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May 31, 2025 - Conspirituality
33:57
Brief: The FDA Amateur Hour Podcast

Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad claim they're going to open the "black box" at the FDA, an agency they're now both employed at. So they started a podcast. It's not the first official FDA podcast, but it certainly fits into the contrarian ethos both men have cultivated since 2020. Derek and Julian listen in to see how much of that box is actually being opened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people.
Everyone thought they knew her, until they didn't.
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real?
Is this real?
I just couldn't wrap my head around, what kind of person would do that to another person?
This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?
And I maximized that while I was lying.
Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Nomi Frye.
I'm Vincent Cunningham.
I'm Alex Schwartz.
And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker.
Guys, what do we do on the show every week?
We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.
That's right.
We take something that's going on in the culture now.
Maybe it's a movie.
Maybe it's a book.
Maybe it's just kind of a trend.
And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.
New episodes drop every Thursday.
Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Unscripted, no makeup, live from the FDA.
Welcome, Vinay Prasad.
Great to see you.
It's great to be here, Marty.
It's great to be joined.
And I don't know exactly what we're doing, but we're having a conversation.
And this is just going to be some civil discourse here, having fun.
I think it's good for people to see what we're talking about, how we're thinking about things, instead of the FDA kind of being a black box of, you know, what's going on inside the agency.
Absolutely, Marty.
I think ultimately the FDA serves the American people and it's really And too often, so many articles about the FDA are behind a paywall for industry insiders only, and we're going to try to make the FDA accessible to the average person in America.
And so it begins, Derek, the FDA Amateur Hour podcast.
On May the 8th, the FDA's YouTube channel launched a new podcast on which Commissioner Marty McCary hosts conversations for the people.
This was literally the day after Vinay Prasad was appointed as head of Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccine licensing.
Which means he's now close to the top of the government public health apparatus that he has spent five years trashing on his own YouTube channel, which features a long list of contrarian videos showing how wrong, if you just look through the titles, he's been on COVID almost every step of the way.
The most telling title from his COVID period, when he was an outsider, is a Reason TV interview he did that was called Stop Trusting the Public Health Establishment.
Well, good job, Dr. Prasad, because you are the public health establishment now.
Regarding this YouTube channel, the FDA one, I can almost picture Prasad kind of pitching the populist social media communications idea that would draw on his extensive experience spreading medical misinformation on video during his job interview with Macri.
I think that's one reason he might have been brought on.
I'll get to that point in a moment.
I have to first say that I don't know exactly what we're doing is both an understatement and a perfect encapsulation of the FDA and the HHS in general right now.
It just came out.
And this is what is being presented as the face of public health right now.
Just clarify two things here that they bring up in this, because there's this whole idea of making the FDA accessible, which they're presenting as now they're doing it in this podcast form.
It's in a video.
But I looked, and in 2021, the FDA launched a podcast series.
And this is the actual scope and what they were trying to do from that page.
For this podcast series, we will focus on the tech-enabled side of the equation.
We will explore how digital technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and sensor technologies can help improve business processes, enable us to better predict and prevent foodborne challenges, and better detect and respond to problems.
The way that Prasad and Macri are presenting it is if they're finally revealing what's going on inside of the agency.
For the first time ever.
Two things.
A, as I just referenced, they had a podcast.
B, here's the thing about bureaucracy.
If you ever want to just spend a really boring afternoon doing something, just go to any of the agency websites.
Most things that they do are listed on the sites.
But here's where I think Prasad is right and why this is smart in terms of appealing to their crowd.
I listened to some of that initial 2021 FDA podcast series.
It's fucking boring.
It's not well produced.
They're all using different microphones.
It's the sound qualities.
And they're just talking about science, which if you don't care – And that's always been the trouble with bureaucracies.
And with science in general, communicating science is really fucking hard.
And communicating the bureaucratic processes is really boring.
Totally.
What Prasad and Macri are doing, I think, are creating a form of state media here that is based on the power of social relationships that they've been able to develop being COVID contrarians.
So it is a smart marketing move.
Because you see them, there's one moment, and I know we have like five episodes, you've clipped from a few of them, Julian, but I watched a few of each of them.
And at one moment, Macri is, where they position themselves is in kind of this U-shaped building where they're right, they have a really sweet spot in front of the windows so you can see how big the building is.
And Macri points to see all these amazing scientists doing this.
They have the affect down, but if you listen to the content, which we're going to do a little more of, it's all the parasocial stuff.
They spend time talking about how they were proven right.
They were the contrarians, and now it turns out, what were they right about they don't actually talk about?
Totally.
But that's the function of state media.
It's more affect than science.
And that is what it feels like this series really is going to be about.
I think there are a lot of questions, a lot of excitement and enthusiasm.
I saw something this morning saying, you know, the scientific community is finally You were early tracking the evidence and not everybody was on board and now they're seeing it.
But there was some kind of talk about maybe you've been unfair about how things were handled from a policy perspective because in the moment of crisis, you don't have time to collect the evidence.
Yeah, they were early tracking the evidence, Derek.
They were way ahead of the CDC and the WHO and whatever the organization is in China.
So that's Sandra Jane Nagpal.
She's the third in this little podcast trio.
She's the new Director of Policy and Research Strategy at the FDA.
Her role as a participant on all videos so far seems to be to play the foil a little bit, but also just to add some lightness and a different voice.
She brings up some of the mainstream concern here, but then she also hits the high notes about how these outsider experts have now finally been vindicated by the scientific community.
Spoiler, they haven't.
I would just direct anyone interested to pick up a copy of Dr. Jonathan Howard's book, We Want Them Infected, which I've talked to him a couple times on the pod, so you can also listen to my interviews with him here.
And that book just painstakingly details the timeline of public statements and interviews and podcast conversations created by Macri.
Prasad and their buddy, Jay Bhattacharya, and all their other friends, in which they repeatedly argued against the scientific consensus.
They made grossly inaccurate predictions about what was going to happen next with the pandemic, and they never went back and said, oh, turns out we were wrong.
You flagged it, but the scientific community is absolutely not seeing what you guys saw early on.
I don't know Nagpal.
I've only been introduced to her.
I don't really make assumptions.
He seems to be kind of a wedge between them to sort of be a yes woman in some ways and move the conversation along.
Any scientist or researcher I've talked to or read is repeatedly showing how wrong these men are.
But again, that's how propaganda functions in a closed ecosystem.
And that is what the HHS is now doing.
They have created the black box.
Like most of Maha, it is very MAGA.
They are being transparent in the sense that they're saying a lot of shit publicly.
But as I flagged with the Maha Commission report, you have to actually do the work and see that it's not true.
When you make up citations, when you're making up researchers or journals, journal articles that don't actually exist, that is propaganda.
No good scientist would do that.
You would be kicked out of school.
You'd be kicked out of your institution if you ever submitted a report that had made-up journals and you were caught.
Because they are the dogs that caught the car, because they are the ones in power, they don't have to worry about being caught in terms of any actual oversight.
They are being caught by journalists, but we also know how these men feel about journalists because they will say that the people actually doing the fact-checking are the propagandists because that's what they have to say in order to give themselves cover and to keep Yeah,
and I've been referring to this as a broad kind of MAGA strategy of retroactive justification, where essentially you accuse the other side preemptively for like years now of doing the things that you are now doing, but then claim that you've come in to reform the terrible thing that they were doing, which they weren't doing, but which you are now doing.
So now we're going to be transparent, but we're going to stop the CDC from telling.
The whole country about the E. coli and the measles and the pertussis and the hepatitis, right?
And we're recording this the day after it was announced that Kennedy canceled a nearly $700 billion contract with Moderna.
I posted that on our Instagram, the initial reporting about it, which said – But what that actually entails, as more reporting came out, is Moderna was developing a bird flu vaccine specifically.
Now, of course, as we said on Thursday's episode, the bird But this is a level deeper here because what Moderna was doing was they were using mRNA technology to develop these vaccines and other potential vaccines in order to get ahead of any incoming pandemics.
Now that they can't do that work...
So we're in a really dangerous place for when something happens.
Now, also to get ahead of it, I saw some of the contrarians because there is a new COVID strain.
That is now going around that apparently began in China and now it's in America.
They're doing the same technique being like, oh, they're just trying to scare you again in order to make you think you need these boosters.
I fear that if this strain is potentially bad, we're going to see a real big upswing in hospitalizations again.
And I don't know.
What or how they're even going to attend to that besides not tracking data?
Yeah.
So when you take the most spectacularly successful, probably like medical science project in the midst of a crisis and slander it and deny how just extraordinary it is that we're able to get these COVID vaccines as quickly as we were and how effective they were.
You absolutely hamstring yourself because based on this political propaganda need to say, oh, well, our followers believe this.
And so we're just going to go with that as the narrative that the vaccines didn't really work, that they weren't well tested, that they weren't really safe, et cetera, et cetera.
And then with Macri, you actually shared something with me where he had talked about, he was asked in an interview or a press conference about potentially there being a vaccine for the chickens so that they don't get the bird flu.
And he's like, oh, we don't know if we want to mess with mother nature.
We have to look at the risk.
Have you been following the ostriches at all?
No.
Okay.
So in Canada, the Canadian government was going to call about, I believe it was 700 ostriches because the bird flu had infected some ostriches.
So they were going to get ahead of it.
Kennedy and Dr. Oz came out and just did their propaganda.
You can't do this.
Oz suggested that Taking all 700 ostriches and bringing him to his farm, which I believe is in Florida.
Think about that.
like, okay, I've gone to Canada a bunch of times, driven, flown.
There are all sorts of...
I tried to get our puppy from someone in Vancouver and it was a whole process.
It didn't work out.
We got it from someone else in America because of how hard it is to get anything across the border.
Sure.
And Oz is sitting here being like, let me bring these 700 ostriches, which may have bird flu, into our country.
Really, really smart.
I've got an interesting little factoid for you.
In South Africa, we eat ostrich jerky, and it's actually really good.
It probably sounds disgusting to a lot of people, but I propose that if we are able to just cut through all of that.
You know, bureaucratic red tape of the deep state and bring the ostriches here.
We should put them wherever all of these white South African farmers are being.
Make them feel at home.
Yes.
Did you ever eat at Fuddruckers?
What's that?
That was a burger joint where I grew up in New Jersey.
I don't know how national it was.
They introduced an ostrich burger in the 90s.
I never tried it.
I'll be honest.
I haven't tried it, but I'll take your word for it.
All right.
So back to the clips.
Here's Macri suggesting a radical.
An open new way of doing scientific discourse and regulatory process by podcast.
What if we brought in, I don't want to call them stakeholders, but we brought in different experts on different topics and just had an open discourse.
Just bring them in, have a roundtable.
You don't have to go through all the red tape of, you know, people coming through an official commission, which has a whole lot of bureaucracy and costs.
We just invite people in for a roundtable discussion.
Let them talk passionately about all the scientific topics that they think are important to talk about that we have not been talking about.
And then let that discourse take place.
And we can just listen.
I love that.
And things that don't fit neatly within the Drug Advisory Committee model.
Topics that kind of span different groups and different fields.
I know you've got a couple of those planned in the summertime.
I was talking to some of our folks back there, and I think Bigfoot is supportive.
I don't know where he is right now, but he's one of our AV experts.
Bigfoot around?
Okay.
He's monitoring your audio.
Yeah, there he is.
And just so people know, we're not assigning you a nickname that you haven't assigned to yourself already.
Self-appointed.
Self-appointed, and we have seen Bigfoot.
Yeah.
Open discourse.
Let me point out that they have the comments turned off on their YouTube channel, so I don't know how open they want to be.
Second, I know that comedians are largely responsible for making the podcast genre become mainstream, but they're comedians.
You guys should leave it aside.
Just do your work.
Yeah, there's a real laid-back emphasis on, like, this is going to be accessible and fun, and we're going to be kind of silly, and we're going to talk about our friend Bigfoot.
Yeah, this idea that you can do FDA policy by podcast, you can cut through the red tape of bureaucracy.
You are now the bureaucrats.
You can bring in just random people to talk about topics that are usually outside of the purview.
So like, yeah, now we're in charge of the FDA, but we're going to do like non-FDA stuff here because, you know, we just think that's interesting.
Passionate outsiders who want to talk about their favorite science topics that don't normally get enough airtime.
I wonder what those topics could be.
This is just bizarre.
In their next episode, they actually had a guest.
So the guest is Kyle Diamantas.
And if you've not heard of him, he's the 37-year-old Florida attorney who happens to be a hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr.
And he now, as the FDA Deputy Commissioner of Human Foods, is overseeing regulation of 80% of America's food supply.
Now, to be fair, he does have some experience with food policy from the litigation side, but that's it.
Maybe they can do some hunting trips to find the ostriches.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
We've got some delicious breaded shrimp over here right in front of Dr. McCary.
And we actually have a standard of identity for frozen breaded shrimp and lightly breaded shrimp.
And if it has 65% shrimp, you can call it lightly breaded.
But if it's more than 65%, then you can't.
Why does the government have to tell you what is breaded shrimp versus non-breaded shrimp?
Yeah, you know, and it's a great question, and I think originally some of these were sort of built out of idealistic visions, and there was a lot of trade associations that have and continue to push for standards for products, but the reality is consumers no longer need that level of protection, Right, we've got a more robust Labeling is more robust.
Sanjula here has a bowl of mixed nuts.
I have two types of mixed nuts.
And this one, and I took a look at this earlier, this one looks like you can call it mixed nuts because this has four different types of tree nuts in it.
But over here I'm seeing I also have a bunch of different ones here.
I'm seeing you have maybe...
I've got a different flavor of cashews, so does that not count?
So if you called this product mixed nuts, you would be in violation of the standard of identity because you don't have four or more of the required tree nuts.
But it's a mixture of nuts.
Well, it doesn't matter, Sandra.
You're now breaking the law.
What's the penalty?
I mean, are we talking jail time if you have?
And there's a mixture.
there's all of this self-contradictory stuff that's part of their propaganda, right?
So on the one hand, Why should he have to tell you what different classifications are?
This is just ridiculous.
Ha ha ha.
I'm the new guy in town.
I don't even understand what all this regulatory stuff is for.
There's robust regulations anyway.
don't need to be.
And then on the other hand, It's just crazy.
I want to include these segments as much as they're kind of draggy and kind of ridiculous because this is like a TV cooking show and they're just having a good chuckle about all of these.
wacky things.
And meanwhile, we're facing a foodborne illness crisis and their boss wants to lift FDA suppression of raw milk products.
Listeners may be wondering about those clips, and I want to assure you that this is what most of the podcasts are like.
They're not actually talking about science.
They're not talking about what their jobs are.
I was actually blown away because first I listened to the clips you chose.
And then I said, I have to see what else they're doing here.
And besides the actual roundtable on talk, which we'll get to next in terms of the scope, the actual podcast we're discussing is just these three people and then occasional guests shooting the shit and then...
And from my perspective, I'm sitting here.
So last night I went on a little book buying binge.
I use a site called Biblio.
If you don't know it, if listeners don't know it, it is where you can access all the used bookstores across the country for older editions.
So that's usually where I head to.
I use bookstore.org if I want newer books, Biblio if I want to find older books.
I ordered about six books.
On the history of chemistry and of vaccines.
Because so much of my work now is just tracking this misinformation.
And I have a pretty good working knowledge of vaccination and the history.
Chemistry, not so much.
And I wanted to just find more so that I can better educate myself.
And then I hear what these fucking idiots are doing.
These are the people who are running the agencies that are supposed to be setting the policies.
for all this history and science that I'm studying.
And this is now what they're doing.
And it's so deflating in some ways.
It's not going to stop because I think the pursuit of knowledge and education is extremely important.
But just listening to this and then next Thursday, we're going to be covering the latest Aubrey Marcus episode.
So I just finished the two hour, 37 minute episode of that.
Listening to all this content, it's so deflating and demeaning to think that people with money and positions of power, this is what they're spending their time doing instead of actually trying to help better inform people.
Yeah, I mean, I will admit to some schadenfreude because...
they're roughly like 1,000, 2,000.
So even though they're employing this kind of populist alternative new media approach, It's not getting traction yet, but things start slowly.
We started with a couple hundred listeners.
That's how it builds.
I don't particularly see this as a series ever becoming successful because of how stupid and irreverent it is, but I could see particular episodes being used in a Maha commission, for example, and really blowing up.
Yeah, my next comment was going to be, until they have RFK Judy Arata as their guest.
On their next episode, this is actually something that we covered on the episode this past Thursday.
We were back to no guests, just Marty and Sanjula and Vinay talking about how the COVID vaccines just really didn't work.
And they shouldn't have been given to anyone healthy, thin and younger than 65. And then on their next episode, they...
Rather than using existing safety data and testing for efficacy the same way we do for the new flu shot each year, they also talk about the importance of consolidating The completely open-source VAERS and other types of reporting systems on adverse events with other medical data on vaccines,
which is potentially catastrophic because what they're really talking about is contaminating the existing legitimate data on how rare adverse events are and how even more rare severe adverse events are with all of this just completely unverified, unexamined.
That comes in off the internet from anyone who wants to say whatever they like.
But here's the last clip that we'll share with you.
The FDA Direct Episode 5 summarized and discussed the New England Journal of Medicine article that Makary and Prasad just published about COVID booster policy.
And again, we covered this on the last Thursday's episode.
Here's where they started.
Let me say before I roll the clip that I find it deeply ironic.
That the day after this article was published, or a couple days after, RFK Jr. on Gary Brecka's podcast said he wants to ban federal scientists from publishing in top medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine.
So I wonder how he's going to discipline these men because they've just published there.
And we are talking about one potential root cause in particular, and that is the roundtable we just had on talc.
And so we convened experts from around the world, and they came and educated us about talc.
And it was pretty eye-opening, I would say.
It was.
And, you know, when a certain company was in the news a couple years ago, but I had not thought about it since then, and now I'm reevaluating a lot of what I consume now.
Yeah, I learned a ton, and I had not appreciated that it was used almost as an industrial lubricant in the tablets and pills of even commonly taken prescription medications.
I hadn't appreciated that that was the case.
The number one?
Three, nine, and ten most common medications in the United States have talc.
In the pill.
In the pill or on the pill.
Yeah.
So if it is that widespread, I think if it was really, really as dangerous as they're making it seem, we would see a massive, massive spike in the data that produced a real causative connection.
This refers back to an FDA roundtable that they held on May 21st on the health dangers of talc.
Which, as it turns out, actually is a problematic substance.
Most people are familiar with it in the form of baby powder.
Sometimes talc is contaminated with asbestos.
And there's some evidence that talc may therefore be inculcated in some ovarian cancers.
And for this reason, many companies phased out its use after lawsuits starting about five years ago.
So the damning evidence here is stronger, much stronger, really, than for the other substances that Maha demonizes, like seed oils and food dyes and vaccine ingredients.
Pesticides that have not been shown to have the deleterious effects that they're implying.
But talc is also really just the latest chemical toxin that they're gambling on as a, you heard it, root cause of America's health problems while ignoring and even suppressing things like the recent E. coli outbreak that affected 15 states.
It is.
It's low-hanging fruit.
I don't know why she didn't say Johnson& Johnson.
She just said some company.
It was weird.
But it's a very famous lawsuit from 2009 because of that.
And finding trace elements of asbestos inside is a problematic issue.
You know, I looked at some of the literature and right now the consequences, But like any good science, you keep looking at it.
And if it's problematic, you take it out.
As you said, some companies have been proactive in phasing it out, which is probably a smart move for marketing as well as for potential problems down the road.
But I believe they're starting with something.
Again, it's been 16 years that this has been in news cycles and being discussed by many agencies through many administrations.
It's low-hanging fruit.
It opens the door for the next round table, which will be on seed oils, for example.
And finally, I just want to point out that the root cause thing is really important because it is one of the Maha brain worms that's out there.
The idea that They're the ones who are actually doing it.
That is complete bullshit because researchers would really like to know what causes diseases so they can stop them or fight them.
That is part of scientific research.
Yes.
I personally have long believed there's probably an overprescription process problem.
We know that we do not get enough time with doctors to really go through everything because of our insurance system here in America.
So therefore, it just makes sense to get people out of pain quicker, which can lead to the overprescription process.
This is a lot of different factors.
I don't think in any of these podcast episodes they ever entertain the notion of socialized medicine.
So therefore, they have to talk around the points of the root causes at all times.
Dr. Andrea Love wrote an article recently talking about how the root cause has a name.
It's etiology, which is identifying what causes disease.
And what I noticed is as people were pushing back for the last couple months, Bobby Kennedy has been using the word etiology more and more in interviews because he's trying to play that line of functional medicine root cause propaganda but make it seem like he's actually talking in a scientific term.
And I have to say that is what a propaganda machine does and Maha has gotten much better at it.
Because not only am I seeing Kennedy, but I'm also noticing the main influencers.
And I'm not just talking about the people employed in the government, but like the Maha coalition, the arm that has just produced the first of four documentaries that I'm sure I'm going to have to fucking watch now.
Like Vani Hari and what Kali means is in the administration, Will Cole.
They're all using the same language.
A growingly sophisticated machine that's emerging here.
And we really need to keep identifying what they're doing and how they're doing it because just as Project 2025 is a playbook, this Maha Commission report and everything they're producing is also a playbook for how AltMed is going to infiltrate mainstream and access.
We need to be identifying and keep calling it out because they are getting better at it.
Yeah, so what we have is a sham medical science public health set of institutions emerging here.
And really, you can trace this all the way back.
It's our kind of subculture that I think has some of the burden to bear in terms of blame here, which is that there's been this pervasive idealizing of holistic and alternative medicine as being a way of addressing the gaps in conventional quote-unquote Western medicine where they don't address the root causes.
They're not being holistic enough.
They're using all kinds of unnatural pharmaceutical chemicals.
We don't know how toxic those might be like that.
I repeated a lot of those.
kind of ideas 15, 20 years ago.
It's a very appealing identity and sort of zeitgeist.
And yet here we are now with, you know, really the most technically sophisticated, spectacularly successful medical science enterprise in the history of human beings.
And it's now being completely undermined with this performative kind of possibility.
We have the answer.
There's a chronic disease epidemic, and it's because of all these things that conventional Western medicine has neglected to look at carefully enough.
Meanwhile, there's tons of research that says otherwise.
And therefore, we're going to come in and be the new sheriff in town and solve all of these things with these random like red herrings.
And as you say, low hanging fruit, things that have been known about for years, if not decades.
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