The Megyn Kelly Show - April 17, 2025


Fighting the Swamp and Conflicts of Interest, Truth About DOGE Cuts, and Finding Autism Cause, with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary | Ep. 1051


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 3 minutes

Words per minute

170.92282

Word count

10,863

Sentence count

766

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Marty McCary is a surgeon, scientist, and has devoted his life to public health. He s the son of a doctor and was performing surgery right up to the day he went in and started this job the day before. He's had a lifelong interest in medicine and in public health more generally and has been very honest about things that are controversial, like COVID.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
00:00:12.040 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. And we are at the FDA today
00:00:18.020 speaking with the new commissioner, Dr. Marty McCary. I got to tell you, it was freaky walking
00:00:23.980 into this building because they've been so demonized, they've demonized themselves over
00:00:28.840 the whole COVID regime and the craziness of the past five years to walk into here and look around
00:00:34.080 like these are some of the people who participated in this is sort of eerie. But the good news is
00:00:40.980 there's a new sheriff in town and Dr. Marty McCary is the real deal. He's a surgeon, scientist,
00:00:47.800 has devoted his life to public health. He's the son of a doctor. He's a doctor. He's at the Johns
00:00:53.560 Hopkins Hospital. He was performing surgery right up to the day he went in and started this job the
00:00:59.660 day before. So he's had a lifelong interest in medicine and in public health more generally,
00:01:05.680 and has been very honest about things that are controversial like COVID and was an early seer
00:01:13.040 on the things that the medical establishment was doing wrong and was totally fearless and speaking
00:01:17.500 out against it with absolutely nothing to gain and actually a lot to lose. And that is how he became
00:01:23.560 of the trusted voices along with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, who's running NIH. And of course,
00:01:30.740 then there's Bobby Kennedy, not a doctor, but a lawyer who is atop them all as he runs HHS. So
00:01:35.860 this is Dr. McCary's first interview as FDA commissioner. And there was a lot to cover. Like,
00:01:42.780 how is he going to deal with the people here who can't stand any of the men I just mentioned,
00:01:49.180 not to mention President Trump? And how are we going to actually start enacting the Maha agenda
00:01:55.680 that Kennedy and Trump and others have been pushing and talking about for so long when it comes to our
00:02:01.760 food, nevermind our drugs? There's a lot to go over, including the corruption that has gone on here for
00:02:08.180 a long time with the revolving door of people working here, approving drugs, and then immediately
00:02:14.640 going to work at those drug companies, working here and working with big pharma as they together
00:02:20.360 decide whether the latest drug should be approved. He's all over it. We get into all of it. Enjoy.
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00:03:29.940 Commissioner.
00:03:30.820 Megan Kelly, great to see you.
00:03:32.140 I mean, you were just on my set and you were just doctor. And now look at you. You could have stayed
00:03:36.980 in the private sector, kept rolling in pretty good money, and you decided to take this job,
00:03:43.440 which is an amazing thing for America. But why?
00:03:46.840 Well, welcome to the FDA, Megan. It's great to have you out here.
00:03:50.500 You know, we are not on a good path as a country in terms of the health outcomes of the population.
00:03:56.720 We do great with sophisticated operations and amazing drugs that can treat certain kinds of
00:04:02.860 lymphoma and other types of cures. But when it comes to the health of the population right now,
00:04:09.120 we have had this massive area that we're not talking about that we need to be talking about.
00:04:13.780 And that is the rise of all these chronic diseases. We've got one in six women now affected with
00:04:19.860 autoimmune diseases. Half of kids are sick. Prediabetes affects about 20% of teens. 70% of kids
00:04:27.320 are not qualifying for the military. So we've got to start talking about our problems and not just keep
00:04:32.420 throwing medications at them. Mm-hmm. Causes and not just possible cures, which often don't turn
00:04:39.000 out to be anything of the sort. So let me start here. You've been here 17 days?
00:04:44.780 Day 17 today.
00:04:46.000 All right. So what are the biggest things that you've learned so far? What's jumped out at you
00:04:49.580 as a civilian who now suddenly is in government service?
00:04:52.260 Well, I got to be honest with you. I had a lot of emotions the last day I was in the operating room
00:04:56.560 the day before my Senate confirmation hearing. And so it's an entirely different world here. I am
00:05:03.020 on a listening tour. We're talking to the career scientists. We're trying to make sure they have
00:05:07.100 all the resources they need to do their job well. We're trying to change the culture here to make
00:05:12.560 it more of a teamwork culture. It's been very siloed. Each of the centers has developed their own
00:05:20.120 fiefdom with their own communications department and lawyers and lobbyists for Congress and IT
00:05:27.920 departments. And the IT systems don't talk. They're on different systems. So that's why you have, you
00:05:34.080 know, VAERS and FAERS and CARES and 10 different adverse event reporting systems. We probably need
00:05:40.700 one really good one. So I'm doing an inventory right now trying to assess the lay of the land. And then
00:05:47.140 we're also trying to change the culture to a culture of teamwork, the scientific gold standard
00:05:52.560 and common sense working together. And that is our goal right now. In medicine in general, there's
00:05:57.660 this divide, a push-pull right now between sort of the old school doctors and the new functional
00:06:03.720 medicine doctors, the new Maha push. And there's some resistance between the two. I don't have to tell
00:06:09.800 you that. Are you seeing any of that reflected here? Do you think the folks here are open-minded
00:06:14.660 to Maha and functional medicine and doing things a different way?
00:06:18.680 We need both. We need, you know, as somebody who is a highly subspecialized pancreatic specialist,
00:06:27.420 we need people who think broadly and think functionally and think about the fact that 90%
00:06:33.680 of type 2 diabetes is curable by changing what you eat. Changing what you eat can actually
00:06:38.860 take care of a certain type of rash that somebody develops, almost as good as some of these expensive
00:06:46.700 biologics in certain circumstances. So we need people who think differently. We need fresh new
00:06:52.360 ideas. We need the old guard to ensure that we hold to rigorous scientific methodology. And we need fresh
00:06:59.340 new ideas at the same time. So we're trying to bring all of that together now. And people have
00:07:03.740 forgotten that the FDA stands for food. And so that is a major focus with Secretary Kennedy in this
00:07:10.760 administration. Right. We're always so focused on the D, especially on the heels of COVID. And we think
00:07:15.680 of the FDA, most of us, especially on the right, poorly, because we feel like we were railroaded and
00:07:20.360 doing things we didn't want to do. And especially, you know, before COVID, there was the opioid crisis
00:07:25.440 and the FDA's role in that. So it has a bad rap, I think, generally, with many in the country. So how do you
00:07:31.800 turn that around? Well, I mean, we're still reeling back from some of the disastrous health care
00:07:37.300 corruption that the government was involved in. The food pyramid, one of the greatest pieces of
00:07:42.400 misinformation put out there that has informed school lunch programs, that has informed what people
00:07:47.960 define as healthy. And so we now have a group that's reevaluating the nutrition guidance. We have
00:07:55.880 a Maha Commission that is going to be putting out a massive report that doesn't just talk about
00:08:01.460 calories in, calories out. It talks about food ingredients and chemicals that don't appear in
00:08:06.420 nature that are going down the GI tracts of our nation's children every day, nonstop. And it may
00:08:11.880 not be one ingredient that is driving some of these chronic diseases. It may not be one ingredient
00:08:17.760 involved in attention deficit disorder. It may be a cumulative burden of all of it. So we're now taking
00:08:24.760 a much wider view. And you mentioned the opioid issue. That probably is the quintessential example
00:08:32.080 of what's wrong with a cozy relationship when the regulator agency is captured by the industry.
00:08:39.720 The person who literally authorized OxyContin then went to work for Purdue Pharma.
00:08:46.600 Curtis Wright. Exactly. He worked here. He authorized OxyContin. He approved a label that
00:08:52.360 suggested it wasn't really that addictive, if at all. And then after he left here, he went to work
00:08:57.340 for Purdue Pharma, the great company he helped. Sweetheart deal. And that label was illegal, in my
00:09:03.520 opinion. It was an indication for chronic pain, for round-the-clock, long-term use. And it was based
00:09:12.240 on a 14-day study. And so that kind of mistake can result in a million Americans losing their lives.
00:09:20.360 And when you don't have good post-approval monitoring, as this agency has not had, you discover
00:09:26.780 things decades later. We discovered Vioxx killed maybe 38,000-plus Americans years after it was approved.
00:09:36.120 We discovered a million Americans died of opioids and overdoses over a decade after the OxyContin label
00:09:44.820 was given. Why weren't we monitoring in real time people who were getting it immediately after
00:09:49.380 approval? In part, the answer to that question is we couldn't do it. We didn't have the data. It was
00:09:54.080 too sophisticated. You'd have to have everybody registered in a study. Now we have giant big data
00:10:00.140 from electronic health records nationally. Now we can have our researchers and universities go in there
00:10:06.440 and look at everyone who's taken a new medication matched to somebody who's similar who is not taking
00:10:13.180 that medication and look at the adverse event rate and ask, is it working? Is there a safety signal?
00:10:21.680 When you don't do that, people get suspicious. And they are suspicious about the cozy relationship
00:10:29.100 sometimes that results in approvals. And they're also suspicious when they hear stories and they
00:10:35.260 don't have hard data. You don't have great rates about certain complications when you just have
00:10:40.640 self-reported data. Self-reported data is terrible data. Yeah, it could be any. Like, how do you know if
00:10:44.960 my sleepless night was due to the COVID vaccine or I'm stressed out? That's right. And in the void of
00:10:50.380 good scientific data, every opinion fills that void. So we can do a better job. And if we have good
00:10:57.140 post-approval monitoring of drugs and devices, then we can also tell companies, hey, instead of doing
00:11:05.940 two randomized control trials to get your drug on the market, how about one? And we'll take a close
00:11:11.880 look in the post-approval monitoring how the drug is doing in real time immediately after it's approved.
00:11:17.280 And that's particularly important when you're talking about rare diseases. When you talk about
00:11:22.060 a genetic issue that affects 52 kids in the world, and that's a real thing. There is a condition that
00:11:28.800 affects 15 or 15 kids. That's also a real thing. You can't expect the companies to do a randomized
00:11:35.680 control trial. You'll kill innovation. You'll kill investment in those innovative ideas. You've got to say,
00:11:42.500 hey, this is a very difficult condition. It's incurable. It's fatal. It's a permanent disability.
00:11:50.380 We're going to customize the approval process to the condition. And so we're going to be rolling out
00:11:57.060 a new pathway for drugs, which is a pathway based on a plausible mechanism. If there's a rare condition
00:12:04.380 or a condition that's incurable, that affects a small number of people, we may be approving drugs
00:12:09.920 based on a plausible mechanism on sort of a conditional basis. What does that mean? Put that in normal speak.
00:12:15.560 Let's say there's a condition that affects 75 people in the world, and there's a new treatment
00:12:20.800 that makes sense physiologically. The mechanism is scientifically plausible that this treatment
00:12:27.620 would help these individuals. No one's forcing these medications on these individuals. If they
00:12:33.480 want to try these new medications, even though we don't have a randomized control trial because it's
00:12:39.080 not feasible, we will allow that and at the same time monitor everybody who gets it so that we can
00:12:45.680 make inferences as soon as the data speaks with a signal in the data. Wow. I like the sound of that.
00:12:52.320 One of the questions I had when you were going over like VAERS, which is the vaccine website where you
00:12:57.760 go to upload your negative consequences, people know it from COVID, is aren't those things only as good
00:13:03.820 as the people who monitor them. Because you and I have talked before, we talked throughout COVID
00:13:08.160 with doctors like Mane Prasad, who's a big fan of yours, about the myocarditis that we were seeing,
00:13:14.420 especially in young teenage boys as a result of the vaccine, especially the second shot and then
00:13:20.120 the boosters. And those things were being uploaded to VAERS, but we weren't getting red alert warnings
00:13:26.080 from the FDA. And so this is one of the reasons people don't trust the FDA. Like there's an agenda.
00:13:31.300 They don't want to tell us about this negative side effect because they're much more concerned
00:13:35.620 with forcing us to take the shot. There's been, look, there's, let's be honest, there's been an
00:13:40.240 epidemic of distrust and part of it is warranted. And when you don't want to look at complications,
00:13:46.880 the complication rate looks lower than it really is. And it makes products look safer than they really
00:13:53.160 are. And so in the case of VAERS, you have something that could suggest it's a screening tool.
00:14:03.020 It could suggest that there's an issue, but you have to do a rigorous evaluation. If you don't
00:14:08.100 follow up with a rigorous evaluation, that screening tool is not very useful.
00:14:13.480 Or if you don't want to know.
00:14:15.340 Exactly.
00:14:16.000 But aren't the same people all here who didn't want to know when it was your predecessor and it
00:14:20.480 was it the Biden administration? We're going to know. We're going to do intense,
00:14:23.680 comprehensive research. And that's why if we have massive electronic health record data,
00:14:29.180 which we now have through something called the Health Information Exchange,
00:14:32.880 we can have researchers go into there and look at real world complication rates.
00:14:38.300 So we're not relying on self-reported data from which you can make no inferences about rates.
00:14:43.920 That's just a basic scientific methodologic principle.
00:14:46.320 When you have a couple people saying, hey, I had this or I had this, you can't infer what the rate
00:14:51.820 is. That is the frequency per unit time. But when you have comprehensive data, which we only have
00:14:57.980 now because of cloud storage ability, we couldn't do this 10 years ago. We have now tremendous big
00:15:04.120 data where we can go in there and look at, here's 100,000 people who took this product.
00:15:09.260 Let's follow them in the data, de-identified to protect privacy and look at how many people came
00:15:16.160 back to the hospital, not just came back to the hospital with myocarditis coded, but who came into
00:15:22.140 a clinic and said, my chest hurts. That once you, once you have good methodologic capture of outcomes,
00:15:27.860 now you're looking at real rates.
00:15:30.080 Will that happen? Because there, since Kennedy took over and FDA is under Kennedy at HHS,
00:15:35.700 yes, people should know. When he took over, a guy named Peter Marks, who was here, it's FDA's
00:15:42.520 former top vaccine regulator. Well, he was forced out reportedly that you approved it. And then
00:15:47.140 Kennedy said, okay, good. I'm fine. Get rid of him. And in his resignation letters, a forced
00:15:52.680 resignation reportedly, he said, it's become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the
00:15:57.620 secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
00:16:02.400 He accused secretary Kennedy of undermining confidence in well-established vaccines. And then
00:16:07.120 he accused secretary Kennedy of wanting to access and directly edit VAERS, which the FDA oversees
00:16:14.600 saying, we don't trust them. He used an expletive. They would write over the data or erase the whole
00:16:20.880 database. So I don't know what he's suggesting here, that secretary Kennedy would go into VAERS.
00:16:26.420 It seems to me it'd be more like the people who are pushing the vaccines on us, who would go into
00:16:30.160 the VAERS database and erase things. But you tell me whether secretary Kennedy and you should have
00:16:37.280 access to VAERS and actually start figuring out whether, I mean, there's still parents who are
00:16:41.900 getting their teenage boys, the third, the fourth shot of the COVID vax, not knowing about the
00:16:48.280 myocarditis. Yeah. I mean, if you follow the guidelines, uh, as they've been written to the,
00:16:54.920 to the exact letter, a 12 year old healthy thin girl should be on her eighth COVID vaccine MRNA booster
00:17:02.260 shot. And so secretary Kennedy has called for gold standard science. And I can tell you, and Dr.
00:17:07.940 Bhattacharya will tell you the same thing at the NIH is he has posed questions, but he is not engaging in
00:17:14.420 the details of how rigorous scientific methodology should be conducted. He's posing questions as is most
00:17:21.040 of America right now. Again, I don't think VAERS is a good database because it is self-reported and not
00:17:27.220 rates on Peter Marks. I can tell you that I never, I never knew the guy. I never met him. He resigned
00:17:34.740 before I came to office. Um, some people, uh, like some of the things he did and some people had
00:17:42.080 concerns with some of the things he did. One of the biggest concerns of course, was that he pushed
00:17:47.500 out the two top scientific vaccine experts here at the FDA. And this all came out in a house judiciary
00:17:54.560 hearing last summer. The two top vaccine experts at the FDA were pushed out by Peter Marks. That's
00:18:02.880 not an opinion. It's in the congressional hearing. And as I recall, they were objecting to certain
00:18:07.980 things that seemed arbitrary, like, uh, mandates for children, vaccines for six year olds, that kind of
00:18:13.640 thing. Exactly. They had concerns, according to their testimony, they had concerns over the COVID
00:18:19.500 mRNA booster repeat strategy as a mandate in children. And as you know, some people have said, it makes no
00:18:28.680 sense. We don't have good data on the risk benefit, uh, profile. The two top vaccine career scientists at
00:18:35.620 the FDA, Dr. Gruber and Dr. Krauss, head director and deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center here at the
00:18:42.020 FDA were forced out by Dr. Marks. So, um, you know, sometimes you have to block out some of the noise
00:18:48.820 where now he's taking a, you know, a different view. Um, I never met the guy, but, uh, that's,
00:18:55.200 those are the different ideas people have on Peter Marks. There's a lot of talented people
00:18:58.360 who can do that job. Well, a lot of very smart people who are, uh, right now who are applying for
00:19:04.600 that job. My guess in knowing you is you want people who welcome that kind of questioning. Let's
00:19:09.060 have more questions. Let's search that up. Let's, let's run that down. Not somebody who like we've
00:19:14.420 had shuts down any questioning that doesn't tow the party line. We are not going to be shutting
00:19:20.360 down ideas, ideas that may be different from my ideas. We should welcome that science is based
00:19:26.420 on challenging deeply held assumptions where there's no good evidence, uh, what we call medical
00:19:32.100 dogma. That is the scientific process. And so we shouldn't be shutting down other ideas. We
00:19:37.800 should be inviting them. And that's why we're going to be having round table expert panels,
00:19:42.960 FDA expert panels on menopause and hormone replacement therapy on a whole host of topics.
00:19:49.060 Sorry about that. I'm queuing up a clip because, uh, I want to jump back to some reforms you're
00:19:53.700 starting with. And one of the big issues we touched on a minute ago, people like Curtis Wright,
00:19:58.840 he's not the only one to leave the FDA and go right into big pharma. Almost every commissioner does.
00:20:03.560 Scott Gottlieb. He was under Trump. He was the FDA commissioner, went right off to Pfizer. He came
00:20:09.440 on my show and tried to tell me nothing to worry about with any side effects as he's working for
00:20:14.360 Pfizer. It's like, we know we can't trust these people. So a, what are we going to do about those
00:20:20.060 people? And B, is there anything else we need to worry about? Because it's not just people who are at
00:20:27.100 FDA and leave. It's also panels of big pharma representatives who oversee the process as a drug
00:20:37.220 gets approved here at FDA. Those are my two questions. Let me key it. I'm going to show you
00:20:41.620 this clip. Here. So when Curtis Wright approved the original FDA label, was there internal pushback?
00:20:47.460 Oh yeah. Diane Snitchler emailed him that Purdue's less addictive claims sounded like bullshit.
00:20:52.320 What was Mr. Wright's response? He said, actually, Diane, this is literally true. 0.96
00:20:57.980 So Curtis Wright is the FDA medical review officer who approves an unprecedented label for Purdue. And then
00:21:05.480 he goes and works for Purdue. So do you think there's quid pro quo with Purdue to grant such
00:21:12.820 generous wording? Yeah. Well, I get that it has the appearance of a corruption, but it's possible
00:21:19.320 there wasn't. What Curtis Wright did is the way the industry works. It's a revolving door where as soon
00:21:28.980 as people leave the government, they go and work for the exact people they were regulating for five times
00:21:34.100 the money. And it's all legal. What appears to be corruption is simply how the system works.
00:21:40.460 Simply how the system works. So is that what, what, if anything, is being done about that?
00:21:48.080 Well, we have to do two things. Number one is we have to partner with industry and pharma to
00:21:53.780 facilitate the process, to make it user-friendly and expeditious. We shouldn't be in a receive-only
00:21:59.160 mode. We want American pharma companies to do well and companies that do business in the United
00:22:03.860 States to do well. But the scientific evaluation needs to be independent. And that's why today we're
00:22:10.240 announcing we are removing industry members, pharma members from FDA advisory committees. I was shocked
00:22:16.600 when I learned that employees of big pharma companies sit on FDA advisory committees as members of those
00:22:24.180 committees. So we're going to be replacing them whenever statutorily possible with patients and
00:22:30.540 family givers, family caregivers. We are going to be inviting pharma companies to send representatives to
00:22:37.000 the advisory committees, but they can sit with the rest of the public and watch and pose questions as
00:22:43.100 the rest of the American public can. So that speaks to, it's not, it doesn't stop at FDAers leaving and
00:22:52.380 going directly to big pharma to work pushing the drugs they just approved while government
00:22:57.160 employees. It's also while the FDA is approving those drugs, big pharma right now has a role in
00:23:05.840 pushing for it, in advising the people who are the decision makers. And so on that second piece of it,
00:23:11.820 at least right now you're stopping that. We're stopping that in for every committee where we can by
00:23:18.640 statute and we're replacing them with patients and family caregivers. And the idea is that
00:23:24.420 there should not be a cozy relationship. There should be a user-friendly process for industry,
00:23:32.520 but not a cozy relationship. Because let's be honest, a lot of people in the United States feel that the
00:23:38.200 system is rigged. A lot of people feel that the relationship is too cozy between pharma and regulators.
00:23:45.320 And so this is an agency that belongs to the American people. And so we can work with pharma
00:23:53.180 and at the same time ensure that scientific evaluation process is totally independent.
00:23:58.600 And on those advisory committees, the pharma and device members, those advisory committees
00:24:04.000 will say that they're non-voting members. But that is a sort of a close club of individuals that has a
00:24:11.120 running dialogue and they meet and they become friendly. And it's okay to be friendly, but we need
00:24:18.360 the scientific evaluation, the voting to be totally independent. And so people ask, are you anti-pharma or
00:24:27.080 pro-pharma? And the reality is we're pro-pharma, but our evaluation has to be independent. And we cannot have
00:24:34.320 any more indications for chronic pain written for a drug based on a 14-day study where the regulator
00:24:41.160 then goes immediately works for the company. That's the kind of thing that breeds distrust.
00:24:46.240 And that's why people perceive that this agency, the FDA, has been captured by industry and it is not
00:24:54.360 captured by industry. It is owned by the American people right now.
00:24:57.320 How do we stop the first problem with all the FDA commissioners and the top head honchos doing their
00:25:02.740 stint in government service and then going out to work for big pharma like they did in the Purdue
00:25:07.540 pharma case with Curtis Wright and making five times more? I don't know. We live in a free country.
00:25:14.260 I do know some of these individuals and they are good people. And I have, they're all God's children.
00:25:19.640 They're doing what the market incentivizes. But when it comes to their influence on the operations of
00:25:26.880 the FDA, that is something that we cannot tolerate. We cannot have people who leave as regulators
00:25:32.720 go to the industry. And we've thought about an ethics pledge. We've thought about all kinds of
00:25:37.100 things. It's non-binding because we live in a free country. You can't control someone after they leave
00:25:42.340 an employer. But what we can do is create a culture here where people want to stay. We can ensure that
00:25:48.180 people who leave don't have undue influence. And so many of the former... I have a suggestion for you.
00:25:55.920 Yeah. If somebody leaves the FDA and goes to work for one of the drug companies,
00:25:59.980 then you should look back to see whether they were involved in approving any of that company's drugs
00:26:04.160 during their tenure over the previous five years. And it should kick in an automatic review
00:26:09.300 on that drug and the approval.
00:26:12.400 When I got this nomination for the job, I cannot tell you how many lobbyists, former
00:26:18.380 members of Congress, the swamp, reached out to me. This is the swamp. I mean, I was in the operating
00:26:27.100 room and the next day I discovered what the swamp was.
00:26:29.680 You were swampy. Surrounded by the swamp creatures.
00:26:32.440 Surrounded by the swamp creatures. And immediately, this is how it happens.
00:26:36.000 We want to help you with your confirmation. We want to write a letter on behalf of our company
00:26:41.580 to the senators on your committee. We know these senators. We're going to talk to them if it's okay
00:26:47.640 with you. And you know what I said? Don't talk to the senators. I don't want your letters.
00:26:52.260 They're not for free. Those are obligations that then you feel indebted to return once you're in
00:26:58.480 office. And I'd rather not get confirmed into this job than have those obligations.
00:27:02.800 Right on. And you were confirmed. You're the only Trump nominee that's had as many Democrats
00:27:07.520 cross over to support you. You've gotten more than anybody, I think. Was it 56-44?
00:27:11.960 Yes. It literally should be nothing political about the FDA. We're talking about values.
00:27:16.600 Look, Republican, Democrat, independent moms came out and voted for President Trump. And
00:27:22.720 they believed in Secretary Kennedy's maha mission. There's literally nothing political about looking
00:27:28.040 at the influence of food colors and ingredients and evaluating the grass standard and getting
00:27:33.820 infant formula without seed oil and added sugar and rewriting our nutrition guidelines,
00:27:39.080 which we're doing right now. These are the most apolitical things in society. Of course,
00:27:44.300 you're going to have media try to spin things, of course. But I think people see through that.
00:27:48.680 On the food, my daughter turned 14 this past Monday, and I was baking her a cake. And I went,
00:27:56.560 I mean, I just got the Duncan Hines. I'm not going to lie. I can't do anything from scratch. But
00:28:00.320 then I just took a moment to look at what was in the icing, you know, with which you would use to write
00:28:06.340 happy birthday. Everything in there was red dye number this, yellow dye number that, green dye number
00:28:12.680 this. And I thought, this could alternatively read carcinogen X, carcinogen Y. And that's where I drew
00:28:23.380 the line. I'm sure there were tons of seed oils and so on in the cake itself. But my point is,
00:28:28.620 how does that even make its way onto the shelf where the vast majority of people have no idea that all
00:28:35.400 those dyes that are in our food, but not in the Europeans, can cause cancer? And so I'm giving my
00:28:41.160 child cancer for her 14th birthday, which is a no. What I don't understand is if there's enough
00:28:46.720 preliminary data to suggest that there may be carcinogenic effects or genomic disruption or
00:28:52.420 associations with attention deficit disorder, or a whole plethora of families that are saying,
00:28:59.000 hey, once we started eliminating these food, petrochemical food colorings from the food of my
00:29:06.080 child, their behavior improved. When you have enough of that, it's not, look, they're not giant
00:29:12.420 randomized control studies over 10 years for each food dye. We're not going to get that. But when you
00:29:16.700 have enough preliminary data to suggest these petrochemical food dyes are concerning, who then
00:29:23.360 would conclude, hey, you know what? Let's just risk it. It's fine. We'll wing it. We'll be, you know,
00:29:28.960 the kids will probably be fine. Why do that? When we have all of these chronic diseases increasing
00:29:35.820 right in front of our eyes that were rare a generation ago, one in 22 boys in California
00:29:42.140 now has autism. I mean, when you have to see these statistics, who says, you know what? It might be,
00:29:48.600 some of these ingredients have been suggested. Europe doesn't have them. They don't need them.
00:29:52.780 The food prices are not higher because they use beet juice and carrot juice and watermelon juice.
00:29:57.420 I know you had Vani Hari on. She's a great champion for that. We're taking a close look at this. And I
00:30:02.280 think you're going to hear some action in the coming weeks on this. Before we go to the autism
00:30:05.680 thing, because Kennedy made news on that too, on the drugs, it's fun to demonize drug companies
00:30:11.700 because we're all kind of ticked off, I think, about the COVID vaccines and so on. Not all, but many of
00:30:16.380 us. However, they're not all bad. They do make some drugs that have helped a lot of people.
00:30:21.800 America's drunk on Ozempic. But I mean, like there are some actual, you know, serious drugs that can
00:30:29.400 help people. And so one of the concerns behind people who back big pharma is how much is all of
00:30:36.520 this, some of the stuff we're talking about, going to slow down the approval process for new drugs or
00:30:41.440 drugs and testing? We're speeding up the approval process. We made an announcement last week that we
00:30:46.740 are reducing the requirements for some perfunctory things like animal testing. Why are we testing
00:30:52.260 every single drug in chimpanzees and dogs, usually beagles, because they're obedient?
00:30:59.420 That's so sad. It's sad and it's unnecessary. Some of these drugs are already proved in other
00:31:03.820 countries in humans. So you have a drug already in use in humans in other countries and we're requiring
00:31:09.460 animal testing before. So we are now, we've put out a release that we are now taking steps to reduce
00:31:16.540 the animal testing requirement. It's cruel to the animals sometimes. It's unnecessary.
00:31:21.220 And we live in a modern world where we have computational modeling using AI that can evaluate
00:31:26.740 a molecule and predict its toxicity in humans better than the animal testing. We also have something
00:31:33.220 called organ on a chip technology, where say liver cells are grown in the lab. Sounds like a terrible
00:31:38.380 appetizer. Yeah, I personally cannot eat liver. I've operated on the liver too much. Oh God.
00:31:44.460 One food I cannot do. No one wants organ on a chip. Yeah, organ on a chip. So in the lab,
00:31:50.260 they grow these cells and then they introduce the drug. And you can actually see whether or not it
00:31:56.040 injures the cells better than if you inject some bunny rabbit that is not going to talk to you and
00:32:02.280 say, my liver hurts. So these new technologies have the promise of replacing some of this routine
00:32:08.600 animal testing. You would cut six months out of that approval process. You lower R&D costs for
00:32:15.600 pharma companies and inventors, which could lower drug prices for everyday Americans. And it reduces
00:32:21.620 animal use. There's too much animal use. Are there any other areas where AI can come and help as we move
00:32:28.540 into the 21st century? Yeah, we're bringing in a team that is really exciting. They're going to
00:32:34.240 use, introduce AI into the review process to help the reviewer, to make the reviewer's
00:32:40.180 work stream much more streamlined and summarize things. There are parts of the drug application
00:32:47.920 that are so perfunctory, that are outdated, that could be streamlined, that could be abstracted with
00:32:53.240 AI to help the reviewer. So here, like all other aspects of government that Trump is taking on,
00:32:58.800 you're saying there's actually too much red tape that we're, and we're red taping the wrong things,
00:33:04.000 it sounds like you're saying. Why does it take 10 years to bring a drug to market in the United
00:33:08.860 States? Because the regulatory steps. I mean, people are dying. People need cures and meaningful
00:33:15.820 treatments. And my predecessor in this role was focused, as he stated, his number one goal was fighting
00:33:25.380 misinformation. Well, our number one goal is delivering cures and meaningful treatments
00:33:30.960 and healthier foods for Americans. That's our, that is our focus. And so you've heard about
00:33:37.180 consolidation or changes or cuts at the FDA. Those were not cuts to scientists or reviewers or
00:33:43.500 inspectors. Absolutely none. They were cuts to communication staff, FDA's lobbyists to Congress,
00:33:49.980 and to the IT systems here, where there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies.
00:33:54.660 Yes, there's been, definitely there's been pushback on the, the number of people who were ousted.
00:34:01.360 I think it was your predecessor who said the FDA, as we know it is, is gone, that the experts are gone.
00:34:07.820 People with decades of institutional knowledge have been turfed, suggesting there might now be a safety
00:34:12.660 issue here. There was a massive growth of FDA employees under the Biden administration.
00:34:18.460 And when the media reports that there were cuts, which many were early retirements, people took early
00:34:26.740 retirement, none were to scientific reviewers or inspectors or law enforcement at the FDA.
00:34:33.680 They were to IT communications, legislative affairs. And so what you're not hearing in the
00:34:39.240 mainstream media is that there was a 100% increase in the number of FDA employees since 2006.
00:34:45.500 You have about 18,000 and it's been cut about 3,500 since you and Kennedy got here. So you're saying
00:34:50.600 we had more like 9,000? We had 9,500 employees at the FDA in 2006.
00:34:56.500 Oh, wow. Doubled.
00:34:57.440 And so when you, when you report that there were cuts and you don't report that there was a 100%
00:35:04.840 increase in employees in the preceding years, that the number of employees doubled in the preceding
00:35:10.320 years, that is misleading. And the people who we've gotten rid of, losing them is not going to slow
00:35:17.700 down drug approval or safety procedures because they were, sounds like more administrative people.
00:35:23.020 There were no cuts to scientists, reviewers or inspectors or law enforcement. And my goal is
00:35:29.300 to make sure that every one of those people has all the resources they need to do their job well.
00:35:34.940 Now, cuts are never perfect. And so we have done an assessment and there are some individuals that we
00:35:42.820 have invited back. There were a couple of people who were taking the early retirement and we were told
00:35:50.320 of their sort of how well they performed here and we encouraged them to stay. But to not report that
00:35:57.320 the agency has doubled since 2006 before this cut, in my opinion, is not telling the whole story.
00:36:03.940 No, it's dishonest.
00:36:05.420 It's dishonest.
00:36:06.800 Is it swampy here? And by that, I mean, we had a report that when Secretary Kennedy came over and
00:36:12.520 addressed the troops last Friday, some people got up and walked out. They were disgusted by him,
00:36:17.400 which seems like a bad sign. Yeah, I was in that room. Nobody got up and walked out. Now we did
00:36:23.680 stream it. So if somebody was watching it in their office and got up to go to the bathroom during the
00:36:29.320 speech, maybe that constituted getting up and walking out. I don't know. I was in that room and
00:36:33.940 there was incredible energy in that room because he talked about how agencies that are set up to defend
00:36:39.860 public safety sometimes become captured by the organizations that they are set out to regulate.
00:36:46.060 And he talked about the EPA has had a history where they have cycled and at times have been
00:36:50.840 captured by the industry. And he encouraged people at the FDA to speak up, think independently,
00:36:57.240 and that he had his full support behind them. So it was an incredible talk. And of course,
00:37:03.780 you're going to hear a clip or a phrase pulled out out of context. But I was in that room.
00:37:09.720 Nobody walked out. It was incredibly a strong message. The FDA is strong and we're going to
00:37:14.700 continue to be strong. And that's because we believe in the scientists. How's your relationship
00:37:18.400 with Bobby Kennedy? It's good. You know, I got to know him during the nomination process and I found
00:37:24.720 that he always listens to me. He values scientists on questions where he has, you know, some skepticism
00:37:33.080 or he has some honest questions that he wants to pose. And I think that's what we need. I mean,
00:37:39.220 first of all, he represents America. There are, President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are the
00:37:47.040 two most popular political people in the United States right now. That's polling data. That's not
00:37:52.500 my opinion. That's polling data. And he is, he represents the American people. He has questions.
00:37:57.880 He wants the scientific process to run its course. And so he's posing the questions and he values our
00:38:04.660 opinion. Everything I put before him, he has valued my input on. And so we're going to see new studies
00:38:11.620 come out. We're going to talk about chronic diseases. We're going to look at food and food
00:38:15.140 ingredients. And he's provided some really great leadership. I've been. Are we redoing the food
00:38:19.280 pyramid? We're redoing the food pyramid. Thank God. And, you know, no longer are we going to say it's
00:38:25.340 you have to have these calories. It doesn't matter how you get them. Doesn't matter if it's all
00:38:29.980 ultra processed foods, it's just pure calories in, calories out. That dogma, which had no scientific
00:38:35.900 support, was a massively underfunded endeavor. We let the industry tell us as a government what's
00:38:43.300 healthy and what's not healthy. And even with the recent Biden administration suggestion to have
00:38:49.940 front of package labeling, they picked sodium, saturated fat, and added sugar in there. I think
00:38:57.180 they got maybe one thing right out of those four, but they ignored a giant sloth of food
00:39:02.640 ingredients. And so when you ignore a thousand chemicals, some of which are petrochemicals that
00:39:09.660 have been introduced into the food supply simply because the industry has self deemed them as safe.
00:39:16.000 When you ignore that, then you can't call something healthy just because it has a low amount of
00:39:22.840 saturated fat. That's old dogma. Talk about part of the story. Are you a yo-yo dieter? You diet,
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00:40:17.660 Secretary Kennedy said this week that we are going to know what causes autism by September.
00:40:25.480 Is that crazy talk? No, people want to know. A lot of parents have been dealing with kids with autism.
00:40:32.280 I mean, one in 32 kids in America today have autism. We can't just keep medicating every kid.
00:40:38.860 It was one in 10,000 in the 90s. It was unheard of. The sort of repetitive motions, the ticks,
00:40:44.720 the heavy, the complete nonverbal child. Where did you see that in the 1940s and 50s?
00:40:52.860 And so we have to look at everything. When you do science, you can't say, hey, we're going to do a
00:40:57.980 study of what is causing this epidemic affecting one in 32 kids. But when you can't look at these
00:41:05.440 potential causes, that's not how science is done. That's what we've been saying. For the record,
00:41:09.540 you're not saying it, but people are talking in part about vaccines because Kennedy has said it
00:41:14.620 should be on the list of things we look at. Now, his critics will say he's blaming it all on the
00:41:19.580 vaccine. He's blaming autism on the vaccine. I've talked to him personally. That's not what he says.
00:41:23.080 It's not what he's saying. He says they're growing up in a toxic stew. That's one of the many things.
00:41:27.560 And in particular, like the aluminum that they put in it as a preservative,
00:41:31.220 like we should be looking at everything they're consuming and we're forcing on them.
00:41:34.160 I don't know what causes autism, but I'm deeply concerned about the rise. If I had to
00:41:40.000 make a hypothesis as a scientist, not as a regulator, but as a scientist,
00:41:45.220 and Dr. Bhattacharya is going to be launching a very impressive study using electronic health big
00:41:49.360 data that we're helping curate. I think it is the cumulative burden of all of these exposures,
00:41:56.220 environmental and dietary, that alter the microbiome. Remember, 90% of the serotonin
00:42:03.860 made, which is involved in mood and mental health, is from bacteria in the microbiome.
00:42:09.700 That's where it's produced. And when you mess up the microbiome, when you carpet bomb the microbiome
00:42:16.020 with all of these ingredients that don't appear in nature, these are novel chemicals,
00:42:21.220 what are we doing? So we've known for a long time as a scientific community that kids with autism
00:42:26.340 have different stool composition, different biodiversity. So when you look at the billion
00:42:32.660 different bacteria that live in the microbiome, there may be an association between change in
00:42:38.180 the microbiome and autism and things that are changing the microbiome that we've not yet fully
00:42:43.460 appreciated. And that could be a whole list of things. I've heard you talk many times with me and
00:42:48.500 others about, and this stuck out to me because I had C-sections, but about how vaginal births are
00:42:56.580 in some ways much better for the baby because it will help their microbiome. Like going through the
00:43:00.580 birth canal is very helpful to a baby's microbiome. But I was thinking about this because what we have
00:43:06.260 now is a scenario in which C-sections are routinely pushed on mothers because it's easier for the OBGYN.
00:43:12.420 They can schedule their life more easily. The nursing staff supports it. They can get a wink or two,
00:43:18.020 whereas the vaginal birth is a different story, natural, whatever. So the kid comes out without that 0.98
00:43:23.380 advantage. Then we're very quick to prescribe antibiotics for young kids. Carpet bombing the microbiome.
00:43:29.220 Over and over, even when they're little. We're not setting them up for success. Then we fill them full of
00:43:33.460 processed foods, or maybe we give them infant formula that's riddled with processed or seed oils or added sugars
00:43:39.460 that don't need to be there. Then we, for a long time, didn't expose them to peanuts or other
00:43:45.220 potential allergens, which made them weaker and more susceptible to these allergies. Then there's
00:43:51.460 all these antibiotics in foods and estrogen-altering chemicals in foods. Now the child is basically
00:43:59.220 hobbled in a lot of ways through absolutely no fault of their own. Really, the parents either. The
00:44:04.020 parents wouldn't have necessarily known not to do that. Your kid has strep. Your doctor says,
00:44:08.820 give them antibiotics, you do it. Then on top of that, we've got all these vaccines,
00:44:14.100 and we've got all these processed foods, and we've got all this weird stuff, and your cow milk.
00:44:19.220 It's so much. It's almost like the system is set up to get your kids sick. Then we say,
00:44:25.700 why is everybody getting colon cancer before they turn 25? No one's even taking a hard look at that.
00:44:31.700 Now it seems like for the first time, we have a team that's saying, no, we're taking a hard look at
00:44:36.820 all of that. All of it. We have to look at all of it. I mean, if you look at how much children are
00:44:42.260 suffering, they're in pain, they're depressed, they're dealing with injecting themselves with
00:44:47.540 insulin, something you would rarely see a kid have type 2 diabetes in their teenage years
00:44:53.940 a generation ago. Now you've got 20 percent of kids who have diabetes or pre-diabetes. The vast
00:44:59.860 majority are type 2 diabetes. We have only been talking about treating the rise in colon cancer
00:45:06.260 in young people with new chemotherapy. New chemotherapy is not going to address the root
00:45:11.620 causes. We need to do it, and we want to see new drugs come into market quickly. But we've got to
00:45:18.100 talk about what is insulting the microbiome, driving general body inflammation. We've got to talk about
00:45:23.700 the two underlying causes of so many chronic diseases, in my opinion, insulin resistance and
00:45:30.820 general body inflammation. And it's all the stuff that we put down. The body's immune system is reacting
00:45:35.860 and causing some inflammation. So we're not just going to be looking at new chemo for colon cancer.
00:45:42.340 We're going to be focused on healthy food at the FDA. And we're looking at a school lunch
00:45:49.460 grant program for schools that want to convert to healthier foods, but don't know how and they need
00:45:56.020 help. We want to help them. Is guidance coming out for parents on how to feed their child in a healthy
00:46:03.220 way? Saying this to you before we got started, the American breakfast right now is, you know,
00:46:08.420 especially for kids, cereal, bagels, English muffins, toast, French toast. It's all carbs,
00:46:15.060 Danish, right? It's all, all starchy carbs. Then God knows what they get at school for lunch. And
00:46:21.060 even when you make them lunch, it's hard. You don't know what it's like. Chicken fingers,
00:46:24.500 good or bad, right? Better than, you know, lunch meat, probably. Well, what? Like people don't know.
00:46:30.180 They don't know. They've had no real guidance. Are they going to get some?
00:46:33.460 Yeah. So we are redoing the food pyramid, but this is a, this is like the number one issue
00:46:39.300 right now in health in America is people don't know how to switch to healthier foods, right? And I
00:46:46.340 wish, you know, there's zealots in every aspect of healthcare and you'll, you hear them, you know,
00:46:51.580 the media gives them a lot of airtime and their issues are legitimate oftentimes. But I, I often look
00:46:57.460 at these zealots and I say, I wish you would take 10% of your enthusiasm over this little issue in
00:47:04.420 healthcare and actually talk about school lunches and healthy foods and educating parents on what to
00:47:11.940 feed their children and, you know, sugary drinks that are ubiquitous and microplastics and seed oils
00:47:17.940 and chemicals in the grass and all, all of it, all of it. So we're going to see some guidance come out
00:47:23.780 that I think is going to be helpful. Schools that want to convert to healthier, more organic,
00:47:30.100 more local and possible foods don't know how, and they got limited budgets. That's where we can
00:47:35.700 provide some assistance. So on a pilot basis for schools that want to convert and don't know how,
00:47:41.140 we're going to help them get off the cupcakes. I didn't realize how many schools feed breakfast to
00:47:47.460 children, donuts, cupcakes, um, ding dongs, French toast, as if, you know, it alludes to the French.
00:47:57.140 Right. So it's more sophisticated, right? So this is where, uh, the entire medical establishment
00:48:06.340 can pivot and focus on. And you're going to see grants coming out of the NIH. We're working
00:48:11.620 in coordination with the FDA, with the NIH to make sure there's research in this area. You know,
00:48:16.420 the NIH has really focused on genetics and the entire culture of the NIH and thus the entire
00:48:24.580 academic medical community in the United States has been a culture focused on the genome based on the
00:48:32.340 Francis Collins, uh, era that the gene is responsible for most of our health problems
00:48:38.420 and the gene can solve most of our health problems. And you look at the NIH individual institutes within
00:48:44.660 the national institutes of health and it's geneticists all over the place. You look at the
00:48:49.780 Institute for child health at the NIH and it's run by a geneticist who parades around, uh, finding a gene
00:48:58.660 involved in some ultra rare gene disorder. That's good. And it's important, but nobody is talking about
00:49:04.260 the food our kids are eating. And by the way, there's not much we can do about our genes.
00:49:07.380 The genes are not the problem of our, not the cause of our chronic disease epidemic. It's what we're
00:49:13.060 doing or what is being done to children by adults today, unknowingly with good intentions. Sometimes
00:49:18.580 you go to the National Institute of Environmental Health at the NIH, go to the website and you'll see
00:49:24.100 the director has on there that they were involved in identifying a gene that may be associated with
00:49:29.860 obesity. What are you doing? I mean, there's value in that research. How about the ding-dongs and
00:49:37.460 cupcakes and donuts and French toast that the kids are eating with government tax dollars every morning
00:49:43.460 at school and nobody seems to be paying attention? And I've heard you say before, if you fix your
00:49:47.060 microbiome, you actually might be less hungry, less prone to obesity. Like the things you were talking
00:49:52.980 about are all to set people up for a healthier lifestyle that's a little easier. You know,
00:49:58.420 that they may be victims to cravings that were created by this terrible food pyramid and them
00:50:05.540 following the American diet that's shoved down our throats. Yeah, as a surgeon, I've had patients
00:50:09.460 that would do everything to lose weight. They did all the right things. They switched to better foods
00:50:14.020 and they would exercise. They couldn't lose weight. What was happening there? Can we learn from
00:50:18.260 those individual patients? Maybe the microbiome was altered in a way that is not easy to fix by
00:50:24.580 just switching back. Maybe all of those years, the cumulative insult to the microbiome was altered.
00:50:30.100 Now, there are some researchers doing this. I met the microbiome researcher at the NIH and it's like a
00:50:36.340 tiny shop. Like this should be the main focus. Yes. You know, the NIH has collected DNA, all the DNA
00:50:44.260 information on 1.2 million Americans. And you'll say, I didn't know about this. What, you know,
00:50:49.620 what, why they are, they have been doing it for the last six or seven years in search of a genetic
00:50:57.540 basis for health disparities. And that entire, what does that mean? It means they want to understand why
00:51:04.260 certain populations have more chronic diseases than others. And they believe that it's in the genome.
00:51:09.300 And so they collected this giant genetic library. They would pay Americans say $25.
00:51:15.460 80% are African-American, Latino, or transgender because they want to unlock why they have different
00:51:23.620 rates of chronic diseases. They have this massive library. When Jay Bhattacharya came into office,
00:51:29.700 the previous director moved that entire database project to another office outside of the director's
00:51:37.220 office, maybe so he wouldn't touch it. Interesting. And what are they doing? Like,
00:51:41.780 I, I'm not saying there's no value in that, but you're not, you can't even tell us how to lose weight.
00:51:47.940 You can't even tell us how to, what foods are healthy for children. You can't even tell us about
00:51:52.660 seed oils or food dyes or ingredients that are added just for shelf life. And so that has been the entire
00:52:01.620 culture of the medical establishment. And when they launched that project, they went to
00:52:06.260 the oldest African-American church in Harlem. They went to Atlanta, Detroit, and they recruited
00:52:13.540 people from minority communities. And they told them no longer is our, is our medical recommendations 0.76
00:52:19.860 going to be blanket. They're going to be custom tailored to your ethnic, your, you know, population.
00:52:27.220 Good luck doing that with trans people. Um, okay. Couple of quick things. One of your predecessors 1.00
00:52:34.100 here has said, you're going to have to expect massive pushback on all of this. Like it might
00:52:39.060 be too pie in the sky that for example, if we remove all ultra processed foods from
00:52:45.220 school lunch programs, we might bankrupt a bunch of farmers. Like, are we too optimistic? You know,
00:52:52.420 is it, is the moonshot not possible? I think people are now discovering that they've been duped
00:53:00.980 with an industry that has told them, don't worry, all this food is healthy for kids. It's low in
00:53:06.020 calories. It has low fat. So, you know, uh, go ahead and, and it's, it's fine. That's sort of the
00:53:12.020 between the lines message. And I think they're very suspicious and they want to find an ingredient that
00:53:17.860 accounts for the chronic disease epidemic. I don't believe there's any single ingredient.
00:53:22.260 I think it's the entire gamut of less exercise, food chemicals, not eating the right foods,
00:53:28.580 micronutrient poor foods. We have foods now in the United States that are basically, um, grown with
00:53:35.700 caffeine, you know, potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen, and, and the roots. And there's no nutrients.
00:53:42.340 And we, you know, there's a deficiency of good soil. And so you get micronutrient deficient food
00:53:48.340 and you can eat a lot, but your satiety, that is your, your sense of feeling, uh, full is, is not
00:53:56.900 triggered because you're not getting those nutrients. Uh, and so what you do is you have this weird
00:54:02.980 feeling after you eat where you're kind of full and bloated, but you're still hungry. And some of those
00:54:09.380 chemicals make you more hungry. The food industry, they're not bad people. They're actually good
00:54:14.260 people. They've done what we as a society have asked them to do. And that is focused on food
00:54:19.940 insecurity and mass production. Now, however, seeing that these chronic diseases have skyrocketed
00:54:27.300 in our country, in our generation, we've got to take a step back and ask, how can we get healthier
00:54:32.420 foods out there? And I wanted to go back to the animal testing, because this is something near
00:54:36.420 here to my heart. I, I'm a big animal rights person. I do eat meat and animal products and
00:54:41.700 I get letters from PETA all the time, but the animal testing is a heartbreaker. And that what
00:54:47.620 Fauci was doing to the beagles is really deeply disturbing. And what I didn't, I never realized
00:54:52.900 until you just said it right now, it's because they're compliant, which is just so sad. It's sad.
00:54:57.060 So how do you stop that? Can, can we as humans stay safe in the drugs we consume and the products
00:55:03.060 we consume without torturing sweet little beagles? And I will throw in a word for the bunnies and
00:55:09.380 even the little lab rats, which, you know, animal torture just seems beneath us at this point in
00:55:14.340 our evolution. But you tell me. God did not make these animals on planet earth for us to do cruel
00:55:20.900 things to them and subjugate them. It's, it, it does not seem right. And so we are doing everything we
00:55:28.260 we can, and we're taking a lot of steps to reduce animal testing requirements and to stop unnecessary
00:55:34.740 animal testing. A single monoclonal antibody that was developed for approval, used 144 chimpanzees in
00:55:45.220 the animal testing requirement. What are we doing? And these chimpanzees are not, you know, living with
00:55:50.980 great sunlight and eating bananas. It's not, you know, there is, there's a problem here. And when you
00:55:59.700 realize that the computational models can do as good or better of a job in predicting,
00:56:04.580 when the lab based organ cells tested or something called organoids, where you can actually grow an
00:56:10.020 organ in a lab, and it's not a functional organ, but it has the properties of those cells. And you can
00:56:15.700 test liver toxicity or heart toxicity or myocarditis. Those models should be replacing animal testing.
00:56:22.420 So the first announcement we had when I came in as commissioner was to take steps to reduce
00:56:27.300 unnecessary animal testing. Reduced by a lot, like almost entirely with a goal toward hitting entirely,
00:56:33.220 entirely or what? I'd, I'd like to see as much reduction of unnecessary animal testing as humanly
00:56:39.060 possible. Look, as a surgeon, we had pig labs in the, at Johns Hopkins where the students and residents
00:56:47.700 would learn how to do surgery on the pigs. I personally believed it had no impact on learning.
00:56:55.380 They could have learned from simulations, computerized simulations. They can learn from
00:57:01.620 watching us in the operating room. It provided no edits because they were unnecessary. And every week or
00:57:07.860 so they would have pigs anesthetized in this big production, it was expensive. And in my opinion,
00:57:13.860 it was unnecessary. We've got to modernize. Okay. So last but not least, 3,500 gone in cooperation
00:57:22.580 with Doge. Will there be more cuts? There's no, I, there are no plans for any mass cuts. Now,
00:57:29.140 if somebody has not logged onto their VPN in two years, we don't want them working. If somebody's doing
00:57:35.060 an incredible job and we measure performance down to 15 minute increments with reviewers that are
00:57:41.620 doing scientific reviews, the reviews are highly tracked. And so if somebody is doing a good job
00:57:48.100 doing that review, we want to encourage them and support. It's hard work doing the reviews is hard
00:57:52.500 work. And so we want to do other things here at the FDA to support a great culture, scientific forums,
00:58:00.180 speakers, round tables. We want to encourage them to spend some of their time doing creative work.
00:58:05.220 And so we've, we're doing a lot right now to create more of a teamwork culture
00:58:09.700 and less of an individual siloed culture. That is the culture that I, I walked into.
00:58:15.460 It feels like you really want to make this a better place for people to work more collegial,
00:58:20.740 more of a feeling of camaraderie, a shared mission. Is it possible? You know,
00:58:25.940 there are certain government agencies. I'm just going to say it where they're hard left.
00:58:30.260 They can't stand Trump and there will be a natural resistance to his appointees trying to do anything
00:58:35.540 to their agency. There are some of those folks here, but you know, they're all God's children
00:58:40.180 and I hope to work with all of them. So, you know, that's my job as a leader to try to win their
00:58:45.300 confidence. And I hope to do it by upholding my mission to put out their gold standard science
00:58:54.820 and common sense together. We can do both healthier food for children, rebuilding the public trust and
00:59:02.180 focusing not on the peripheral distractions, but focusing on cures and meaningful treatments for
00:59:07.540 Americans. And when this is done, is there a chance they're going to a drug company?
00:59:13.300 Zero chance. Oh, in terms of if there's an inventor that I might have the chance with
00:59:18.980 to work with, I have no idea. When it comes to the large pharmaceutical companies,
00:59:24.500 you will not, I'm not auditioning for a job with them. At the same time, I love them. I believe and
00:59:30.100 love thy neighbor. And I hope we can work with them to create a great user-friendly process
00:59:36.100 to chop down that 10 year timeframe to an approval to a much shorter timeframe. And I'm committed to work
00:59:42.980 with them to get that down. I can't wait to see what you do. Thank you so much.
00:59:47.380 Thank you, Megan. Thanks for being willing to do the job.
00:59:49.620 Thanks for being a champion for my bombs. My pleasure.
00:59:53.860 Ah, so interesting. I love him. I feel so much better that he's here, right? I feel like we're
00:59:58.660 in good hands. He's got his work cut out for him and we'll stay tuned. We'll keep you updated on what
01:00:04.020 happens over here. Now, in the meantime, I have got to tell you something important before we go.
01:00:08.740 Okay. Everyone loves when Maureen Callahan comes on, including me. And I told you the last time she
01:00:14.740 came on that we were going to do, we did this long debrief on the Meghan Markle ridiculousness
01:00:19.780 that on Netflix, her show, you know, showing you really tough things like how to dump pretzels into
01:00:25.540 a bag. That's her new show. Well, we had this idea to do our own version of her show with love.
01:00:34.420 I had a naughty word that I was going to use instead, but no,
01:00:39.540 we've done it is my point. Maureen and I have shot our own series and she's going to be on the show
01:00:46.660 tomorrow with the presentation of what we came up with, which I think you're really going to enjoy.
01:00:53.460 Here's just a little sneak peek.
01:00:58.580 It's important to me to stay relatable.
01:01:04.020 I love to elevate a guest's visit. Microwave popcorn. You plop it right in there.
01:01:10.900 It's so simple. Only the lazy people don't do this. Put it in a paper bag.
01:01:15.140 Here we go. It's right behind you. Oh my God. You did it. We're going to put it
01:01:21.700 in one of these special cellophane bags. It's okay. These aren't, it's not expensive like your clothes
01:01:31.940 are. Look at how fun that is. These are amazing and you're going to absolutely love them. This,
01:01:44.020 we're just going to put into a different bag. They're spectacular. And then I just,
01:01:49.700 and then I just dump them. Just like that. Where, where are you getting all these like
01:01:54.820 mini brainstorms? What's, I'm so impressed. Maybe in the next wave of our friendship,
01:02:00.180 I'll try to explain it to you.
01:02:08.100 I died when I saw the first clip. I mean, it's a longer one than what you just saw there.
01:02:12.740 I was with Abby. We cried. We were laughing so hard. I think you guys are going to love
01:02:17.380 tomorrow's show and I can't wait to bring it to you. So we'll see you then.
01:02:23.300 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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