| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | |
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| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Brian Blaize. | ||
| He's president of Paragon Health Institute, formerly White House National Economic Council policy advisor in the first Trump administration. | ||
| Brian, welcome. | ||
| Amy, thanks for having me. | ||
| Just to ask about Paragon Health Institute, your mission and your funding. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Paragon, I founded it about three and a half years ago, and we are a health policy research institute that is dedicated to evaluating how government programs are working and developing sets of reforms that empower patients and really reform government programs by changing incentives so that people are oriented and sort of all the actors oriented at getting as much value out of the system as possible. | ||
| We're a nonprofit, so we're funded by individuals and foundations. | ||
| Paragon takes no corporate or industry funding. | ||
| And why did you feel the need to create Paragon Health? | ||
| Was it, like, what are the issues that you're trying to solve? | ||
| Health policy is, I think, the most important domestic policy issue facing the country. | ||
| It's a huge part of family budgets. | ||
| It's a huge part of what the federal government does, a huge part of what states do. | ||
| And policies are not working for the American people. | ||
| They're not working for patients. | ||
| The quality of health care is often underwhelming. | ||
| And they're not working for sort of the hardworking American families and the taxpayers that are financing these programs. | ||
| So there's a lot of things broken that need to be fixed. | ||
| Why is it? | ||
| Why is health care so expensive in this country? | ||
| And as you said, the quality is not there. | ||
| I mean, that's a very good go and answer that for a long time. | ||
| What's the biggest reason? | ||
| I mean, a lot of it goes back to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. | ||
| They used cost-based reimbursement. | ||
| So hospitals were getting as much from the payer as they claimed their cost to be, which led to a very inflationary increase. | ||
| And we've really separated the end user of health care from the price of those services. | ||
| 90% of what we spend in health care comes from third-party payers. | ||
| It comes from the government bureaucracy or it comes from health insurance companies. | ||
| So we've created this big wedge between the supplier, the producer of the service, and the user of that service. | ||
| And there's a lot of sort of intermediaries in the process, and some of them play valuable roles, and some of them, I think, are less valuable. | ||
| But they have just led to sort of escalating costs over the past really several decades. | ||
| I want to play you a portion of RFK Jr.'s confirmation hearing from yesterday. | ||
| He talked to senators. | ||
| This is Senator Michael Bennett. | ||
| He's a Democrat of Colorado. | ||
| Talking about his previous views on health issues. | ||
| And then I'll get your response. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did you say that COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon that targets black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people? | |
| I didn't say it was deliberately targeted. | ||
| I just quoted an NIH-funded and NIH published study. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did you say that it targets black and white people but spared Ashkenazi? | |
| I quoted a study, or I quoted an NIH study that showed that I'll take that as certain raised. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have to move on. | |
| Did you say that Lyme disease is highly likely a materially engineered bioweapon? | ||
| I made sure I put in the highly likely. | ||
| Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon? | ||
| I probably did say that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did you say that? | |
| I want all of our colleagues to hear it, Mr. Kennedy. | ||
| I want them to hear it. | ||
| You said yes. | ||
| Did you say that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender? | ||
| No, I never said that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, I have the record that I'll give to the chairman, and he can make his judgment about what you said. | |
| Did you write in your book, and it's undeniable, that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes or no, Mr. Kennedy? | |
| I'm not sure if I may exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, I'll give it to the chairman, Mr. Kennedy. | |
| And my final question, did you say on a podcast, and I quote, I wouldn't leave it, abortion, to the states. | ||
| My belief is we should leave it to the woman. | ||
| We shouldn't have the government involved, even if it's full term. | ||
| Did you say that, Mr. Kennedy? | ||
| Senator, I believe that every abortion is a tragedy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did you say it, Mr. Kennedy? | |
| This matters. | ||
| It doesn't matter what you come here and say that isn't true, that's not reflective of what you really believe, that you haven't said over decade after decade after decade, because unlike other jobs we're confirming around this place, | ||
| this is a job where it is life and death for the kids that I used to work for in the Denver public schools and for families all over this country that are suffering from living in the richest country of the world that can't deliver basic health care and basic mental health care to them. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's too important for the games that you're playing, Mr. Kennedy. | |
| And I hope my colleagues will say to the president, I have no influence over him. | ||
| I hope my colleagues will say to the president, out of 330 million Americans, we can do better than this. | ||
| What do you think of that, Brian Blaise? | ||
| Well, it doesn't sound like Senator Bennett is ready to vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy as secretary. | ||
| I would say that, you know, I think the president selected Mr. Kennedy because of the compelling message around Make America Healthy again. | ||
| Which we'll talk about. | ||
| But I wanted to ask you, do you believe that he is qualified for that position? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| He was selected by the president, and I think he is qualified. | ||
| Do you believe he's qualified because he was selected by the president or because of his qualifications? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think both. | ||
| The president vetted candidates for that position. | ||
| It's a really important position. | ||
| And I think that Mr. Kennedy brings certain attributes and skills to that position that are going to be a good fit to be secretary. | ||
| Make America Healthy Again. | ||
| Walk us through some of those key points. | ||
| So I think, first of all, it's diagnosing the state of American health. | ||
| And if you look at many measures of American health, one of the principal ones being life expectancy, we've been in decline. | ||
| So starting in 2014 for three straight years, life expectancy in the U.S. declined. | ||
| And then, of course, we had the pandemic and the tragedy around the pandemic. | ||
| So life expectancy is lower now than it was a decade ago. | ||
| And I think you've got an increase in many chronic chronic diseases, diabetes, obesity. | ||
| I think during the hearing yesterday, about two out of three Americans struggle with obesity or overweight. | ||
| And there are sort of problems with children too, both in terms of I think a third of kids overweight or obese, as well as a lot of mental health. | ||
| challenges that were severely exacerbated during the lockdowns in the pandemic. | ||
| So you think you have a lot of, I mean, American health has stagnated over the last 15 years, and I think public policy has failed to recognize that. | ||
| It's been focused on very different things in health policy. | ||
| And I think he's going to reorient the conversation back to what matters for American health. | ||
| And we'll take your calls for Brian Blaise talking about health policy. | ||
| Our lines are bipartisan. | ||
| Democrats 202748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Mr. Kennedy mentioned getting chemicals out of food. | ||
| That would require regulation of the food industry. | ||
| What kind of regulation do you think is needed right now? | ||
| Well, I mean, and also it overlaps with the USDA and the guidance that the federal government puts out. | ||
| Puts out to consumers. | ||
| Puts out to consumers. | ||
| Yeah, I think one of the main problems in what the government has put out in terms of nutrition advice is the food pyramid. | ||
| If you go back to when the food pyramid was created several decades ago, right, it really emphasized the heavy carbohydrate diet. | ||
| And it really overplayed problems with fat. | ||
| And what we've learned now from nutrition science is that that was the exact wrong guidance to be giving to American families. | ||
| We didn't need to have high sugar, high carbohydrate diets, that the excess sugar is really what's problematic. | ||
| So I think, you know, if I'm looking at it from a sort of what should they do first, you should look at what is the government initially doing, what information are they putting out so that they're providing Americans with better information about what they put into their bodies. | ||
| But going back to the chemicals such as food dyes, preservatives, is that something that you feel that the government should mandate be out of our food supply? | ||
| I think they need to run a process on that and weigh the pros and cons. | ||
| I know that the FDA just banned, I think, red dye number three from our food supply starting in 2027. | ||
| I know that is consistent with the direction that Mr. Kennedy wants to take. | ||
| So it seems like there's bipartisan agreement on certain food additives and chemicals that should be removed. | ||
| That's not my area of expertise. | ||
| So I think they need to run the process. | ||
| They need to understand the science. | ||
| Ultimately, I think, and he said this about, you know, I'm fine with people that go to McDonald's and have cheeseburger and Coke, right? | ||
| It's about making sure that Americans have the information that they need so that they can make the best decisions possible for them. | ||
| And you agree with him that it should be the same with vaccines, that you should just make whatever choice on vaccines without the government telling you these are the vaccines that are recommended or required. | ||
| Well, I think there's differences with like the COVID vaccine and the requirements that the government put on the COVID vaccine and certainly like the mandate to have military members. | ||
| So leaving aside the COVID vaccine, because that's a newer one. | ||
| But if we're to look at, for instance, polio or measles. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, from listening to his testimony yesterday, he endorsed the polio vaccine, the measles vaccine. | ||
| I don't think there's disagreement among whether Americans should be taking those types of vaccines. | ||
| Let's talk to callers. | ||
| We'll start with Catherine in Cleves, Ohio, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, Sufim. | |
| I'm a longtime listener, and I call pretty frequently. | ||
| But my statements are: first, we have plenty of money in our health care system. | ||
| The problem is that we have CEOs and stockholders who take all the cream, and then we're left with just whey for the people who pay the bills. | ||
| I'm 76 years old. | ||
| I'm on Medicare. | ||
| I'm handicapped now on oxygen 24 hours a day. | ||
| And I see my health care benefits falling apart and not being able to get the things that I need. | ||
| We have plenty of money in health care. | ||
| It's just that we need to be, what would I say? | ||
| It's you make no profits off of health care. | ||
| Health care should go all to the people. | ||
| And my second one is, I question your views on how you think that Mr. Kennedy is qualified. | ||
| If this was 100 years ago, we would say he was a snake oil salesman. | ||
| He changes. | ||
| We can't really depend on what he says because he won't even admit to the things he said in the past because it doesn't meet his criteria today because he's trying to get a job in the Trump administration. | ||
| If he was trying to get a job in someone else's administration, he would be singing a different song. | ||
| So if you trust this man, I wouldn't trust him. | ||
| Family doesn't trust him. | ||
| All right, Catherine, we'll get a response on those two topics. | ||
| Yeah, so on topic number one, I agree there is plenty of money in the health care system. | ||
| I think that profits are fine. | ||
| Profits are actually good. | ||
| We want to have a profit motive and suppliers that can make a profit by providing better health care services, by developing innovative products to get them to consumers. | ||
| But the profits that many in the health care industry get now are not the result of providing value to a consumer. | ||
| They're about how much lobbying power they have in Washington. | ||
| So a lot of these groups, insurers, hospitals, they get more money from the government than they do from the private sector. | ||
| And the resources that are allocated to them are more a function of the lobbying power that those individuals, that those organizations have, rather than the value that they provide. | ||
| On Mr. Kennedy, see, he would be an appointee of President Trump. | ||
| So on areas that they disagree, and abortion is one of them, the president sets the policy agenda. | ||
| And his appointees, the cabinet officials, and all of the people that work in the White House, they have to follow the agenda that the president puts out. | ||
| The president was elected. | ||
| He got 77 million votes. | ||
| And part of that was an embrace of this Make America Healthy Again movement, which was really spearheaded by Robert Kennedy. | ||
| Sarah is next in Edgewater, Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Sarah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| You mentioned earlier that there was a dye that was removed from the Food and Drug Administration. | ||
| They have known for decades that that dye causes cancer in rats. | ||
| And the question is, why would they even allow this to be in food when they know that, right? | ||
| Because this has, in some cases, probably caused cancer. | ||
| Then the second thing is healthcare in America, call it profit care. | ||
| And as you said, there is such a thing as people should make some money. | ||
| However, there's a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse going on. | ||
| And, you know, when you look at every major insurance company that offers Medicare Advantage plans, they have actively defrauded the federal government by tens of billions of dollars a year and have gotten away with it. | ||
| And there has been absolutely no consequence. | ||
| The government should shut down an insurance age, an insurance company, when they actively defraud the federal government. | ||
| Why are companies allowed to continue to offer Medicare Advantage plan when they have defrauded the federal government? | ||
| That I think should be addressed. | ||
| And then the last thing that I wanted to say is a lot of doctor offices today do not do their own billing anymore. | ||
| And I have experienced this by talking to people who work for these outside companies that do the billing for the doctor office. | ||
| And there's a lot of fraud involved in that, too, where employees get incentivized by adding additional, you know, costs to the total bill by adding procedures and changing the coding that's being used, you know, so that they can make more money. | ||
| And then. | ||
| OK, Sarah, it's a lot there. | ||
| Let's get. | ||
| Let's get a response. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Sarah, thank you for that. | ||
| Let me focus on the middle of your comment there on fraud, waste, and abuse. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| There's a tremendous amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in our health care sector. | ||
| I think that comes back to what I mentioned. | ||
| There's a lot of misaligned incentives throughout the healthcare sector with really all of the individuals. | ||
| On Medicare Advantage, there are more than 30 million seniors right now enrolled in Medicare Advantage. | ||
| It's actually more than half of all Medicare enrollees have chosen Medicare Advantage. | ||
| And what Medicare Advantage is, is it is a senior who's on Medicare who chooses to get their benefits offered through a health plan. | ||
| They get the traditional benefits of covering hospital care and physician care. | ||
| They get the pharmaceutical benefit. | ||
| Medicare Advantage plans also offer supplemental benefits. | ||
| They can offer vision, dental, and hearing coverage. | ||
| They can offer gym memberships, benefits that seniors value. | ||
| So I think there's value in Medicare Advantage. | ||
| That said, I think there are ways to improve Medicare Advantage. | ||
| Paragon put out a very comprehensive report last year on ways that we think the Medicare Advantage program could be improved. | ||
| They hit on one thing that you mentioned, the insurer profiting. | ||
| The main issue of controversy there is around its risk adjustment program, where insurers get paid more based on having sicker enrollees. | ||
| And that has given them an incentive to diagnose all of the conditions of the enrollees. | ||
| And in many cases, they have overdiagnosed. | ||
| They've exaggerated the conditions of the enrollees in order to get more money from the government. | ||
| And we think that is a real problem and something that the government should look to address. | ||
| Let's talk to Lynn next, a Republican in Catawba, North Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Yes, I was watching yesterday Bobby Kennedy, and I was, I'm always taken back when he's getting drilled by these Democrats. | ||
| I mean, they have a freaking meltdown. | ||
| There's no sense in it. | ||
| Elizabeth Warren, it seems like it's the Democratic Party that just give the man a break, give him a chance to answer a question. | ||
| They just keep on and on and on. | ||
| I think that what he's trying to do and what President Trump is trying to put in place is the warnings to let everyone know about the number three red die that Bobby has known for how many years did he say 30. | ||
| I could be wrong on that, but there's no telling what we don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that with his health condition that he has studied, this has been his cup of tea, so to speak. | |
| He has done his research. | ||
| He's written six books on nutrition. | ||
| He's very active, and he's exactly right. | ||
| I'm always envious of seeing people in China be so much smaller than the people in the United States. | ||
| I only wish I could be a size three again. | ||
| There's things I could do myself, but I also know that President Trump is trying to get these warnings out, get his cabinet in place to give you the warnings, not to tell you that you can't go to McDonald's. | ||
| It's a choice thing, just like your Amendment One that gives you the right to speak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a choice thing. | |
| But know what you're eating or know what you're drinking because of the possible harm of the side effects. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As far as health system, the cost, the last caller was exactly right. | |
| It's crazy how expensive everything is. | ||
| And I think that over time, jobs has just been added to jobs and billing to went out to other companies. | ||
| And there is ways to cut the spending, which in the long run would help the consumer, which is us. | ||
| And I think that President Trump, give him a chance that spend like 10 days. | ||
| There's no sense in the attitude of the grilling and the screaming, give the man a chance. | ||
| Got it, Lynn. | ||
| Anything to add to that? | ||
| So, Lynn, like the previous caller mentioned, sort of the craziness with the health care billing structure, I agree. | ||
| That's a pry because we have too much that runs through bureaucracy and insurers. | ||
| Just to step back and give you some context on the Department of Health and Human Services, it is a massive federal department. | ||
| It's got 80,000 employees. | ||
| If you think about the federal budget, the Medicare program, the Medicaid program run through the Department of Health and Human Services, and you've got all the public health agencies. | ||
| So you've got NIH, FDA, and CDC. | ||
| So it is impossible for any one man on the planet to know everything about all the health care programs that are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services. | ||
| So you've got a set of other people who have been appointed, selected by President Trump. | ||
| Dr. Oz at CMS, Marty McCary at FDA, Jay Bhattacharya at NIH, for example. | ||
| And these are very serious, reform-minded individuals that I think are going to be really great leaders at the individual agencies within HHS and provide good recommendations both to the Secretary as well as to the President. | ||
| You mentioned about 80,000 employees at HHS. | ||
| Are you concerned at all about the potential cuts in the federal workforce in that department impacting the services they're able to give to the American people? | ||
| So it's a tough question to sort of evaluate right now because we don't know what the exact impact is going to be of that order. | ||
| I mean, I know that there's a severe problem with government workers that have not gone back to work in the office. | ||
| So that's one of the issues that is trying to be addressed. | ||
| The Trump administration put out that only 6% of federal workers are back in the office full-time. | ||
| I do think like some of the work that FDA, CDC, and NIH do, yeah, you need to have the scientists there. | ||
| You need to have the evaluators there. | ||
| I don't know the ramifications of that order. | ||
| Jeff in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Democrat, good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm Brian. | |
| I wanted to know if you promote the restrictions they're trying to put on the people on the government food stamps about restrictions what they can buy in supermarkets when it comes to sweets, whether it's ice cream, chips, or sodas, because we have an overweight president that's drinking eight cans of diet soda a day, and he's addicted to fast food. | ||
| Now, I work out. | ||
| I have great blood sugar. | ||
| I should be entitled to buy what I want in the supermarket. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| A lot of these people voted for him. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I hope these are the people that he hurts the most. | ||
| Jeff, are you on SNAP? | ||
| Do you get food stamps? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I work out and I should be entitled to eat whatever I want. | ||
| And currently, Jeff, there's restrictions on what you're able to buy with those food stamps, right? | ||
| You cannot buy soda. | ||
| No, there's no restrictions. | ||
| Or there are no restrictions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Sodas, they're imposing all kinds of things. | ||
| Kennedy and, like I said, Trump are really trying to hurt us on this program. | ||
| They really are. | ||
| And he's drinking eight cans of diet soda. | ||
| There's chemicals in there like aspartain and all that. | ||
| Sorry, Jeff. | ||
| So about the restrictions on food stamps. | ||
| So there is a policy debate now on whether the SNAP program, whether enrollees in that program should be restricted from using that benefit on sugary sodas, on sweets. | ||
| Really a substantial percentage of the spending on that program goes to those consumption of those products. | ||
| There is also a sense that money is fungible and people will use their own money on those products. | ||
| I myself, my view is that I think it's okay for the government to place restrictions on a government benefit. | ||
| So if the government studies this and thinks that there is a problem with too much overconsumption of sugar, soda, and sweets, which clearly there is in the country to place limits on that welfare benefit, then that sounds like a reasonable public policy to me. | ||
| Here's another Jeff, this time in Bayville, New York, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Meety. | |
| Mr. Plays, I'd like to point out to you that you said that there's no disagreement apparently between people understanding that the measles vaccine and the polio vaccine are working. | ||
| But that's not true. | ||
| Mr. Kennedy has been opposed to those specific vaccines. | ||
| That's been brought out in the hearings yesterday. | ||
| He says though with his own words when the senators recount what he has said and then confront him with that, and then he changes his mind suddenly because he's been offered the job, which also has been pointed out, part of the sick affair she He's a very dangerous man to have his HHS secretary. | ||
| It couldn't be worse because there's a very great concern, for example, that H5N1 could turn into a pandemic at some point. | ||
| Hopefully, it won't. | ||
| But there's certainly tremendous concern in the public health community that it would. | ||
| Do we want somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the vaccine program at a time when that vaccine will save millions of lives? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Pick you. | ||
| Well, I mean, what he said yesterday is that he is pro-vaccine, he is pro-polio vaccine, he's pro-measles vaccine. | ||
| I take him at his word that he is in favor of all those vaccines. | ||
| And I know Marty McCary, who has been nominated to lead FDA, is also pro-vaccine. | ||
| He will follow the science and make the recommendations that ultimately are in the best interest of the American people. | ||
| He did say a lot at the hearing that he's going to follow good science. | ||
| Is that problematic that maybe people have different ideas of what good science is and what bad science is? | ||
| Clearly, I mean, if you just look at the experience in the pandemic, there were a lot of government recommendations that came out from closing of schools to the six-foot distance guidelines that had no scientific basis at all, but were promoted at the time as being backed by science. | ||
| So I think there is like science is a process. | ||
| Science is evolving. | ||
| It is evaluating what the evidence is. | ||
| And I think there are good studies that are well designed, that have control groups that you can draw definitive conclusions from. | ||
| And then there are studies that are weak, much weaker, and that they may come to a conclusion, but because of the study's design, you can't really draw conclusions from them. | ||
| One more call for you. | ||
| This is Alex in Washington, D.C., Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, thanks for taking my call. | |
| So, really quick background on me. | ||
| I have a PhD in the sciences, and I think that Robert Kennedy is a good choice only for the purpose of radical transparency. | ||
| I think there's been a massive loss in trust in institutions, and a lot of that is actually well-founded. | ||
| And to people who are opposed to him, I just think that there needs to need to understand that, well, when you have the previous NIH having their discussions about the lab wards or they're saying they're 50-50, or if it comes out of China, we'll never know because we don't know a whistleblower. | ||
| And then they go publicly and they say it definitely didn't come out of China. | ||
| It's a conspiracy theory. | ||
| You have the new incoming head of, I believe, NIH Dave Atacharia, who was actively censored by the previous head of, I think it's the NIH, that would be Fauci and Collins. | ||
| These are the things that are the seeds that will sow distrust in the expert class. | ||
| And the fact that the expert class hasn't been able to latch onto that and realize that they need to go through a season of transparency if they're ever going to regain their credibility is really astounding to me the amount that they've fought back and pushed back against that. | ||
| And I think C-SPAN can help. | ||
| Emily Knope at Open or U.S. Right to Know has done great work on this in terms of getting the documents, whether it's the DARPA grant that basically looks a lot like the genetic sequence of the COVID-19 that just shows that there's a lot of evidence that was suppressed for a long time, and even the media hasn't really been forthcoming with it. | ||
| And if you all can do that, we'll get to a place where people can trust experts again. | ||
| So thank you very much, Michael. | ||
| All right, Alex. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think he makes reasonable points. | ||
| I think there is a severe lack of trust in the public health authorities, Largely because of the pandemic response and that transparency, both in public health and really more broadly throughout the health sector, will help the American people have more confidence in the recommendations that they get from experts. | ||
| All right, Brian Blaise is president of Paragon Health Institute, former White House National Economic Council policy advisor in the first Trump administration. | ||
| You can find his work at paragoninstitute.org. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Bobby Cogan. |