This is the Cater Daily podcast for Tuesday, November 12th, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown. Many of the ideas of RFK Jr. on matters of public health are not supported by science and are truly off the wall. And yet some others have merit. Whatever his future position within a Trump administration, it's worth taking some of those ideas in turn.

Cato's Jeff Singer comments.

I think for a lot of people who regard FDA or public health agencies as great, that they do great work, that somebody like RFK Jr.

at the head or at least in a position of significant influence within those agencies is probably

a difficult pill to swallow, so to speak. What is Donald Trump said? What has he said about

what his role might be with regard to regulating food drugs and pollutants, for that matter?

Well, right now, of course, it's unclear. A lot of people are speculating that he might be appointed Secretary of HHS, but others think

he might just sort of had a commission to advise the White House on public health issues.

Trump during the campaign said he was going to, I think he said he said he was going to let him

run wild over health care,

which, you know, those are worrisome words, but we really don't know yet. But I need to

stipulate from the outset that, you know, a great many of RFK's health care claims are not

evidence-based, and actually they can harm and have harmed others.

For example, his claims about vaccines and vaccines causing autism, not only is that not true,

and it's been long debunked, but for example, we see it's contributing, his contribution to that argument has led to a dramatic decrease in

parents getting their children, MMR, measles, mumps, and rebella vaccines. And we're seeing

measles, which is a deadly disease, make a resurgence back a couple years ago in Samoa.

There was an accident where nurses

accidentally loaded the MMR vaccine with a muscle relaxant and two babies died. And this caused

a lot of the people who were against the measles vaccine to say, see how dangerous it is.

And it's long been found to be, actually was a case of malpractice.

But that led to a traumatic drop in parents getting their kids vaccinated in Samoa.

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