MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services, under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy Junior, announced it would be cutting nearly $500,000,000 in funding for mRNA vaccine development. And it's not just mRNA vaccines. The Trump budget proposal cuts more than $33,000,000,000 from health and human services. Trump's proposed budget for the next year includes cutting nearly 40%. I'm gonna say that again. 40% of federal funding allocated to the National Cancer Institute. His cuts to scientific funding and grants and institutions broadly have thrown just a huge amount of possibly life saving research into chaos. Is any of this, is all of this really gonna make America healthy again? I doubt it. Obviously, I doubt it. But what it does do is reveal what make America healthy again was really, is really about. I feel about that movement the way I felt about the Department of Government Efficiency. I'm fundamentally sympathetic to what it is promising to do. A department of government efficiency, an effort to make America healthy again. These are good ideas. Somebody should actually try them. But Maha like Doge isn't even attempting to do what is promised in the name. So what is it attempting to do? What are its actual ideas? How did a pandemic that was largely ended by vaccines lead to this policy regime? How did the president who presided over Operation Warp Speed, that was Donald Trump's great success. How did he become the president who appointed RFK Junior to lead our most important health institution? How is it possible that five years after the COVID pandemic, experts now say that we are less prepared for the next pandemic than we were for the last one? My colleague, David Wallace Wells, has done incredible reporting both on the pandemic in the sort of fast moving scientific and social moment that was, and since on how it has deformed our politics and our society. Rachel Bedard is a physician and a writer who's been trying to think through where Maha is and where it and its critics might find common ground. As always, my email is her clientshow@nytimes.com. Rachel Bedard, David Wallace Wells. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So, David, I wanna start with you. There's a quote from Michael Lewis, the writer, where he says, the problem with pandemics is that people want to forget them. So we're four plus years on from COVID's onset. What have we forgotten? I would say the biggest thing is the death. One point five million Americans died, thirty million people globally, tens of millions hospitalized, probably some number in the millions who are disabled by experience with COVID. And we now look back on the experience focused on all of these secondary questions, whether we close schools too long, whether we mask toddlers, exactly what kind of sterilizing immunity vaccines could deliver. And those are all important questions. We should be asking them in …