; we will put the links in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Anna, why don’t you go first this week? 

Edney: Sure. So mine is in The Washington Post, and it’s: “Do State Abortion Laws Affect Women’s Recruiting? That’s Up to Athletes.” It was a really interesting look at basically how women athletes, specifically in basketball, and they discuss others lower down, are choosing college based on abortion laws — the states where they have less restrictive abortion laws, or more abortion rights, I guess I should say — then they’re tending to go there. And then, you have the schools more in the South, where they’re more restrictive, where they’re choosing not to go there for the four years of their college life. And it was something that I think was just a really interesting look at a topic that has been on everyone’s mind, but with so much going on, not exactly focusing on it. And it talks about other trends in college admissions and things too. So something to think about. 

Rovner: Yeah. I know we’ve talked a lot about health workers avoiding states with abortion restrictions. This is the first time I’ve seen this link to younger women and sports and college, and we’ll see whether some of the states react to that. Sandhya? 

Raman: My extra credit is called “Psychiatric Hospitals [Turn Away Patients Who Need Urgent Care. The Facilities Face Few Consequences],” and it’s in ProPublica by Eli Cahan. And I think what drew me to this is EMTALA [the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act] has been one of those things where we have been thinking about it a lot in terms of abortion, when we’ve seen it in the news in the last few years, it’s been very abortion-focused. But this story looks at a psychiatric hospital in Colorado that got taken to task for not providing stabilizing care to patients at risk for suicide, and CMS [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] didn’t penalize them in reducing funding or imposing any penalties. It’s part of a broader thing, where over 90 psychiatric hospitals have violated EMTALA in the past 15 years. I don’t want to give away the whole thing of the story, but it goes more into this. 

Rovner: Yeah, it’s a really good story. All right. My extra credit this week is from NBC News by my friend and former colleague Liz Szabo, and it’s called “RFK Jr. Has the Federal Vaccine Court in His Sights. Attacking It Could Threaten Vaccine Production in the U.S.” It’s a really good roundup about what’s likely to be the HHS secretary’s next target: the program that compensates the very small number of Americans who are injured or killed by vaccine side effects. There are risks to all vaccines, although they are very much outweighed by the benefits, and this program was created by Congress during the Reagan administration to compensate those who have suffered from those rare adverse reactions. 

The program was created to keep vaccine manufacturing alive in the United States because product liability suits were threatening to shut it down entirely, while the program also makes it easier for those who are injured to receive compensation. The program is far from perfect and it could use some revisions, which Congress has tried and failed to do over the last couple of decades. But it seems clear that that’s not what Secretary Kennedy has in mind. It’s a great preview of what the next likely battle is going to be in the vaccine wars. 

OK, that is this week’s show. Thanks this week to our editor, Stephanie Stapleton, and our producer-engineer, Francis Ying. If you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review; that helps other people find us too. Also, as always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can find me on X, @jrovner, or on Bluesky, @julierovner. Where are you folks these days? Sandhya? 

Raman: At X and on Bluesky: @SandhyaWrites. 

Rovner: Anna? 

Edney: Same places, @annaedney or @annaedney. 

Rovner: We will be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy.