| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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License Plates and Licensing
00:06:27
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unidentified
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Killing the people in our country and multiple other countries. | |
| And I love to see that our military is so together, they have all of the things that they need to go in and take someone out, the leader of the country. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And it's something that we need. | ||
| We get rid of the drug pushers. | ||
|
unidentified
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We save lives. | |
| We get rid of confusion with people using the drugs. | ||
| And it's a great thing. | ||
| The problem over in Minnesota, that woman wasn't even from the state. | ||
| Her license plate was a different license plate than where she was. | ||
| And what mother of three children puts her life on the line to try and save people that are here in our country illegally? | ||
| I am so tired of hearing these people say, oh, these immigrants are here in our country. | ||
| They've been here for years with not causing any problems. | ||
| The problem is you can look at the Somalia money being stolen. | ||
| You can look at anything of these immigrants coming here, going on welfare, getting funding for housing because they don't have any jobs. | ||
| They don't know how to speak English most of the time. | ||
| Elaine from Michigan, a Democrat, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
| I think the shooting happened three days ago on the 7th. | ||
| And when I woke up on the morning of the 8th, I thought, country feels a little different. | ||
| The air feels a little different. | ||
| And I'll tell you, I listened to your first segment this morning. | ||
| The caller seemed to confirm a change in attitude and tone. | ||
| You started the program with Venezuela, and nobody wanted to talk about Venezuela. | ||
| Everybody wanted to talk about the shooting in Minneapolis. | ||
| And I listen to the show every day, you know, and I have really rarely heard such angry, raised, hateful voices as I heard coming through, you know, the program this morning. | ||
| And I think it kind of confirms we've had enough, you know, after a year under the Trump government, we are clearly moving toward my rules. | ||
| And just not just here, but also in the world. | ||
| And I think people can be outraged and questioning and sad and angry. | ||
| But I think where we need to put our energy now is into protecting the elections. | ||
| I think the writing is on the wall, and we should shift some focus to local, state, and of course, then federal elections, voting places, etc. | ||
| James from Page, Arizona, Independent, you're next. | ||
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unidentified
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Hey, how's it going? | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I'm just telling to, yeah, continue to comment. | ||
| So, you know, the United States has been, you know, at war my whole life. | ||
| I'm 30 years old. | ||
| March 2003 on my birthday was when they started dropping bombs on Baghdad. | ||
| I love all these young people calling today. | ||
| Continue. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's important. | ||
| So, yeah, when, You know, in 2025, 2026, we start, you know, talk about Venezuela and wars over oil there. | ||
| It's just a continuation of this same thing that I've been seeing my entire life, and we're just so sick of it. | ||
| But my real comment, I just want to speak directly to my representative of Arizona too, Eli Crane. | ||
| You know, he concerns himself with, you know, this drug raids in Venezuela and extracting Maduro because of drugs, which he says. | ||
| But, you know, we don't see any money for drug rehab centers, human resources, or medical help for addiction here in Northern Arizona. | ||
| He concerns himself with child care fraud in Minnesota, which Biden's FBI conducted investigations on in 2022. | ||
| But we don't see any resources for child care facilities that are closing in northern Arizona. | ||
| I believe that Eli Crane, you know, he's just simply a Trump loyalist. | ||
| He really just goes with the party line, and I don't believe that he truly represents people in northern Arizona. | ||
| And just like the Republican caller, I'm like, he doesn't answer my phone calls either. | ||
| So it's a Democrat and Republican issue is congresspeople not contacting their constituents. | ||
| And then lastly, I'll just say that any extra judicial killing is morally and ethically corrupt no matter what you do. | ||
| And, you know, with all this ICE activity, I think it's simply to inflame xenophobic sentiments, which we've seen on these calls. | ||
| And this country is nothing without immigrants. | ||
| Read the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. | ||
| This country is nothing without immigrants, and they just want to inflame xenophobic sentiments. | ||
| And that's my comment. | ||
| Jay from Temple Hills, Maryland, a Republican. | ||
| This is open forum. | ||
| You can talk about anything. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, Jasmine, there's a small group of advent C-SPAN watches. | |
| We call ourselves the Crazy 88. | ||
| And we have been rating the host. | ||
| Now, you are fairly new, so we don't have a rating for you. | ||
| But the way that you are taking a deep dive with these articles, verifying issues that people bring up, I'm sure you'll get some votes for deep dive hosts. | ||
|
Conflict of Interest
00:02:52
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unidentified
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Right now, Mimi holds that title. | |
| Two things I want to bring up. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I said Mimi is excellent. | ||
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unidentified
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All of the volunteers. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Continue. | ||
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unidentified
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Go ahead. | |
| Although Pedro refuses to do it. | ||
| But that's a whole nother story. | ||
| Two things I want to bring up. | ||
| Paul Offord, he's your next guest. | ||
| He really should be disqualified from coming on talking about vaccines because he co-founded a vaccine with Merck, and he received royalties as a result of that. | ||
| So that's really a conflict of interest. | ||
| So, you know, he should not be on talking for or against vaccines because of conflict of interest with him. | ||
| Okay, that's the first point. | ||
| The second point I want to make is there has been a lot of talk about why the United States does not have universal health care. | ||
| I hope you asked Mr. Hofford about his Merck involvement. | ||
| But there's been talk about why the United States doesn't have universal health care. | ||
| Teddy Roosevelt tried it in 1912. | ||
| FDR tried it. | ||
| Truman tried it in 1947. | ||
| The reason why there's no universal health care in the United States is because of racism. | ||
| There's a name I want to throw out. | ||
| Frederick Ludwig Hoffman. | ||
| He was a German scientist. | ||
| He was a mathematic genius. | ||
| In the 1800s, he came with the result that if you keep black people away from receiving health insurance for two or three generations, they will die off as a race. | ||
| That was to resolve the race problem. | ||
| That has continued, as I mentioned. | ||
| Teddy Roosevelt tried in the 1912, Truman in 1947. | ||
| But the reason, and even with Obama with Obamacare, he took that out even before it went to be debated on because black people will get health care. | ||
| That's why the United States is the only advanced society that does not have universal health care. | ||
| Randall from North Dakota, a Democrat, you're next. | ||
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C-SPAN's Unrelenting Coverage
00:06:57
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unidentified
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Morning. | |
| C-SPAN ran at least, I don't know, three dozen times the murders taking place on the open seas down in Venezuela. | ||
| C-SPAN has been showing the killing of this woman in Minnesota, I guess, at least two dozen times today, several, several times over the dozens of times over the past few days. | ||
| The one thing we know about murder that we're seeing is how obscene it is and how profane it is. | ||
| And it's C-SPAN, for some reason, is finding a purpose in just running this over and over and over. | ||
| Well, Randall, I can say that we run it one because multiple people have been calling in today saying if you look at the video, if you look at the video, if you look at the video, and we want to give our viewers an opportunity not just to talk about it, but to also see for their own eyes exactly what these callers are saying and whether or not they agree with their position. | ||
| It's not, we're not gratuitously showing it. | ||
| Obviously, it is a very tragic thing to what happened. | ||
|
unidentified
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And you're not allowing me to make this point. | |
| No, I'm saying, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is obscene. | |
| And then we see this man kill this woman. | ||
| And in two seconds after she kills this woman, he's all right. | ||
| So we will not have any cursing on this show. | ||
| But Mike from North Carolina, an independent. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| Hello, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you for taking my call. | |
| Hello, can you hear me? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm sorry, but this Minnesota shooting, I can't help but think that this poor woman, Miss Cook, would be alive today, you know, to protest another day had she obeyed, you know, the law of the officer, a lawful order to get out of the car. | ||
| It seems apparently she had gotten through a previous stop or somewhere she came through. | ||
| And, you know, for them to come up on her like that, she had to have done something previously. | ||
| And when I said get out of the car, she should have stopped immediately and done that. | ||
| You know, all this protest stuff is straight out of Marcus Playbook. | ||
| You know, use the media to get the citizens riled up against their government. | ||
| And, you know, and the long haul is to overtake the government, is what it is. | ||
| But the way these attacks on law enforcement go, it's getting out of hand. | ||
| And now they're walking around with signs saying justice for Ms. Cook. | ||
| Well, understandably so. | ||
| How about using the justice or laws on the books to prosecute, but justice on the books? | ||
| Also, justice is obeying a lawful order. | ||
| Michael from Florida, a Republican. | ||
| You're next. | ||
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unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On this topic about the Minnesota protest, it's illegal and they're impeding. | |
| These officers are there to catch criminals and they're causing interruption in their duties, and that officer also had a right to protect his life as she was driving towards him like that and also as well, while ordering the National Guard to go after ICE, and all that. | ||
| Any of those officers or the National Guard should have to stand down if they don't represent and protect with ICE against this community that the criminals are in, that ICE, in fact, is going to get these criminals off the streets to protect America and American citizens. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And just a quick clarifying note, I point to a Hill article. | ||
| It says, Walls puts Minnesota National Guard on alert amid protests over ICE shooting. | ||
| It says that Governor Tim Walz authorized his state's National Guard to be, quote, staged and ready Thursday amid protests after a federal immigration officer fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis. | ||
| Lisa from Cleveland, an independent, you're next. | ||
| Lisa, you've got about 30 seconds. | ||
| What's your comment for Open Forum? | ||
| All right, I'll make it quick. | ||
| First, I just want to say I appreciate the opinions everybody are expressing. | ||
|
unidentified
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However, if you're going to quote an article, please quote the words correctly. | |
| The word was mortality, not, the word was morality, not mortality. | ||
| So that puts a whole different spin on the article. | ||
| Secondly, in terms of the health care in this country, the correction. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Sure, because that's going to change the whole context of that article you read. | ||
| We don't have a health care crisis in this country. | ||
| We have a health insurance crisis in this country. | ||
| I heard a couple weeks ago, finally, somebody spoke the truth, of which I've been talking about for about 30 years now. | ||
| The government has approximately 661 agencies. | ||
| It has no authority on having, including it has no authority under the Constitution to run health insurance. | ||
| So if we get the government out of all of these agencies in the health insurance business, we will have access to health care. | ||
| No problem to that. | ||
| There will be much affordable health care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The reason why somebody brought up, we don't have universal health care in this country because nobody could afford it. | |
| Secondly, I just wanted to point out ICE is here to protect us. | ||
| Unfortunately, sadly, most Americans don't know what ICE is, why it came into being. | ||
| Without ICE, okay, we'd had 3,000 people die on 9-11. | ||
| That's all I want to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And to her first point, let me recorrect. | ||
| Trump lays out a vision of power restrained only by my own morality from the New York Times. | ||
| And the full quote here is, yeah, there is one thing, my own morality, my own mind. | ||
| It's the only thing that can stop me when asked that there were any limits to his global powers. | ||
| Next on Washington Journal, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center Director and former FDA Advisory Committee member Dr. Paul Offitt joins us to discuss the CDC's overhaul of the childhood immunization, which lowers the number of universally recommended vaccines. | ||
|
Book TV Sundays
00:02:56
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unidentified
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be right back in a divided media world one place brings Americans together According to a new MAGIT research report, nearly 90 million Americans turn to C-SPAN, and they're almost perfectly balanced. | |
| 28% conservative, 27% liberal or progressive, 41% moderate. | ||
| Republicans watching Democrats, Democrats watching Republicans, moderates watching all sides. | ||
| Because C-SPAN viewers want the facts straight from the source. | ||
| No commentary, no agenda, just democracy. | ||
| Unfiltered every day on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 1:30 p.m. Eastern, Arthur Z delivers his inaugural reading as the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. | ||
| Then at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, Encounter Books honors the Claremont Institute's Charles Kessler and the University of Pennsylvania's Amy Wax for advancing American ideals and academic freedom. | ||
| At 5 p.m. Eastern, Beth Macy, author of Paper Girl, looks at the physical and cultural deterioration of towns and cities in America by revisiting her hometown of Urbana, Ohio. | ||
| And at 8:15 p.m. Eastern, economist and author William Easterly, with his book Violent Saviors, argues that Western foreign aid has historically exacerbated conflict in developing countries. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Get C-SPAN wherever you are with C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app that puts you at the center of democracy, live and on demand. | ||
| Keep up with the day's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the U.S. Congress, White House events, the courts, campaigns, and more from the world of politics, all at your fingertips. | ||
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| Download it for free today. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to the program. | ||
| Joining us now to talk the latest about the vaccine schedules is Dr. Paul Offutt. | ||
|
Vaccines and Hepatitis Risks
00:14:58
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| He's from Children's Hospital Philadelphia and vaccine education center director and the former FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. | ||
| Paul, thank you so much for joining us this morning. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So this week, the CDC announced it was cutting the number of vaccines universally recommended for kids. | ||
| What is the childhood vaccine schedule? | ||
| Well, so there are a series of vaccines that are given routinely in the first 18 years of life to prevent diseases that cause meningitis or bloodstream infections or severe diarrhea and a variety of other illnesses, paralysis caused by polio. | ||
| And, you know, we've been giving vaccines in this country, really, since the first vaccine, smallpox vaccine in the early 1800s. | ||
| And for that reason, we live longer and better and healthier lives. | ||
| Now, who uses it? | ||
| And can you just kind of walk us through how often changes, particularly of this magnitude, are made to it? | ||
| Well, how often changes are made of this magnitude is never. | ||
| We have a Secretary of Health and Human Services who is a vigorous anti-vaccine activist and science denialist who believes that vaccines have merely lessened infectious diseases at the cost of causing chronic diseases, even though he's wrong about that. | ||
| And he is on a war against vaccines. | ||
| He is going to do everything he can to make vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared. | ||
| And in that way, he thinks he's actually helping children when he's doing exactly the opposite. | ||
| Now, before we continue, Paul, I want to invite our callers to start calling in. | ||
| The lines are a little bit different here. | ||
| For parents, your line is 202-748-8000. | ||
| For caregivers, your line is 202-748-8001. | ||
| For medical professionals, your line is 202-748-8002. | ||
| And others can call in on the line 202-748-8003. | ||
| Now, I want to put a full screen graphic on the screen right now, Paul, that deals with the vaccine categories. | ||
| According to this new announcement, universally recommended vaccines that all children should receive is a part of it. | ||
| Vaccines for children that are high risk is another category. | ||
| And vaccines that should be discussed as a shared decision with the child's provider. | ||
| I wonder, now that they're split into those three categories, what's your reaction? | ||
| And what are you hearing from the medical community? | ||
| Well, the medical and scientific community are doing what they should do, which is basically ignoring this posting by Health and Human Services because it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I mean, it's, again, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has put his thumb on the advisory committee for immunization practices. | ||
| And in this particular instance, he's gone behind closed doors with a series of other political appointees who don't have an expertise that just made up their own schedule. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| First of all, high-risk groups, when it lists things like respiratory syncytial virus and hepatitis A and meningococcus as high-risk high-risk groups, everyone's at risk. | ||
| I mean, hepatitis A can be a food-borne illness. | ||
| Therefore, eating food puts you at high risk. | ||
| Respiratory syncystial virus causes 60,000 to 80,000 hospitalizations every year in this country in children less than six months of age, most of whom are previously healthy. | ||
| So the high risk is breathing air in this country, you know, if you're less than six months of age. | ||
| So that didn't make any sense. | ||
| Similarly, this shared clinical decision-making for the COVID vaccine, the flu vaccine, the rotavirus vaccine also is nonsensical because what that says is basically the vaccines are optional. | ||
| You can reasonably choose not to get a vaccine, and that's not a reasonable choice for viruses that continue to circulate. | ||
| Those three viruses, SARS-CoV-2, the flu and rotavirus, continue to circulate. | ||
| And so you take a real risk of getting those diseases with no benefit. | ||
| Now, on those universally recommended vaccines in that category, some of those listed are diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, influenza type B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, HPV, chickenpox, according to HHS. | ||
| I wonder what is your reaction to those still being universally recommended. | ||
| I don't know their thinking. | ||
| I don't understand what problem they're trying to solve. | ||
| Is there thinking that we were preventing too many diseases? | ||
| Did they want some of these diseases to come back? | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| I mean, I think if you ask the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be honest about why he's doing this, he will say that he thinks children are getting too many vaccines. | ||
| So he'll retain a core group, but yet he's going to try and work away at the edges to decrease immunizations for diseases like meningococcus or rotavirus or respiratory synsocial virus because he just thinks that that's somehow weakening or overwhelming or perturbing our immune system and causing us to have chronic diseases, which simply isn't true. | ||
| The good news is pediatricians are largely ignoring this as they should. | ||
| And they look to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends all these vaccines because the job of the American Academy of Pediatrics is to protect the nation's public, whereas the job of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services is to wage a war on vaccines that will only make them less available, less affordable, and more feared. | ||
| That's who he is. | ||
| Now, something else that the HHS identified in these is, you've talked about it, but high risk. | ||
| And that includes CDC recommended vaccines for children at high risk. | ||
| That includes RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and some others. | ||
| Is there a potential harm? | ||
| I mean, obviously, I think your answer to this would be yes, but who get the, or excuse me, one, is there a potential harm for others who aren't high risk to get these? | ||
| And then secondly, is there a potential harm to those who get the vaccine and may not need it for these listed as only recommended for high risk? | ||
| So the category is mislabeled. | ||
| Everyone is at risk. | ||
| Most children who were admitted to the hospital with RSV were otherwise healthy. | ||
| Most people who get invasive meningococcal disease, which can cause bloodstream infections and meningitis and pneumonia, are previously healthy. | ||
| Most people who get hepatitis A infections were previously healthy. | ||
| What is their risk? | ||
| I guess is it fair or accurate for the administration to say, you know, children with asthma are high risk and therefore they're the only ones that should be getting or are recommended to be getting these type of vaccines? | ||
| Well, so again, yes, there are certain high-risk categories, but because everybody's at risk, everybody therefore should receive the vaccines because there's no no-risk category. | ||
| So it doesn't make sense. | ||
| And you mentioned shared decision, but I just want to pull up this full screen for our audience one more time. | ||
| The shared decision vaccines for children that the CDC recommends, that's rotavirus, COVID, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B. Is there anything that you believe that parents or caregivers should consider should consider when making decisions about whether or not to take these listed vaccines with their health care provider? | ||
| Well, you should always speak to your physician. | ||
| I think that's always a good idea. | ||
| So the notion of shared clinical decision-making is not anything new. | ||
| Of course, you should talk to your physician and make sure you understand the risks and benefits of any vaccine. | ||
| But to move it away from a routine recommendation is to say that you can reasonably choose not to get this vaccine. | ||
| So what RFK Jr. is doing is he's basically trying to move vaccines to being basically optional. | ||
| And that's what Project 2025 says for the CDC. | ||
| It says it wants to eliminate the CDC as a recommending body for vaccines. | ||
| And that is slowly what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing. | ||
| Obviously, the HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has a huge following. | ||
| They call themselves Maha. | ||
| It's part of the reason or part of the coalition that he brought over when he endorsed President Trump in 2024. | ||
| But they would say that they don't agree with all the vaccines that have been recommended in the past. | ||
| So I guess what is your response or what should happen if parents and caregivers don't agree with their doctor on the recommended amount of vaccines? | ||
| I mean, isn't this action by HHS kind of in response to those feelings? | ||
| Yeah, but again, what HHS should do is, and what historically they did do, is respond to the science, respond to scientific studies. | ||
| I mean, if parents are uncomfortable about giving one or more vaccines, then we should do a better job of explaining why they're important. | ||
| Instead of just saying, okay, well, if you're concerned about this vaccine, then we just won't give it. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And look what happens when you do that. | ||
| I mean, last year, we've had this past year, we've had a measles epidemic that's involved more people than we've had in more than 30 years. | ||
| We've had three people die, including two healthy children. | ||
| That's the first child death from measles in the last 20 years. | ||
| We've had more tetanus cases, you know, lockjaw cases than we've had in more than a decade. | ||
| We've had almost 300 children now who have died of influenza over the past year. | ||
| That's more than anything we've seen since the last flu pandemic. | ||
| We've had pertussis or hooping cough deaths. | ||
| That's what happens when you back away from vaccines. | ||
| And it's just going to get worse under this Secretary of Health and Human Services. | ||
| Last question I'll ask you before we turn to calls here, Paul, is rotavirus. | ||
| It's something that you focused on. | ||
| I believe you helped co-create it. | ||
| It was part of your co-inventions. | ||
| One, do you have concerns about it being shared or being included on the quote shared decision list? | ||
| And two, can you talk to us about your connections with rotavirus? | ||
| Particularly, do you profit off of it being about it being kind of in the rotation of vaccines? | ||
| Okay, so I am the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine Rototech, which is one of two vaccines that are current rotavirus vaccines that are currently available. | ||
| That vaccine was licensed and recommended in 2006. | ||
| In terms of my, and so what's that vaccine done is it's virtually eliminated the 70,000 hospitalizations from severe dehydration that children primarily between six and 24 months of age were forced to suffer. | ||
| Now we virtually eliminated that and that vaccine in the developing world saves about 165,000 lives a year. | ||
| Most people would consider that a good thing. | ||
| Anti-vaccine activists who basically are conspiracy theorists aren't. | ||
| They sort of look to you and say, oh, well, you must have benefited financially and that's why you're promoting vaccines, which isn't true. | ||
| I mean, both the motivation for working on that vaccine and the reward from that vaccine, obviously, were never financial. | ||
| But just to answer your question, yes, I am the co-inventor and therefore co-patent holder on that vaccine, but I am the intellectual property of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. | ||
| Therefore, they own me and therefore they own the patent. | ||
| So I don't make money off of royalties from the sale of that vaccine and never have. | ||
| Our hospital sold out their rights to that patent almost more than 15 years ago. | ||
| But again, I didn't have a direct financial connection to Merck. | ||
| Never have. | ||
| Jeff from New York, who's calling on the medical line, your line's open. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Dr. Offit. | |
| I think it would be instructive maybe to take one particular vaccine that has been that Kennedy has taken off of the list or changed it in such a way that it's going to increase mortality and morbidity. | ||
| And this is the hepatitis B vaccine. | ||
|
unidentified
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The fact is that 25% of infected children with hepatitis B will die as they become adults. | |
| And that infection rate has dropped virtually to zero, starting with the advent of the hepatitis B vaccine. | ||
| Could you explain to everybody exactly how that works and how many deaths are going to be now caused by the Kennedy recommendation? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for your question. | ||
| So here's the way that played out. | ||
| If your mother has hepatitis B and you are born through a birth canal that has blood in it that contains hepatitis B, you have roughly an 85% chance of developing that infection. | ||
| If you get infected in the first year of life, you have a 90% chance of going on to develop cirrhosis, which is chronic liver disease or liver cancer, which will shorten your life, which is just what you said. | ||
| So I completely agree. | ||
| When we went to a universal hepatitis B birth dose vaccine in 1991, we virtually eliminated the 16,000 cases every year of hepatitis B in children less than 10. | ||
| So these children weren't getting hepatitis B because they were sex workers. | ||
| They weren't getting it because they were intravenous drug users. | ||
| They were getting it because either they passed through a birth canal that had hepatitis B or not. | ||
| About 8,000 of those children would get it from relatively casual contact for people that had chronic hepatitis B infection, of whom there are millions in this country. | ||
| And about 50% of people with chronic hepatitis B don't know that they're infected. | ||
| This isn't AIDS. | ||
| If you're living in the home of someone with AIDS, you're not going to get it, assuming you're not having sex with that person or sharing drugs with that person. | ||
| If you're a child in the home of someone with AIDS, you're not going to get it. | ||
| Not true for Hep B. If you come in contact with someone who has hep B and you share a washcloth or towel or toothbrush or nail clipper or someone in the immediate family or someone who comes to visit, that is how you can get hepatitis B, which is how 8,000 children less than 10 got it in this country. | ||
| With the hepatitis B birth dose, we eliminated 99 plus percent. | ||
| What Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has just done is he's just said, yes, you can get the birth dose if your mother's infected, but if your mother's not infected or if the status is unknown, then you can wait. | ||
| That's a bad idea because it ignores those 8,000 children who got infected by other means. | ||
| It's a terrible recommendation. | ||
| He fired 17 people from the real advisory committee for immunization practices and replaced them with people like him who have an anti-vaccine bias. | ||
| And all he is going to do is make it more likely, as you note, that people are going to get hepatitis B and then die at a younger age because of it. | ||
|
Danish Study Reveals Chicanery
00:15:47
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| Tragic. | ||
| Anthony from Miller Place, New York, caregiver. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
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I would like to bring to the equation here just the sheer chicanery that has gone on over the last 10 years with regard to mRNA, over-prescribing of medicines. | |
| You know, CVS Pharmacy, Omni Healthcare, which distributes all the drugs to the nursing homes and the places where they keep people, you know, people with mental disorders, they got caught up in a trillion-dollar fraud where they were kicked back money to all these hospitals and doctors. | ||
| So they've settled, they were found guilty for over $900 for almost a trillion dollars, excuse me, $900 billion with a B that they embezzled through a kickback scheme for a very long time. | ||
| And they settled it for like, they got a slap on the wrist. | ||
| Now, you also have Marion Gruber and Philip Krauss, who were involved with the FDA's vaccine approval program. | ||
| They resigned their positions because of the chicanery that they witnessed. | ||
| And I ask you this, if the vaccines that you want to promote and profit from, which you're in denial of, if they're so safe and effective, why did Congress and the Senate exempt themselves and their staffers from consuming said proprietary ingredients that we, the people, my body, my choice, I can't even know what's in this stuff. | ||
| You're looking to force me to inject into my body. | ||
| So as far as we're concerned, you're finished. | ||
| We, my body, my choice. | ||
| I wonder if you're going to respond to some of those comments. | ||
| I'm not sure what the question was there. | ||
| I would say a few things. | ||
| First of all, I don't profit from the sale of vaccines, nor do pediatricians. | ||
| So in fact, for the most part, vaccines are a losing proposition for pediatricians because they have to stock them and store them, and it's the best to break-even phenomenon. | ||
| You're wrong about why it is that Phil Krauss and Marion Gruber resigned from the FDA. | ||
| Not for any of the reasons that you said. | ||
| The reason they resigned from the FDA was that in August of 2021, President Biden stood up in front of the country and said, as of September of 2021, we are going, we, the United States, is going to recommend a third dose of mRNA vaccines. | ||
| What they didn't like is they didn't like it that President Biden ignored the FDA, ignored the CDC, and just made a unilateral statement. | ||
| That's why they resigned. | ||
| It had nothing to do with the quote-unquote chicanery that you're mentioning. | ||
| So get your facts straight. | ||
| I wonder one question, though, is, you know, this vaccine schedule was changed without an independent review, public formal comment, or input from stakeholders. | ||
| What was the process? | ||
| What is the process? | ||
| What has it typically liked to make some of these changes and who is typically involved? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So here's what normally happens. | ||
| So I was actually on the advisory committee for immunization practices to the CDC between 1998 and 2003. | ||
| We actually considered trying to see whether we could in any way lessen the number of doses because as children were getting more and more vaccines and they were getting more and more doses of vaccines, you know, there was concern in the public that it was too much. | ||
| So we did go through that. | ||
| And the way that works is you formulate a working group, which then reviews the data, discusses the data, and then presents those data to the advisory committee for immunization practices, the voting members who are experts, who have an expertise in the fields of virology, immunology, microbiology, statistics, epidemiology, so that you can come up with a good science-based, well-hewn decision. | ||
| That's not the way it worked here. | ||
| The way it worked here was that political appointees went behind closed doors without an expertise and simply made up a schedule that was somewhat based on Denmark's schedule, which makes no sense. | ||
| So we're not Denmark. | ||
| First of all, we're 55 times bigger than Denmark. | ||
| We don't have a national health care system. | ||
| We have a child poverty rate of 20% compared to their 4%, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So that didn't make any sense. | ||
| And so it's just been hard to watch the way this has all played out, but it certainly doesn't play out the way it normally plays out, which is, as you mentioned, not only sort of the comments by expertise, but having public comments so people can better share in the decision-making process. | ||
| I mean, it's Robert F. Kenny Jr. said he's ushered in an era of radical transparency when in fact he's done exactly the opposite. | ||
| I mean, that was going to be my next question. | ||
| Obviously, there have been a lot of connections to this new schedule to Denmark. | ||
| You said that we have more people than Denmark. | ||
| You said that we don't have a universal health care system similar to Denmark. | ||
| But there are about 20 other high-income countries that the White House has compared this new schedule to. | ||
| Are there other reasons, other big factors as to why the U.S. is different than those 20 countries and why it's not apples to apples? | ||
| We choose to pay for vaccines. | ||
|
unidentified
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They don't. | |
| I mean, look at Denmark, for example. | ||
| Denmark last year had about 1,200 hospitalizations of children with rotavirus. | ||
| They had about 2,800 hospitalizations of children with respiratory syncytial virus. | ||
| We are trying to prevent those diseases. | ||
| We spend the money to prevent those diseases. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| And if you talk to the people in Denmark who are making those kind of public health decisions, they'll tell you why. | ||
| They choose not to pay for it. | ||
| They don't want to pay for it. | ||
| We do. | ||
| So if anything, they should be emulating us, not the other way around. | ||
| Bob from Independence, Missouri, calling on the others line. | ||
| Once I find your number, you're next. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| Dr. Alfred, you know, I come from a long line of doctors. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not a doctor myself. | |
| I worked 20 years in the healthcare industry. | ||
| not invested in any vaccines like you aren't either. | ||
| When I was a kid, when we were children, my two brothers and I, our cousin had polio and mom found out that we hadn't been vaccinated, so she marched us promptly to the nearest clinic and make sure we got the polio vaccine. | ||
| So medical science cannot be built on conspiracies. | ||
|
unidentified
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It never has been like it is now. | |
| We have conspiracy nuts running the CDC basically or people like this idiot, I'm sorry to say, RSK Jr. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean I can't believe that in 2026 we're having this discussion. | |
| You have answered, you have touched some of the issues that I want to talk about already, so I'm not going to bring that up. | ||
|
unidentified
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But would you elaborate on the study on 1.2 million children done in Denmark showing that there's no connection between aluminum and autism and things like that? | |
| And it's a very comprehensive study that cannot be ignored by America or any other country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| No, thank you for bringing that up. | ||
| I mean, polio is also an emotional issue for me. | ||
| I mean, I was born in 1951 before there was a polio vaccine. | ||
| And at age five, I was in a polio ward for about six weeks. | ||
| So I certainly remember Iron Lungs. | ||
| I remember the Sister Kenny hot pack treatments where children would get these excruciatingly hot packs, put on withered arms and legs, and would scream out it was a Dickens-like experience. | ||
| So I share your emotional connection there. | ||
| You bring up a good point. | ||
| I think Robert F. Kenny Jr. is interested in going after aluminum adjuvants and vaccines. | ||
| So aluminum adjuvants and vaccines, which have been used really for about, not only about 100 years, exactly 100 years, they were first used starting in 1926, are used to make it so that you can give fewer doses of vaccines and lesser quantities of the vaccine itself. | ||
| So he's going to go after that. | ||
| And there was a really important study that was just published out of Denmark that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine looking at that. | ||
| Is it possible that as you look at children who got more or less aluminum adjuvants, that there's any connection to any chronic infection? | ||
| So it was a really perfectly done study. | ||
| Andritz Vid was the senior author. | ||
| And they looked at children who got anywhere from zero milligrams of aluminum salts to up to 4.5 milligrams of aluminum salts and then looked at 50 different disease or disorder states in the categories of allergic or autoimmune or neurodevelopmental and found no association. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy Jr., not surprisingly, hated that study because it showed that he is dead wrong about what he's pursuing. | ||
| And he tried to kind of get the journal to withdraw the study, which obviously they didn't do. | ||
| So that's an excellent single study that stands out there. | ||
| Thanks for bringing it up because I feel like we're going to be talking about that study more over the next few months. | ||
| And just for folks to visualize what that looks like, I'll have my producers show my screen right now. | ||
| It's the Annals of Internal Medicine. | ||
| That study was produced, I believe, in 2025, July 15, if anybody wants to independently research that for themselves. | ||
| Shelly from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the Medicare medical line. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm glad that I was able to get through, Dr. Offic. | |
| Just to preface my question, I've been a nurse for over 45 years, and 25 years of that I spent as a nurse at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. | ||
| I believe you were a resident there. | ||
| I started in the early 70s, and then I focused on kids with cancer. | ||
| And I've moved on to work for a large NCI-supported cooperative group that develops clinical trials for adults with cancer. | ||
| And I think that my question is maybe to explain to the public, you know, Bobby Kennedy Jr. A lot about returning to the golden standards for research, but that's what has been used over all of these decades to produce studies, well-developed, you know, studies. | ||
| I'm involved with them. | ||
| I'm the, on certain studies, I'm involved with serious adverse event reporting. | ||
| And I know how these, I've come to know how these studies take time and then to implement them, conduct them, to follow them, to publish your results. | ||
| And so he's just basing all of his stuff on junk science. | ||
| I've looked at some of these studies, especially the one that came out of the Lancet that started all this autism stuff. | ||
| I think there was only 12 subjects in that study. | ||
| So if you could just kind of talk about how vaccines have gone through true gold standards for research, I would really appreciate it. | ||
| And thanks once again. | ||
| You started out good by starting a children's hospital. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I was at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh between 1977 and 1980, so we probably overlap. | ||
| Actually, I was briefly a Steelers fan, but now I'm in Philadelphia, so I'm an Eagles fan. | ||
| But yes, you're right. | ||
| No, you make such a good point, and you make it well that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has this sort of Orwellian thing that he does where he really says the opposite of what he means. | ||
| When he says that he's holding up a gold standard study, invariably he holds up a methodologically flawed, poorly conceived, poorly contrived study that is exactly the opposite of that. | ||
| And then for a study such as the one we just mentioned, the Anders Vid study about aluminum managements, he says, well, that was a terrible study because it doesn't agree with his fixed, immutable, science-resistant anti-vaccine beliefs. | ||
| You're so right. | ||
| I mean, we learn by doing excellent studies, and I think truths emerge over time. | ||
| I think we're always open-minded to the fact that we don't know everything and that we need to be open-minded to the fact that as we learn more, we change. | ||
| And invariably, I think medical innovations, for every medical innovation, there's a human price paid for knowledge, and we need to be open-minded to that human price. | ||
| But you're so right. | ||
| I mean, I think we, you know, we live, let me put it this way, when cavemen lived till about 30. | ||
| By the late 1800s, we lived till about 35. | ||
| Now, you know, men till about the mid-70s, women till the early 80s. | ||
| Vaccines have a lot to do with that. | ||
| And advances in medical care, like, you know, antibiotics and so much else that we have done because of good science, good, excellent scientific studies done by people like you. | ||
| So thank you so much for calling in. | ||
| James from Rim Rock, Arizona, calling on the parents' line. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I wondered if maybe you elaborate a little more on the European vaccine schedules versus the American. | ||
| And how is it that the socialized medicine that you leftists are pushing all the time, how is it that they're the conspiracy, but you're not the conspiracy? | ||
| Are they not telling the truth here? | ||
| Are they lying? | ||
| Or who's the conspiracist? | ||
| I guess is what we really want to know. | ||
| Okay, so the way you've asked the question, I have to choose who's the conspiracy theorist. | ||
| I don't believe a conspiracy, sadly. | ||
| I mean, I'm a scientist and a pediatrician by training and a virologist by practice. | ||
| For me, it's just about making the best decisions based on the best evidence. | ||
| It's really very simple that way. | ||
| So I don't have to get involved in what you would describe as leftist conspiracies. | ||
| I wonder, though, if you can talk a little bit more about the difference between European schedule and this new schedule or our previous schedule, as the caller mentioned. | ||
| Right, so we're the only developed world country that doesn't have a national health system. | ||
| They all have national health systems, and therefore they make financial decisions in a way differently than we make them. | ||
| So, for example, Denmark chooses not to give a rotavirus vaccine and suffered roughly 1,300 cases of rotavirus admissions to the hospitalizations, which, if you multiply out the fact that they're 55 times smaller, was about the 70,000 hospitalizations we had until we eliminated it with the vaccine. | ||
| Similarly, their respiratory syncitiovirus hospitalizations mimic what ours would have been: 60,000 to 80,000 hospitalizations a year in babies, until we had a maternal vaccine and then a childhood monoclonal antibody that has cut that number in half. | ||
| They should admire what we're doing. | ||
| We shouldn't be admiring what they do. | ||
| Well, you know, it's, I think, part of what people don't understand is when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets up on television, he'll say this: he'll say, you know, when I was a little boy, I only got a couple vaccines and I'm fine. | ||
| So, one thing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I share, and it's probably the only thing we share, is that we are both children of the early 1950s. | ||
| I was born in 51, he was born in 54. | ||
| We were both born before a polio vaccine. | ||
| We got two vaccines: we got the smallpox vaccine and we got the diphtheria tetanus pertussis vaccine. | ||
| It's not the number of shots that counts, it's what's in those shots that counts. | ||
| I mean, if you're talking about challenging the immune system, then how many immunological components are in vaccines? | ||
| The smallpox vaccine had 200 separate immunological components. | ||
| It's viral proteins, it's a large virus. | ||
| The hooping cough vaccine, which was a whole kill bacterial vaccine, and bacteria are big, had about 3,000 immunological components. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy and Jr. and I were inoculated with roughly 3,200 immunological components in the early 1950s. | ||
| If you take what my grandchildren are getting today and add up all the vaccines that they're going to get, it adds up to about 180 immunological components. | ||
| 3,200 versus 180. | ||
| Children are less challenged by vaccines today. | ||
|
Adults' Concerns About Vaccine Impact
00:05:28
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| I understand that they had more shots, but there is actually a lesser challenge of their immune system. | ||
| I don't think people understand that. | ||
| Nancy from Ohio, calling in on the others' line, you're next. | ||
| Nancy? | ||
| Nancy, are you on the line? | ||
| Linda from Pennsylvania, calling in on the parents' line. | ||
| You're next. | ||
| Yes, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And I want to say, Dr. and I live in the same area. | ||
| I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, so go Philadelphia. | ||
| Anyways, I'm a grandmother, and I would like to say that I vehemently disagree with Robert Kennedy, and I don't think he's going to change. | ||
| I appreciate what people have, that people have strong emotions. | ||
| He even lied on his or mistold the truth on his interview in front of the Senate or the Congress. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| So I think rather we should concentrate on the relationship between the doctor and the patient, which would be a mother, maybe a father, maybe a caretaker. | ||
| What's important here, though, is I find that the time allotted between doctor and patients, I often feel pressured as an adult. | ||
| I'm remembering back, I have two children that are adults. | ||
| I just don't think that doctors or their support staff, it could be a nurse practitioner, male or female, I don't think they're spending enough time with the patients or the mothers to make this decision. | ||
| I'd like to make one other statement because I watch C-SPAN regularly, and very rarely is a doctor available. | ||
| I would like everyone, please, to consider that Donald Trump probably has post-traumatic stress disorder. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please listen to me. | |
| Anyone who's had a bullet graze their ear, what he went through, I think that was also in Pennsylvania, but what he went through was horrible. | ||
| I think he has PTSD. | ||
| Yes, we could say Trump.1 was his first four years. | ||
| There's a change in him. | ||
| Dr. Paul, I wonder if you have a response to either part of that. | ||
| Well, the first part. | ||
| So what I would say is that when you say that people are dissatisfied with the healthcare system, I completely agree. | ||
| When you say that people are dissatisfied with the fact that when they go to their physician, that the physician is often just looking at the computer and typing things and isn't really looking at you or spending the time with you, that you need to be reassured about a variety of issues. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I think that's where a lot of this comes from. | ||
| I think a lot of the pushback, not just against vaccines, but against medical care in general, is coming from that dissatisfaction. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I think we need to do much better on that. | ||
| And since you are a resident of suburban Philadelphia, go birds. | ||
| Joseph from Alabama, a parent, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| All right, Joseph, you've got about 30 seconds. | ||
| Do you have a question for Dr. Paul? | ||
| Yeah, Dr. Paul, I was in the RSV double-blind study a few years ago, and I hadn't been sick ever since. | ||
| You got to, and when the pneumonia virus vaccine came out, took that and had pneumonia since then. | ||
| But I remember when polio was around when I was born in 52, and neighbors all around me had polio. | ||
| My mama made sure we got vaccinated. | ||
| And when I was in the military, we got vaccinated every time we had to put our uniform off. | ||
| Have a good day, people, and get vaccinated. | ||
| We in Fortnite. | ||
| You know, I'd like to say one thing to that. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| It's always really comfortable for me when people who are older call in because they know what the impacts of vaccines have been. | ||
| Younger people, I think vaccines and blogs have been a victim of their own success. | ||
| Younger people, including younger doctors, don't see these diseases anymore, so they can be more blasé about them. | ||
| But I love it when older people call in. | ||
| I wonder just quickly, in about 30 seconds, Paul, do you have concerns, not just about the children who may not be getting these shots anymore, but what effect that would have on adults who cohabitate with children or around children? | ||
| Is there any concern about that? | ||
| Yes, especially for diseases like respiratory sincerity virus influenza. | ||
| I mean, studies have been done showing that when you, for example, vaccinate children against influenza, that that also affects an adult, including an older adult population. | ||
| Of course, that's true. | ||
| That's why this whole kind of medical freedom movement, which is, I'm going to make a decision for myself and the hell with everybody else, you know, these are contagious diseases, so you are making decisions, brother. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Dr. Paul Offitt of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Vaccine Education Center Director and former FDA, former member of the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. | ||
|
Republican FCC Chair on Tech Policy
00:03:53
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| Thank you so much for joining us this morning. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| And that's all for today's program. | ||
| But another edition of Washington Journal comes to you tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country. | |
| And coming up Sunday morning, we'll talk about Campaign 2026, Trump Administration Policies, and Political News of the Day with Henry Olson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. | ||
| And Democratic donor and venture capitalist Oliver Libby discusses his book, Strong Floor, No Ceiling, Building a New Foundation for the American Dream. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
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| He joins our host, civic leader, best-selling author, and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, David Rubenstein. | ||
| I thought writing kids' books were a good way to broach certain subjects that might have been tough when you were kids or whatever else in the backdrop of a travel team, travel baseball team, because we all worry about things as kids, and it was a way to communicate a good message through books. | ||
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| Coming up next, several events from the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. | ||
| We'll start with remarks from Republican FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who talks tech policy. | ||
| And then it's FDA Commissioner Martin McCary on the future of medicine in light of technological innovations. | ||
| After that, the governors of Alaska and Nevada discuss innovation and economic growth. | ||
| And later, a pair of FCC commissioners are joined by National Telecommunications and Information Administration Administrator Ariel Roth in a conversation about the top priorities for U.S. leadership in universal connectivity, free speech, and leading in AI innovation, among other topics. | ||
| But right now, Republican FCC Chair Brendan Carr, he comments on the FCC's deregulatory efforts under his leadership and about the future of tech policy. | ||
| He joined the FCC in 2012. | ||
| He's been a vocal advocate for policies that support broadband deployment, that strengthen infrastructure, and ensure the communications networks keep pace with the pace of innovation. | ||
| His work touches every corner of technology and the communications landscape. | ||