On May 19th, the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, was holding a town hall for agency employees headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland.

We have to maintain safety and transparency...

In this video obtained by CNN, you see him talking about how research should be ethical and not endanger human populations. Standard science stuff. But then, he makes a hard turn.

This is important because it's possible. There's a lot of controversy over this. I'm sure there's folks in the room who disagree with me. It's possible that the pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings.

'The pandemic he's talking about, of course, is COVID-19.

And it's also possible that the NIH partly sponsor that research. And if that's true, it's nice to have free speech. Welcome you guys.

'What's happening there is that dozens of employees had stood up and were heading for the exits. It's worth noting that Badacharya's view is not shared by many virologists. They say it's much more likely that the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged from animals rather than leaking out of a lab. And while some employees told CNN the walkout wasn't necessarily about his COVID comments, it was pre-planned to protest working conditions under the second Trump administration. It's clear Trump's Make America Healthy Again agenda is causing discord inside America's So what does it mean for the American public? My guest is Dr. Paul Offit. He's a pediatrician and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. We're gonna talk about what new changes to COVID vaccine recommendations mean for you and how a war on trust is unfolding in the scientific community. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.

'So Dr. Offit, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Came out earlier this week with the leaders of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, and they made this big announcement about COVID-19 vaccines. Can you just explain exactly what they said?

Right, they unilaterally declared that they are no longer going to recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children or pregnant people.

Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any political data, to support the repeat booster strategy in children.

That ends today. It's common sense, and it's good science.

This was done without the advice of either the FDA or CDC advisory committees. It was done with the advice public comment. It was just a unilateral decision as if it was handed down on stone tablets from on high.

We're now one step closer to realizing President Trump's promise to make America healthy again.

Well, do we know why they singled out these two groups, pregnant people and healthy children?

In fact, there was a presentation at the ACIP in April where they went through data on who's getting hospitalized and who's dying from COVID and roughly there's about 165,000 people who've been hospitalized over the past year with COVID, about 40,000 people have died. Among those who have died are children. There have been there were 150 deaths in children last year. Half of those children were previously healthy. Most of those deaths occurred in children less than four years of age. So why would you ever take away vaccines for children, considering that it will prevent suffering, prevent hospitalization, and save lives. It's a wholly irresponsible thing to do.

The vaccines have been around for a while, so do we know of any adverse effects in these groups?

Well, so we know certainly that the mRNA vaccines were a cause of myocarditis when the vaccine first rolled out and we had a generally naive population. And that typically occurred in males 16 to 29 years of age, most of whom now have been either vaccinated or actually infected or both. And so myocorditis is a consequence of this vaccine has really largely disappeared. But that was it. I mean, it is a remarkably safe vaccine and clearly an effective vaccine. But it's not an effective vaccine if you don't get it. And only about 5% of children less than five years of age get this vaccine. All this is going to do is further discourage vaccine use.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Does this mean that these vaccines literally won't be available for these groups or will pregnant women or parents of young kids still be able to get the shot if they really won't?

'So I think what the FDA did by publishing that paper in the New England Journal of Medicine about a week ago, saying that now there are only certain high-risk groups and people less than 65 years of age for whom this vaccine will be licensed. So that's different than recommended. They basically have said that they are gonna have a license for people who are over 65 and people who were less than 55 who were in one of 23 high- risk groups. But healthy children are not in that high-risk group. And although pregnancy is in that high-risk group, Marty McCarrie, who's the FDA commissioner, stood up in front of the public a few days later and said that pregnancy is no longer considering a high- risk group. So I think what worries me in this is that if you make it really part of the license, then someone who, say, wants to get the vaccine because they're taking care of a child with leukemia, they may not be able to have their insurance company cover that cost, and for some, that would be burdensome enough that they wouldn't get the vaccines. So

So it could just be way more expensive.

'That's right, and it would be off-label use, basically. See, normally the way this works, the FDA is a regulatory agency, not a recommending body. The FDA can say this vaccine's safe and effective, it can be distributed. It's the CDC that then recommends it. And the CDC in June was about to say, we're going to have these high-risk groups who we're gonna say should be getting this vaccine, but that won't exclude other groups from getting it who would get, say, shared decision-making with your doctor, which would then mean insurance companies would pay for it. What the FDA did by basically, usurping the power of the CDC and anticipating what they were going to do a month hence, basically took the power away from the CDC and made this vaccine less insurable, which is the goal. I think the goal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is to create chaos, to make vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared.

Yeah, so you used to be on this committee of independent vaccine experts called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, and they make recommendations about vaccines to the CDC. Do you have a sense of how that group is feeling about all this now that these usual processes have been so disrupted?

You're right, I was a voting member on the ACIP between 1998 and 2003. I think that what is happening now and I know voting members that are on the ASAP is they feel that they're being pushed aside, that their expertise is not being valued. I mean, the value of the ACP meetings is one, they're open to the public. You hear those debates in public. They are external advisors. They are are external to the government, external to pharmaceutical companies. They are independent and. Those discussions that not only happened in front of the public is also available for public comment. None of this is happening now. R.F. K. Junior has simply declared that healthy children and pregnant women are not to get this vaccine, thus ignoring the fact that of the roughly 150 children who died of COVID in this past year, most of whom were less than four, half of whom are previously healthy. So it's the notion of trick to make a distinction between healthy and unhealthy in terms of who can get hospitalized or who can die from this virus is arbitrary Against the data.

Bobby, if you'd say, give him your thoughts, please. Well, thank you very much, Mr. President.

Well, so last week, a government panel called the Make America Healthy Again commission, it was put together by President Trump. It came out and issued its first big report.

At its core, this report is a call to action for common sense.

'And it recommended a whole bunch of things, you know, that federal agencies reassess the nation's childhood vaccine schedules, scrutinize ultra-processed foods, study pesticides used in commercial farming. What did you and I guess the broader health community make of what they said?

'Well, I think one should be suspicious of the fact that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Has been a science denialist for 20 years. I mean, despite study after study, for example, showing that vaccines are safe and effective, showing that the MMR vaccine, for example, measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, doesn't cause autism. I think that R.F.K. Jr. Just ignores those studies because he has this fixed, non-science-based, immutable belief that vaccines cause autism, so there's nothing. You're going to ever say to him that's going to make him feel differently. I think what's interesting in that Maha report is that there were at least seven references that don't exist. He just made them up. And this is who he is.

Wait, this... court reference.

'Is studies that just don't exist? Yeah, there was, I think, a notice, N-O-T-U-S put out a thing today showing that there were a handful of studies that don't exist, or there were also studies that completely misrepresented what that study showed. This shouldn't be surprising. This is who R.F.K. Trunier is.

Yeah, and the White House is standing by the substance of the report, but did say it had some, quote, formatting errors and it'll be updated. But speaking of reports, Kennedy also said on a recent episode of the Ultimate Human podcast that he may stop government scientists from publishing in top medical journals like Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA. What would be the impact of something like that?

But we would be a less informed public.

I'm gonna be an advocate for strong science.

I mean, he, in that second confirmation hearing, in front of the HELP Committee, Health, Education, and Labor Pensions Committee, he held up a paper that said, this is a gold standard paper, this is what I mean. This is the kind of studies we should be doing.

'There was a study that came out last week of 47,000 nine-year-olds in the Medicaid system in Florida.

'And it was a study done by Mawson and colleagues looking at a Florida Medicaid group who received or didn't receive vaccines. It was horribly flawed. It was methodologically flawed as to be uninterpretable. It was never published in a scientific journal, never published a medical journal, never peer reviewed, funded by an anti-vaccine group. That to him was gold standard science, which tells you he has a bias and he is going to try and fit data into that bias. And we're just gonna be seeing more and more of that.

There are other studies out there. I just wanna follow the science. And I will do, if the science says, and I am wrong about what I've said in the past, as I said, I will publicly apologize.

He doesn't like the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association or Lancet because they have a rigorous peer review process and therefore, relatively good studies get published as compared to the kind of stuff that he buys into.

Well, and what he says is that these journals are in the pocket of big pharma and are just out for profits. Is there any truth to that?

So, for example, a study is published that shows that MMR doesn't cause autism. Show that the people who did that study, the authors who, or researchers who did that study were biased. Prove it instead of just this kind of vague, bald flag waving that he does, claiming conspiracy and innuendo.

Well, I mean, it's clear that you're not a fan of the guy. I can sense that quite clearly. But is there, like, what would you say to the idea that this is what Trump voters wanted, someone that would come in, question the establishment, the system, and this is kind of how they're doing it? Well, do I?

That pharmaceutical companies have acted aggressively and unethically and illegally. Yes, probably the opioid crisis is the best example of that. And there's other examples of that as well. But again, that doesn't mean that they always act unethical or aggressively or illegally. And I think that when you look at a scientific study that's published, for example, in the New England Journal of Medicine, those are generally excellent studies that are peer reviewed and held to a very high standard. And if he can show where that's not true, where they're not held to high standard, where they're consistently publishing things because that simply promotes the pharmaceutical industry, prove it instead of just saying it.

Yeah, I guess I'm wondering this idea of trust and trusting the science. I think there is a section of people out there who just generally aren't buying what is out there. So, like, where does this go if he's kind of putting out this stuff that is not backed by science and like you say, he's just kind of saying it rather than showing the

No, I think we're now entering an age where people simply declare their own truths, including scientific truths. And I do think science is losing its voice as a source of truth. And it's a worrisome time. And I think that's what you're seeing. You're seeing this sort of attack on science. And in many ways, I think it's the consequence of the early stages of the pandemic. When, for example, in 2020, we didn't have anything. We didn't monoclonals or antivirals or vaccines until the end of the year. So what do we do? We shuttered schools, we closed businesses, we restricted travel, we isolated quarantine, masks, social distancing. I think people saw that as massive government overreach. I think the following year when we had a vaccine and you couldn't go to your favorite bar or restaurant or sporting event or a bar and we're fired from your job if you didn't get vaccinated. Again, I think that people saw that as an impingement on their personal freedoms. And that's extended to. Personal freedom I have to declare my own scientific truth. I believe, for example, people say that hydroxychloroquine treated COVID or that ivermictin treated COVID, or that the lab leak hypothesis was real, when all of that wasn't true. And it wasn't through because study after study in excellent journals like regarding lab leak, you know, cell and nature and science have shown that this was an animal to human spillover event that occurred in the the southwestern of the Hunan seafood market. In late 2019, but nonetheless, the government is sort of declaring that we were right, that we are right to make those statements back then, even though they weren't. And I think that's what you're saying.

What do scientists do with that? How do they wrest control of that back? Or are we at a point where that declaring is just going to be the way that this kind of goes forward, at least for the next couple of years?

I think a good science does win out in the end. I mean, you know, like Galileo, when he was sort of put in chains for daring to buy into Copernicus's theory that the earth revolves around the sun. I mean he was made to retract that in front of this Roman Catholic tribunal. And you know he's famously said as he was being marched out in chains, referring to the earth and presumably in Italian. And yet he said it still moves. You can put me in chains. But the fact is the earth does still revolve around the Sun and vaccines don't cause autism and it doesn't matter how many. Sycophants or media outlets or fringe scientists or fringe doctors, RFK junior gets to say that vaccines do cause autism. The fact is that they don't because good science does win out in the end and I think we have to know that.

I think Galileo would have been an interesting follow on social media, to say the least. Well, Dr. Paul Offit, thanks so much for the perspective. I appreciate it.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Matt Martinez, Felicia Patinkin, and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Mark Duffy, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Jamie Gumbrecht and Wendy Brundage. We'll be back on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.