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

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. 0.99

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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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

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