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
Summary
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
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.
00:02:28.180
Grand Canyon University, a private Christian university in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona,
00:02:33.660
believes that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty,
00:02:38.480
and the pursuit of happiness. GCU believes in equal opportunity and that the American dream starts
00:02:44.120
with purpose. By honoring your career calling, you can impact your family, friends, and your
00:02:49.660
community. Change the world for good by putting others before yourself. Whether your pursuit involves
00:02:54.760
a bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree, GCU's online, on-campus, and hybrid learning environments
00:03:00.620
are designed to help you achieve your unique academic, personal, and professional goals. There's
00:03:04.700
the NCAA tournament, which they are in again this year. With over 340 academic programs as of September
00:03:10.960
of 24, GCU meets you where you are and provides a path to help you fulfill your dreams. The pursuit
00:03:17.820
to serve others is yours. Let it flourish. Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Private,
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?
00:04:46.000
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.
00:14:16.000
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,
00:15:30.080
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.
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
00:26:12.400
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.
00:34:57.440
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.
00:36:06.800
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,
00:39:29.920
lose weight, and you gain it all back plus a few, and then later you lose it again and so on and so
00:39:34.800
forth. That can be dangerous. Studies show this could actually increase health problems. Breaking free of
00:39:41.420
your yo-yo diet pattern is why doctors created Lean. Lean is a supplement and you don't need a
00:39:47.660
prescription. Lean includes natural ingredients targeting weight loss in three powerful ways,
00:39:53.480
maintaining healthy blood sugar, controlling appetite and cravings, and it helps burn fat by
00:39:57.820
converting fat into energy. Listen, if you're tired of losing weight and gaining it back and you want to
00:40:02.460
lose meaningful weight at a healthy pace, Lean could be something for you to consider. Let me get you
00:40:08.100
started with 20% off when you enter MK20 at takelean.com. That's MK20 at takelean.com.
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
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
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
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.
01:01:04.020
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,
01:02:08.100
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.
01:02:34.340
The human body is incredible, capable of repair and growth that amazes scientists,
01:02:38.900
even in 2025. But as the years pass, natural healing and building processes slow down. While
01:02:44.820
this is normal, there is a way to support your body. A collagen supplement from Ancient Nutrition
01:02:50.100
can help you look and feel your best. For centuries, people have searched for a mythical fountain of
01:02:56.020
youth. Spoiler alert, it doesn't exist. However, collagen is a proven way to promote youthful health and
01:03:02.020
appearance. And this is why I want to tell you about Ancient Nutrition's multi-collagen advanced lean.
01:03:08.260
Ancient Nutrition combines ancient wisdom with modern science to create high quality supplements.
01:03:13.060
It's delicious and easy to incorporate into daily routines. You can mix it right into coffee,
01:03:18.500
matcha, or your smoothie. Right now, enjoy 25% off your first order at ancientnutrition.com.
01:03:24.340
That's ancientnutrition.com for 25% off. Support your bod and feel your best with Ancient Nutrition.