RFK Jr. is now running the Department of Health and Human Services. So we sat down with journalist and Conspirituality co-host Derek Beres to get an idea about how long it will take for Kennedy’s "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) agenda to revive the black plague.
We chat about why Beres argues that Kennedy's wellness-sounding platform masks an exclusionary health vision which amounts to “soft eugenics,” RFK Jr’s endorsement of the MMR vaccine and how this angered his followers, harmful narratives about autism which will probably be endorsed by the federal government, and how the MAHA Commission's AI-generated report doesn’t seriously address health problems facing children.
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Conspirituality Podcast
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Re:frame substack
https://derekberes.substack.com/
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SOURCES
Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics
Florida becomes second state to ban adding fluoride to drinking water
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/florida-fluoride-drinking-water
Health secretary RFK Jr. endorses the MMR vaccine — stoking fury among his supporters
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/07/nx-s1-5354900/hhs-rfk-endorses-mmr-measles-vaccine-stoking-supporters-fury
RFK Jr. Misleads on Autism Prevalence, Causes
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/04/rfk-jr-misleads-on-autism-prevalence-causes/
Water fluoridation for the prevention of dental caries
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26092033/
Effectiveness of fluoride in preventing caries in adults
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17452559/
National COVID-19 trends, May 27
https://thesicktimes.org/2025/05/27/national-covid-19-trends-may-27/
The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist
https://www.notus.org/health-science/make-america-healthy-again-report-citation-errors
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 326, Mahamia, featuring Derek Barris.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Of all the Arkham Asylum inmates that compose the current administration, the one that I personally find the most disturbing is RFK Jr. in his position as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Now, I'm willing to debate this point.
Some have reasonably argued that Pete Hegseth is more dangerous.
But I think, you know, with all the other positions, there's this practical ceiling of how many people can be harmed, killed, or oppressed by either incompetence or malice.
But when we're talking about the health policy of the United States, a major screw-up can affect hundreds of millions of people, not just in the U.S., but all over the world.
I think I speak for everybody in a country that is not the United States in saying you are dead wrong, sir.
And Americans should pay the price for being in the evil empire that they are.
And if that price is reawakening ancient diseases that have not existed since medieval times, then I'm all for it.
I'm not sure if you can beep this.
I'm just wishing death upon an entire country.
Is that beepable?
I don't think so.
I think the sort of unanimousness of it is...
I'm just going to go through.
I'm just going to say I'm in full support of RFK Jr. and what he's doing.
Jesus Christ.
Great start to this episode.
So I just don't have a lot of faith.
That RFK Jr. is going to maha, as he says, or make America healthy again.
Because of his long history of vaccine denial, promoting misinformation about autism, attributing all sorts of diseases to environmental toxins despite a lack of evidence, and general hostility to public health measures.
In fact, as chair of Children's Health Defense, he filed over a dozen suits, all but one of which were dismissed, lost on appeal, or stuck in limbo against the CDC, FDA, and NIH, agencies he now oversees.
But maybe I'm a worry ward.
So to get a more informed perspective, I'm calling in an expert.
We are joined today by Derek Barris.
He is the host of the Conspirituality Podcast, the Reframe Substack, and he has written for several publications about the more toxic elements of the wellness community, including The Guardian, NPR, and Time.
Derek, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me, and I don't think your fears are unwarranted.
It's probably worse than most people realize.
Mahamia, here we go again.
I'm dead because I think the vaccine causes autism.
I know.
Only on the QAA podcast do we bring an expert on to tell you it's worse.
It's actually, however bad you think it is, it's actually probably a lot worse than what you're imagining.
That's so on brand for us.
I can't speak Yemeni, but I would if I could.
I mean, it's like, I really enjoy your coverage of RFK Jr. and the general wider Maha community on conspirituality because I always get this feeling of like, why isn't this getting more coverage?
You know, it's just always so extraordinary about just the wild things they sang and the, at the very least, potential impacts that his policies have.
And it's strange that I'm getting that from a podcast instead of just the mainstream media.
I had to take every vaccine that no longer exists recently just to get a chance at potentially having an alien residency in this country.
And even then, they tried to get them all and then they said, oh, in January we actually went back to doing the polio shot.
So I don't know what the hell he's doing out there, but he has not helped me at all.
I don't think he knows what he's doing either.
And to your point, Travis, one thing that mainstream media has trouble with is understanding where Kennedy comes from.
I became interested in his work in 2014 when there was a measles outbreak in Los Angeles.
And I was like, why is there a measles outbreak among all these Brentwood Santa Monica moms who weren't vaccinating their children?
So that's when I first became interested in it.
And if you're not steeped in wellness propaganda,
But as we've seen over the last couple of months when he's actually spreading QAnon talking points at a cabinet meeting in front of Donald Trump about child sex trafficking, the media doesn't even know what to do with that because they're not accustomed to the fact that I want to start by sort of just discussing how Robert F. Kennedy
Jr.
He presents his Maha policies and how that contrasts against how it appears to work in practice.
Because, like, if you don't look too closely at the details, like you mentioned, Kennedy, he presents this sort of reasonable diagnosis and an appealing vision, which is that, like, Americans, including American children, are living with increasingly worse health.
And to reverse this, federal efforts should be made to better focus on eliminating the root causes of diseases and disorders rather than merely treatment.
Like, again, if you stay at that very surface level, which is the information space that most people live in, that sounds good.
I don't know.
Would you trade being super buff, Travis, for having that voice?
Yeah, yeah.
He really made a deal with the devil on that one.
The root cause language comes from functional medicine.
And Kennedy, one of his closest friends, is Mark Hyman, who is one of the most prolific grifters in the alt-med space.
The New York Times reported that he made $20 million last year selling supplements and diet books.
And it's this idea that medical doctors and researchers aren't looking for what causes disease.
And so you have this situation where the real root cause of the problem is we don't have universal health care or socialized care.
and they're all in competition, which from a consumer perspective makes it horrible.
He exploits that sentiment, that anger that people have rightfully about our poor healthcare system and the for-profit nature.
But then what they do is they try to offer solutions that's just shuffling money into for-profit wellness companies.
And that's the real trick that's going on here.
And the root cause language itself is pulled from this idea that we're only being put on pills.
All of the time.
When the guidelines that he's talking about implementing through Maha already exist and have existed for a long time.
But that doesn't fit in with his messaging.
So he has to make it seem as if there's this agenda that's trying to make people sick, which is just not true.
The problem is that people are sick and there are real problems.
They're just never really addressing what those are, which are largely what are known as the social determinants of health.
You have written about how, like, his agenda is actually much darker than it seems because beyond merely bad science or conspiracist thinking, it amounts to soft eugenics.
And what do you mean by that?
And, like, why do you think this is, like, I guess a component of the covert agenda of Kennedy's policies?
It's not my term.
The idea of a hard or soft eugenics really came in the mid-20th century.
There started being debates about it.
A lot of eugenics thinking, we often point to the Nazis.
Rightfully, because there was this idea of a master race and that other races needs to be cleansed so the master race can proliferate and rule the earth.
Soft eugenics accomplishes something similar, but without all of that language.
And also, to be clear, without the same intention most of the time.
The idea is that if you are not fit, it's something that you did wrong.
So somewhere along the way, obesity is your problem.
One thing that Kennedy does, for example, is say that...
Now, there are dozens of causes of obesity.
Sometimes it is the person's agency.
They're not eating well, and they could be.
They could afford to eat better.
They could exercise.
They're not.
But a lot of the times, obesity happens from genetics.
It happens post-pregnancy.
It happens from chronic disease.
it happens from infectious disease.
There's a whole range of reasons it happens, but what Maha does really effectively And so if you're in a situation where people are constantly feeling embarrassed because of their health, and the idea, and this is reflected in his comments on autism being a chronic disease, for example, is that these are then problems and not variations in the ways that humans can be or human health.
And it becomes the same sort of mindset where we have to fix, we have to call We're going to identify the cause, the single cause of autism, and we're going to correct it so that behavior isn't replicated in human genetics any longer.
And that's just a different form of eugenics.
I mean, yeah, what's tough is that Americans, like, do eat, like, shit.
Like, you can't just argue that they have weak genetics, you know?
I mean, a lot of this is just American culture and these companies not giving a fuck.
But has he talked at all about, like, I don't know, corn subsidies or regulations around, you know, processed foods?
Or is he approaching it from a totally different angle and just ignoring these obvious issues?
He talks about subsidies, and I want to point out that some of the things he says are very true and should be looked at.
There shouldn't be a pipe There shouldn't be direct-to-consumer pharma advertising on television.
Pharmaceutical companies shouldn't have to pay for so much of the clinical research that gets used by government agencies.
But what he doesn't talk about is the reason why that happens is because the government doesn't appropriate enough money for public good science, which is what we really should have here.
So Because for him to actually go after companies to affect those subsidies, I don't think is in the plans.
But he will actually address it at times.
Yeah, I mean, this seems to be, like, a common thing, is that, like, even when he does, I guess, diagnose genuine issues, his proposed policies don't really reflect any, I guess, substantial change or a substantial addressing what those things, what's causing those issues.
Yeah, that's what makes it, I think, so tricky, right?
It's, like, you give people part of the truth about the problem, and then you either pay lip service or ignore any of the real solutions, which are definitely not at the consumer.
You know, putting it on the back of people is an insane thing.
And I think that's where, like, you know, oh, like, let's take away menthols or, like, let's make it illegal to sell soda in a certain size or whatever.
I mean, that is just, like, an insane approach to a broken system, but it's a trickle-down, you know?
It's from the top.
It's not Although now we have a feedback loop, right?
I mean, people have habits formed by these terrible mechanisms, and it's hard to even determine whether it's chicken or egg because it's been generations now.
You brought up Soda, and Callie Means, who is Kennedy's top advisor, he also takes credit for introducing Kennedy to Trump, along with Tucker Carlson, and bringing him into his camp.
He did an event with Politico recently, and he said that the reason that Americans are obese and have Now, he never talks about the infrastructure problems, the desert part of food deserts.
He never talks about the social determinants of health.
But this is a good way to further deregulate and kick people off of SNAP, which is the ultimate goal here.
But they couch it in all of this health language.
So one thing that I realized early on that Kennedy and the entire Mahal crowd is doing is they're exploiting population health statistics.
So the negative health outcomes that we're hearing about all the time, the 60% of this and 90% of this, they predominantly affect low income and minority populations in America.
All their solutions are geared toward helping people that can already afford health care, they can afford the wellness accoutrements they want to sell, and are only going to further exploit the minority populations that they're already exploiting through the way that they talk about these things.
Yeah.
I mean, we're basically.
In our last regular episode, we talked a bit about how it was kind of easy for Dan Bongino to be conspiratorial when he was just a radio host, but he was actually appointed as the deputy FBI director.
He suddenly started adopting some rhetoric that made him sound like a deep state shill to some of his supporters.
I think something kind of similar happened with RFK Jr. in regards to his stance on the measles vaccine.
This came up recently because Texas has been struggling with the worst outbreak of measles in the U.S. since 1992.
And this has sickened more than 700, sent dozens to the hospital, and led to the deaths of two unvaccinated children.
This spurred RFK Jr. to go on a media tour and very explicitly endorse the MMR vaccine.
On CBS News, RFK Jr. recommended that people get the vaccine, and he only did sort of like minor hedging with that recommendation.
Measles vaccine is the best way of preventing spread, but it's another thing to then say, and therefore, we suggest that you get the measles vaccine.
We encourage people to get the measles vaccine.
What's the position, philosophically, of the federal government in terms of public health?
The federal government's position, my position, is people should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating.
It is really hard to get over the fact that this guy represents the health of America.
And you just have to hear him and look at him.
Yeah, just incredible.
Yeah, I hear actually, I hear like the measles vaccine was what they gave Biden, and now look what happened.
But yeah, this was, I mean, this was startling, I mean, to me, but it was much more startling.
It was welcome, but it was much more startling to his supporters.
I mean, like, how did they react to this very, very explicit recommendation?
Oh, it was a field day on Twitter.
It was actually tremendous because the conspiracy theories that came around that Kennedy was being bought, that somebody had the dirt on him, proliferated.
And then we did an entire episode on this because Candace Owens then turned this into a whole conspiracy theory going back to tying in Israel with the vaccines.
There's such cognitive dissonance in this community because they're just...
And the anti-vax purity test is, you can imagine, anything that actually states a vaccine might be good, that's a line you cannot cross.
But instead of confronting the fact, which would actually be more reasonable, which is that he's a bureaucrat now and he actually has to at least give the appearance of sometimes presenting credible science, some people did give him a little push.
pass for that.
But the more staunch children's health defense segment of his audience just either lost their minds or thought that he was being bought out by someone.
And people actually were writing essays about Sayerji from Green Med Info, for example.
At what point did people start assuming that politicians were going to say mostly only things that they liked?
You know, like it feels like when, you know, they're like, I'm an RFK guy, I'm behind him.
He's going to change the world.
And then, like, you know, when he says something that goes against it, they're like, now wait a minute.
And it feels like, at least when I was growing up, that we were always kind of expecting politicians to say something that we disagreed with.
There was inherent kind of, like, us and them kind of division.
But nowadays, I feel like people are very surprised when their guy, you know, says something that seems to go against, you know, sort of the approved upon, like, belief.
systems like you know when trump basic anytime trump tries to brag about operation warp speed or whatever in this instance with rfk and the measles vaccine Kennedy is the dog who caught the car, and that's the issue.
He's been doing this for a generation.
He's been on the vaccine tip since 2005, and even before that, everyone likes to say he's an environmental champion.
He's doing lawsuits, some of them good, but for environmental reasons.
And then on the side, he starts a bottled water company because he wants to be able to sell the things that he's monetizing with the lawsuit.
So the idea that RFK wouldn't just be doing what Trump does, which is pretend he's not a politician, yet is, is exactly what he's trying to accomplish.
It's the illusion that he's going under.
But I think that people are giving, except for his staunch fans, I think people are giving him less leeway to be able to do that.
Tens of thousands.
Thousands of moms who have turpentine and a spoon doing the plane and telling their kid to open up are so furious right now.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, it feels like anti-vax people who support, I guess, even Trump, I feel like there has to be a lot of cognitive dissonance there.
I mean, one of his proudest policy achievements is Operation Warp Speed.
It was the program that helped accelerate the development of the COVID vaccine.
He brags about it constantly.
He talks about he got the vaccine.
But I don't know.
It's very strange that despite that, he has not really lost much support amongst the sort of the anti-vaccine community.
Well, Trump downplayed it once he got booed.
There was a moment where he tried to take credit in front of a crowd when he was campaigning during his four-year campaign, and he got booed by a crowd, and then he really kind of stopped.
And I think one of the best parts of Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's book, Abundance, specifically, they talk about this.
The fact that the right, because they've pulled in the anti-vax crowd, they can't claim credit for Operation Warp Speed.
And the left can't give them credit because then you would be saying the Trump administration didn't.
But because of our politics, people almost pretend it didn't happen.
And therefore, everything about our understanding of mRNA technology, for example, was lost, even though that technology is now being used to develop possible cancer.
Nobody's happy.
Nobody wants to give the other side a win in any way.
And like you said, it's like people can just kind of siphon themselves off into whichever, you know, sort of like whichever community gives them the least ideological resistance.
So, yeah, you have this situation where like nobody can be happy about this thing because otherwise you have to admit that the worst guy in the world did something good or the best guy in the world.
RFK Jr. has made several controversial statements regarding autism.
For example, he has addressed the increased rates of autism diagnosis.
Now, the CDC says that one out of every 36 children has been diagnosed with autism, which is a jump from one in 110 in 2006.
Health experts say that this increase is best explained not by an actual increase in autism rates, but by medical clinicians getting better at detecting autism.
But RFK Jr. instead suggests that there is an autism epidemic caused by some toxic exposures.
Autism groups say that this wording pathologizes autistic people and fuels cure narratives.
Now, RFK Jr. has even stated that he's going to launch a project that will supposedly identify the cause of this supposed autism epidemic.
Yeah, this is exactly like what happened with Sweden and Japan and the suicide rates.
They're just much better at recording them.
And so everyone's like, yep, more people kill themselves over there.
Just a basic misunderstanding.
Autism was a subtype of schizophrenia for 60 years in the literature.
Again, what they do so well is rely on people's ignorance of history.
I think politicians in general do that, but we're really watching the ignorance of scientific history, of chemistry, of biology on display here when they're able to say things like that.
The diagnostic criteria has constantly changed.
It is pretty accepted that it's long been accepted that it's a spectrum, but that there's a range of variations of the human experience that...
And instead of thinking about accommodating that, about how to better position high-functioning autistic people in society while supporting low-functioning autistic people, they would just rather pretend that it's a chronic disease that has to be stopped.
And that's really dangerous.
And I do think that Kennedy kind of overstepped in that because, again, for the anti-vax crowd who believes that vaccines cause autism, his rhetoric plays really well.
But when a lot of people saw that, most people I know, I have autistic family members, most of my friends have.
at least an autistic family member, they're not tuned in to this shit like I am all the time.
And they see Kennedy say those things and they were really taken aback.
And he really struggled.
He had to do a lot of damage control in the following weeks to try to gain some ground back.
One of the ways that he did that is that he kind of, like, walked back the claim that he's going to find the cause of the supposed autism epidemic by September.
He said, like, he's merely going to sort of, like, conduct some studies, mostly replication studies, and those will be completed by September.
It's like the God particle.
I will find the autism particle.
Yeah, here's what kind of concerns me, is that if you're a sincere investigator about something, Unless, of course, you already have an end sort of a goal in mind.
You already know what the answer is.
You're just sort of, like, going through the motions of, like, investigating and researching as a matter of procedure.
Is that what's going on right here?
I'm a little worried that he's going to basically use the weight of the federal government to endorse some very unscientific views about autism.
Oh, you should be more than a little worried.
I found a 2010 blog post by Mark Hyman, who I referenced earlier, saying that autism must be caused by an environmental exposure.
And then on his website, he's selling autism support supplements.
That is a longstanding playbook.
So when Kennedy comes out and says, it can't be genetics, or it could start with genetics, but then it must be a toxin or environmental exposure, that's not how science works.
You can have that hypothesis, but you can't say it.
Must be this.
Because all the research leading up so far is saying we don't know and genetics plays a big role in this.
So he's overturning all of that.
My personal feeling is that, like I said earlier, he was invited into the Trump administration.
They are following the Heritage Foundation playbook of Project 2025, which is a business for deregulatory agenda.
What does that translate to in terms of health?
Well, Project 2025 has an entire chapter about how they want to privatize as much health care as possible, which is a longstanding right wing organization.
And flattening out issues to make it seem like they're single cause.
What that eventually does is he's now in control of the public health apparatus.
He's going to do these studies, like the one you referenced, Travis, which David Greer, who's a longtime anti-vaxxer, is leading, who is not a doctor and shouldn't be leading any sort of study.
And he's going to find that it's an exposure, and he's going to discover that some of the supplements that Calamine's and Mark Hyman sells could actually help treat that exposure.
And then my belief is that you're going to start seeing government public contracts to these companies to further push healthcare into the private market, but only away from pharmaceutical companies towards the alt-med companies that have supported him.
It's crazy how insulting it is to 8chan to say that it's an exposure issue.
It sounds like, you know, the thing about, like, you know, health quackery is that it's one of, like, the oldest and the biggest and most reliable grifts in history.
Because through our life's journey, everyone's going to have health problems as part of the human experience.
And everyone wants some really quick and easy answers about how to correct it.
So there's always been people who have been willing to promise, I don't know, tar water or cornflakes or whatever in order to cure it.
That's just reliable.
But it just sounds like this large sort of practice of, like, health quackery and, like, wellness grifting is starting to be sort of reaffirmed, again, in the federal government.
It's just, like, the sort of, like, major longstanding health agencies I think are at risk of becoming sort of a way to promote, like, you know, bullshit supplements.
Cornflakes, of course, cured the longstanding disease of masturbation.
So that was an important one in the history of medicine.
Yeah.
I've been filling my ass with yogurt just in case they're right.
See, I've been trying to get the yogurt out of my ass.
The two of you have a company here.
Yogurt and yogurt, brought to you by Ass and Ass.
The number one advertiser that supported newspapers in the 19th century was Snake Oil Salesman.
America has a longstanding habit of medical grifters finding real problems in whatever healthcare system was around at that time and then exploiting it with propaganda.
It is nothing new.
It was at the foundation of this country.
And for the last 200 years, snake oil charlatans have used...
For all of my personal grievances with the insurance system and with the pharmaceutical system, there is at least standards and evidence that needs to be presented in order for any medications to be accepted.
That is not true in supplements at all.
Most of the trials, if any are done, are done on animals or in vivo.
They're not done on But in the fall, Kennedy said that supplements are being suppressed, which is completely ludicrous.
But again, when you're working with propaganda and people's ignorance of the sort of regulatory bodies behind it, then you can get away with it.
Another major area of interest for RFK Jr. is the fluoridation of water.
Now, scientists who study this generally consider community water fluoridation to be one of the greatest public health triumphs ever.
The Cochrane Review of 155 studies regarding the impacts of water fluoridation found a median 35% reduction in tooth decay among children after fluoridation began eight decades ago, while CDC surveillance attributes a 25% nationwide drop in cavities to optimal fluoride in water.
Now, these measures primarily benefit rural and low-income families who face the greatest oral health burden.
And this is achieved at the cost of less than a dollar a person.
So it's just, it's a massively beneficial program.
It helps the most needy.
Dirt cheap, so generally people like it.
Now, the ingestion of any chemical substance, including fluoride, in large enough amounts is potentially toxic, but the recommended fluoridation level of 0.7 milligrams per liter has never been shown to cause harm.
But it's fair to say that Kennedy does not share this view.
Fluoride should not be in our water.
Fluoride had a strong justification in the 1940s when it was added and people didn't understand the science and they thought its benefit to our teeth was systemic.
By drinking it, it would enter your body and somehow protect your teeth.
Now we know that there is no systemic advantage, zero systemic advantage.
The evidence against fluoride is overwhelming.
Absolutely ludicrous.
Just complete inversion of reality.
He's truly amazing.
I wish I could fucking vaccinate that guy with a d*****.
The WHO listed the top 10 public health achievements of the 20th century, and fluoridation is one of them.
Not only has he recommended that regions or states stop fluoridating water, he's also now taking fluoridation supplements off the market.
Which goes completely against every other supplement that he's trying to promote.
But because it fits his agenda here, which is to demonize this substance, his followers don't even bat an eye over that.
Meanwhile, the liver king is saying never brush your teeth and selling plenty of supplements despite taking, you know, an insane amount of anabolic steroids.
It's just, we truly just a clown country.
Yeah, I can't disagree with that.
I mean, it's like, this is just so ludicrous because, I mean, like, ultimately, this policy, I think, or it's like this policy of, like, demonizing fluoridation, though I should mention there are now two states that have banned community fluoridation, Utah and Florida.
But this policy, again, will ultimately harm the very needy people.
And I also live in the largest American city that does not fluoridate its water, which is Portland, Oregon, because we have a long history of a weird blend of pro-Second Amendment gun right-owning hippies that fall for a lot of wellness conspiracies.
And so that's the situation we're in.
And the advantage of having a podcast that's popular in the wellness space, the critical wellness space, is that a lot of people reach out to me after episodes.
We have higher rates of childhood cavities.
That bore out as well in Canada.
I'm forgetting which city, I think it was in Ontario, decided to take the fluoride out of the water.
And something like eight or ten years later, they noticed childhood cavity rates shoot up.
So they brought it back and they went back down.
We have data.
You just have to...
The British are finally getting their revenge.
There was such a good joke on the Paul Rubens, the Pee Wee Herman documentary, where they were showing his old clips from David Letterman before the movie, and he does a really good British teeth joke.
So if you guys haven't seen it, I would go watch that documentary.
Kennedy chairs the Trump-ordered Maha Commission, and they delivered their first report recently, a few days ago, and it links childhood chronic diseases to ultra-processed foods, smartphone overuse, and chemical additives such as glyphosate.
So, Derek, what did you make of this report?
Again, we've been talking in various ways about Naomi Klein's sentiment that conspiracy theorists get the feeling right and the facts wrong.
We do eat too many ultra-processed foods.
There are arguably too many in our food system, and that is an issue.
Why that's an issue is another story that Maha doesn't address, but that's important.
Glyphosate is one of the most tested fertilizers in history and at levels that most people ingested, if at all.
But he's been on that for a long time.
What the report doesn't do is it doesn't talk about what communities suffer most from this.
It doesn't talk about the systemic reasons.
In fact, Kennedy had to tow the anti-DEI line coming into HHS, so a lot of their cuts were to any research that had the words DEI in it or anything about inclusivity.
So they create this fear-mongering report, which is very along the lines of Kennedy's Children's Health.
Or a propaganda outlet like the Environmental Working Group does this as well, where they highlight these substances that are out there and they put the burden of disease on them, which is partially sometimes correct when it comes to the food supply and ultra-processed foods, for example.
But to use their term, if you don't look at the root cause of why things like ultra-processed foods are so systemic in the food supply, then you're never going to actually address or fix the problem.
And the report does nothing.
It offers no actual solutions for fixing health problems.
He loves to interview all these guys.
You know, he loves to talk about, like, oh, the end of men and all these things that are, you know, giving us less powerful cum and less testosterone and all this shit.
And then meanwhile, like, his family's money is all frozen dinners.
And I've eaten a lot of frozen dinners.
and my cum is just as runny and weak as ever.
Well, I mean, you got to go with...
You gotta go with hungry man.
Oh, I always do.
You know, something a little bit more substantial.
I go with hungry envy, but fair.
I should just point out that there's nothing inherently wrong.
Most foods are processed that we eat.
Now, ultra-processed just means that there are certain levels of preservatives or additives in them.
Even then, that is not necessarily a problem.
It's the amount.
It's the nutrient density that you're getting in your life.
So if 90% of your diet is ultra-processed foods, probably going to be a problem.
I'm just making these numbers up, by the way.
I have no data on this.
If 10% or 20% you're eating, that's probably not going to be an issue.
If your overall health profile is taken care of, but again, who has access to these things matters.
And if we have access to these things, I don't know.
Over the years, I've downloaded probably 20 different apps that claim to be able to track my nutrients and protein and calories and stuff.
And they all just eventually, at some point, they go like, you don't have enough money to get the real version of the app.
You gotta make it worth our while, and we'll give you the real printout.
We'll give you the actual PDF that has your plan.
And by then, I'm on to the next one.
Yeah, I mean, Jake started making money and his diet is still fucked up, so.
Yeah, it's horrible.
It's arguably worse in some ways.
He's actually kind of living proof that Derek is wrong.
Yeah, but that's also okay.
But making money, how?
You know, definitely contributed to the decline of my mental health, which I think also plays a big part in my diet as well.
So I'm probably not the best control group in this situation.
I think I said the other day that McDonald's was my favorite.
Favorite restaurant to somebody.
Restaurant.
I love the restaurant.
That's a great one.
You know, one of the buzzwords in the wellness community for a while has been the microbiome.
And one of the things, it's such a murky territory.
We're even experts, so like we don't know a lot.
But one thing that seems to be pretty solid is the foods that you ate growing up really affected the bacteria in your microbiome and really set the stage for your later years.
along with that is just simply eating habits.
They are really hard to change.
I grew up eating a lot of processed foods, a lot of whatever my parents could.
I was a latchkey kid.
And in my 20s and 30s, I was vegetarian for 20 years, vegan for two years.
And I had a range of health problems that went along with that.
In my 40s, I started eating meat again and tried to take the lessons I learned being a yoga instructor and being in this world and eating better, but also just eating a broader range of foods, including the foods that I ate growing up without the microwave shit, and all those health problems all cleared up.
So one thing that they do is they make it seem that you can just correct your life choices immediately, which doesn't honor your biology.
So incremental changes are really important, but being able to change eating habits is a psychological conundrum that is baffling because of how intimate food is for people.
So I don't want to just make it seem like it's the accessibility that's the issue.
There's a whole range of conditions that affect Well, you got to take it to the salon.
This is probably jerky and they're trying to sell it as steak.
You know, but I think there's also, at least for me, also anecdotally, you know, I'm also battling against like a slew of TikTok videos that they see all the ads on TikTok now seem to be targeted at like, oh, this toothpaste.
That's made with, like, radium.
Or, like, this toothpaste made out of lasers, like, is going to remove plaque 270% better.
Or, like, I bought recently, like, mineralized gum.
Like, it's all aimed at, like, stuff that's like, hey, like, did you realize, like, you know, or you're having heartburn?
Suck on a stone for a little bit.
Just go outside, grab a pebble, and suck on a stone.
because the dust particles and like dog dew that naturally occur on the underside of the stone is really good for healthy gut bacteria.
It's just like everything I scroll has got some kind of like easy fix for whatever, you know, whatever ails you.
All you got to do is click that orange link.
Battle against a slew of TikToks is one of the funniest fucking ways to phrase it.
Yeah, me too.
I love the battles that I can basically win by uninstalling an app.
I met a Khajiit in Elder Scrolls Online who told me to drink my own piss, and I should not have trusted him.
We did an entire episode on urine therapy.
It's a thing for people who don't know.
It's a real thing.
Oh, yeah.
No, no.
We covered it in ManClan.
I mean, it rules.
If you're not drinking it, at least rub it on your skin after you leave it under the porch for two days.
Now, while researching for this episode, I came across an article in the publication called Fierce Healthcare, which I thought made a really interesting point about the Maha Report, which relates to the fact that according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
their investigations, the number one cause of deaths in children and teens from 2020 to 2022 was guns, was firearms, or children are killed by firearm violence than any other cause, including car crashes and cancer.
But in this report, which was supposedly about the issues that children face in their health, it was mentioned zero times.
Somehow, this report, which was all about diagnosing what is ailing our children, did He wants to take away our guns.
Well, just be honest about, like, you know, this is, I think, the strongest indicator for me that this is very much a political, ideological sort of document and not a sort of, like, an honest investigation into what's making children unhealthy.
I mean, I have actually heard in these circles that SSRIs cause school shootings and shit.
So, you know, even if they do address it, Travis, they won't address it in the way that you'd like, I'm sure.
Yeah.
And just to let you guys know where I'm at, I opened TikTok while I was talking to be like, I wonder if I could open it and get like a silly ad that I could reference right here, live, real time on the show.
Was it the shoes that add three inches again, Jake?
No, it's worse.
It's a big hat.
What do you mean?
What do you mean it's a big hat?
No, please.
Continue.
I want to hear more about the big hat.
It's a big hat that has two fans built into it.
And the fans are solar powered.
And so there's two holes in the big brim of the hat that tilt down so you can have two fans.
Okay, okay, okay.
They think I'm like the Highland of Dr. Moreau or something.
They're trying to get me.
Bear with me.
Bear with me.
When someone tries to headshot a child, if they were wearing that hat, that would probably be what they shoot instead of the dome of the child.
So think about it.
There's two big holes.
There's two big holes in the hat where the fans go, so that's less protection overall on the brim.
Look at the size of this hat that this guy has on.
It takes up most of the screen.
I'm kind of with you, Jake.
These flat brim fucking felt hats need to stop.
I totally agree.
Derek, what have we learned about the big hats?
Don't ask Derek.
His entire yoga practice is based on women who wear these hats.
When did the big hats come?
Why have they stayed?
Why are we putting fans into them?
Yeah, why is RFK Jr. not addressing the big hat epidemic?
I think my next episode is going to...
Got nothing.
All right, please.
Sorry, Travis.
Oh, fuck.
Well, RFK Jr. news never ends because actually just today, the day we are recording this, Kennedy instructed the CDC to drop COVID-19 vaccination from the schedule for healthy children and healthy pregnant women.
And this overruled the CDC's advisory committee.
And to justify this, they cited, quote, insufficient clinical data.
Now, I mean, we don't have, like, precise data on how many people are getting infected with COVID nowadays because COVID-19 is no longer nationally notifiable and labs and states aren't required to file positive tests anymore.
But a model-based and indirect surveillance techniques say that tens of thousands in the U.S. are still getting infected every day.
And that figure will certainly increase if vaccination rates decrease.
I mean, my big question with this, Derek, is like, where does he think that?
Because I feel like people are going to notice if their children have a lot more cavities than they did as a kid.
People are going to notice if all of a sudden there's a polio outbreak.
People are going to notice if health outcomes are generally getting worse instead of better.
So it's like, what is their plan to like just suddenly, I guess, like with a measles vaccine, just reverse course once they realize that it's not going in the direction of the vaccine?
Like, do the people actually believe their own conspiracy theories?
Did they get indoctrinated?
Are they just grifting?
Like, I believe there's a spectrum of people.
I am pretty confident that Kennedy fully believes the shit he's saying.
Like, you know, there was a couple months ago.
A photo that came up of him dropping methylene blue into his water while he was on an airplane.
And you don't take that unless you actually have bought into the idea that that is going to make you healthier, which there's no evidence for.
So when it comes to vaccines, I truly believe he thinks that they are toxic and damaging to people.
I don't really question his intention on that.
So then you have to step back and say, okay, what has Children's Health Defense been doing besides raking in millions of dollars each year in donations to do these lawsuits?
Kennedy, when he was the chairman, a handsome amount of money.
It is to end vaccines.
And I do think that is their end goal.
Like, it was never really just about questioning the COVID vaccine.
And we can see that.
We're already seeing that.
So what do you have to do, though?
You can't just take them all off the schedule.
You have to go bit by bit.
And that's what they've been doing systematically.
So he'll say, yeah, the most effective way is the measles vaccine, but vitamin A. You could do that too.
And so what happens is the doctors start giving vitamin A in West Texas.
And what happens is that some of the children end up in the hospitals with vitamin A toxicity.
They don't really think through the downstream effects because these are people who don't understand public health.
They don't understand health in general.
They just believe the propaganda they've been sold and they've been repeating for a long time.
So this move, take away the recommendations from children and from pregnant women.
What does that do when insurance is no So that's a good way to get a lot of people not to take the vaccines any longer.
That's going to create a public health crisis.
But since they're not tracking that data, you're only going to know about that if it affects you personally because magically there's been no bird flu infections in the last few months when we had some before Kennedy got installed.
They stopped tracking.
You're not seeing that.
I don't think they're tracking the raw milk outbreaks if there are any since then.
So if you don't have the data and then you insert your own data, well then you can make up any story that you want.
I do think there will be a tipping point, to your point, Travis, of whether it's something like polio becoming widespread again.
If it's further measles outbreak, you cited a 700 number before with Texas, but the number is well over 1,000 now nationally.
Or it's going to be cavities.
It's going to come piece by piece.
And what they're going to do is as every other piece comes up, they're going to try to deflect and redirect in some way because that is their playbook.
Do you think, if he truly believes this stuff, then do you think his reversal on measles, like, that he has some explanation for himself why he reversed on that?
Or, like, why wouldn't he just apply that to his other beliefs about vaccines?
I think that he just had to say it in that role at that time.
Like, he probably had some pressures coming into him.
Because that was before he had installed Macri and Bhattacharya and all of the others who are now his clown show around him.
You know, you'll see Oz and Macri and Bhattacharya next to him at all times now.
So when he said that, that was before the time.
And he always caveats it with this weird personal liberty idea.
That goes back to Reaganomics.
That's always been their argument.
Since that time of how they want to deregulate healthcare is that health is a personal responsibility, the whole bootstraps mentality.
So he'll say, it is effective, but you should really talk to your doctor.
You should consult with your family before making any decision, which is, again, not how health works.
Not saying you have to listen to your doctor on everything.
When I had cancer, I actually talked and engaged with my oncologist about how many rounds of chemotherapy and we came to an agreement that was not what she wanted and not fully what I wanted.
But we actually looked at things and had conversations and brought in other people.
They make it seem as if those conversations can't happen, that your doctor is only trying to do this or that to you.
And so that's where part of their effectiveness lies.
Maha is really...
That is what they're doing.
Everyone around them is generally healthy and has the means to be healthy.
And so that is the crowd they're going to keep speaking to and they're using people with chronic illnesses as punching bags.
I know you weren't being literal, but Macri and Bhattacharya literally sound like clowns.
I was going to say they sound like Star Trek villains, like Oz, Macri, and Barajara.
And they're flanking RFK Jr. as he steps off like a Borg-style cube.
We're just up against not even the main villains, but just kind of like a monster of the week.
RFK Jr., I just want to thank you for your contributions to the fall of Americaka and its evil empire.
But it really – I mean you make a really interesting point, Derek, which is that nobody is considering the relationship that the unhealthy individual has with their care system.
And, you know, for a party that's overwhelming kind of about freedom and freedom of choice and freedom from this, and they don't want their government telling anybody, you know, they seem to be awfully okay with somebody saying, well, here's what works, here's what doesn't, you know, that it's not, they're actively fighting their doctors.
I mean, we saw this with COVID where the doctors are saying, here, this is what we think you should have.
And they're like, no, you got to give me ivermectin.
Like, you know, there isn't this collaborative sort of relationship with the medical.
I think for all of the reasons that we've talked about, the failures in our healthcare system, you know, can lead to this sort of distrust.
But the idea, yeah, that even like the commercials in between, you know, below deck as they're just, you know, assaulting me with medication after medication, it always ends with, discuss with your physician.
And that just doesn't seem to be something that ever comes out of, you know, the RFK wing of medicine and health.
There are so many wars being waged on Jake through his screens.
An intergalactic battle is playing out right before my eyes on a very small screen, a somewhat bigger screen, and then a very large screen.
I've noticed this language seeping into conversations when I go to my doctor, or more recently, my wife right now, as we're recording, is at the veterinarian with our puppy because he's on his vaccine schedule.
And the last time I went in, every vaccine, they're not just telling me what it does, which is appropriate.
They're basically giving me these caveats about how it's my decision and all this, and I think you should.
And I'm just like, you are the expert here.
I do want to know what it does, but I'm not going to sit here and debate you.
But a lot of medical professionals right now, they're on edge all the time because people are indoctrinated into these Maha wellness ideas, and then they take it into the doctor's office and just start spouting it at doctors.
And it's often when I meet a new doctor, I go in.
And I say, hey, I work in health misinformation.
Like, let's just get that clear right away because I don't want to have to have that sort of, you know, that sort of combativeness that exists because they're just always being assaulted by people now.
And this is, like, the most important thing that you don't want to pretend you're an expert in.
Like, I would never go into Home Depot and start telling the guys there how to build a shed out of two-by-fours because I can barely mount wall shelves.
You know what I mean?
But going into a doctor, it's like, well, because it's my body, I think I know best.
You know what's right for this.
I mean, Home Depot is very literally where you get supplies to do it yourself.
Well, I mean, I guess that's not the thing.
But you're asking, right?
You're going in and you're going in and you're going, hey, what kind of...
And the lady had to casually mention it as we were checking out with it because we had our dog with us.
She was like, oh, these are so pretty, so pretty.
But you got to be careful because they are poisonous.
And we were like, oh, well.
For the animal that we have with us right now?
This explains a lot about all the stuff that's been going on with Teddy.
You're just buying various poisons, installing them in your house.
He's like the Triceratops in Jurassic Park.
It's like, we swear he's not eating these roots.
I mean, on the plus side, it might be a Ninja Turtles thing.
He might get some really cool skills and kind of anthropomorphize at some point.
Hopefully, and just kill me.
This is my first puppy, and I know I'm going to field now, but I just learned about foxtails, and they are all over my neighborhood, and I'm terrified now.
Oh, yeah.
Well, at least you don't have the coyotes out there, right?
Oh, no, we do.
Okay.
Great.
Yeah.
I would just say, you know, I'm now talking about stuff that I'm an expert in.
It is being scared of what a coyote might do to your dog.
That's me expert in that.
And there are some collars that you can buy that, They've got spikes on it.
Why are you wearing one right now?
Coyotes also, they don't like when you change around your lawn furniture.
So every now and then, just like put up a random like decoration.
You know, it's like any kind of, you know, could be a secular, could be a holiday decoration.
The coyotes don't like that.
So as long as you kind of keep them on their toes, they won't get comfortable in your lawn.
So the coyotes, like it's better if it's secular because they don't get offended if it's like not their belief system or whatever?
Well, I just didn't know what Derek's belief system was, so I didn't want to assume.
Just don't invite them into your house and they can't harm you.
Well, they will try to break down your door, though.
That's how you can tell the difference between a dog and a coyote, is that coyotes don't have reflections.
I had a pack of coyotes try to burst in through my front door.
That's serious.
Okay, Travis is like just holding his head.
Your patience is amazing.
Thanks for participating though, Derek.
Oftentimes the guests will take Travis's side and that's just unfortunate.
Yeah, they won't get stuck in the mud with me and Julian at all.
Oh man.
Now, Derek, we are four months into this administration, which will last four years.
So, I mean, knowing that, what is, I think, your biggest concerns about the direction of the current U.S. federal health policy?
Well, my biggest concern is that it's going to last much longer than four years, because that is the explicit goal of Project 2025, is to give all of the power to the unitary so that there are no longer elections.
So I'm hopeful it'll only last four years.
I think there's going to be some sort of mass casualty event.
There is going to be another pandemic.
There is going to be an outbreak of a disease that we had under control.
There is going to be such a burden on our healthcare system that there are going to be more Luigis coming out because that is the unfortunate but natural reaction to a system that does not look out for its citizens.
You cannot keep these conditions where you just keep taking and taking and exploiting people and then expect them not to have consequences.
Oh, and another tragic one is how much we're losing in terms of knowledge.
People are leaving to go do research overseas.
We were the cream of the crop when it comes to scientific research.
Technology and science is kind of our thing.
And on one side, Trump is giving just carte blanche to tech companies.
And then when it comes to science, people are fleeing.
So we are no longer going to be setting the standards for science.
And I think as a member of a country that really set the civilizational standard for science, with contributions from around the world, to be clear, but coming here to our institutions, I think that's just going to push us in a very dark direction, not only in terms of the financial problems that I flagged, but also just in terms of living in a culture that's diverse and rich in knowledge.
Yeah, you know, I was thinking if the COVID pandemic started in this Trump administration as opposed to the previous one, I don't think we would have an Operation Warp Speed.
You know, there wouldn't be as much energy towards creating a new vaccine.
But we would have an Operation Paperclip.
But I don't think we would have mainstreamed anti-vax sentiments to the degree that we have without COVID.
Because COVID was the moment, whether they knew it or not, and I don't think they knew it, that anti-vaxxers were waiting for.
They weaponized and exploited ignorance and fears around government agents.
Julian, you said earlier about going in and, you know, you're telling your doctor, I know my body better.
That has been rhetoric in yoga spaces since the 90s.
I started my practice in the mid-90s.
The instructors were saying then, you know your body better than anyone.
You know better than doctors.
Like, that is very common rhetoric.
But it's elevated to the point where it's been weaponized by Maha.
So I just don't think we get to this level without COVID.
And unfortunately, because of things like climate change, we know we're going to have accelerating pandemics in the future, maybe in our lifetimes, but definitely down the line.
And that's just the apparatus is being dismantled right now.
Public health should be boring.
It's predictive, it's proactive, and it's policy-driven.
It's all the sort of sexy stuff that influencers would never understand or be able to sell and monetize.
And that's part of the problem.
But when you dismantle that system that is very bureaucratic and necessary and nothing is there to catch it, then we're in serious trouble.
Grim stuff, Derek.
Thank you so much for joining us.
But yeah, I have to say, if you like that, please go check out the Conspirituality podcast.
It is well-informed and very, very fascinating.
Derek, where else can people find more of your work?
Conspirituality is my main job with Matthew Remski and Julian Walker.
I have a non-profit called Cyrus Health where I work with medical experts and research experts.
I have another podcast over there called Clarity Lab.
And I try to take one bit of health information.
For example, cosmetic chemist Michelle Wong I talk to about sunscreen because there's an anti-sunscreen movement.
So we spent 20 minutes just breaking down why sunscreen is important.
So I have that project and then I'm on Substack, which I do weekly to address a lot of these topics.
Fantastic stuff.
Derek, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
We've also got a website that is qaapodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the Maha bless you and kill you.
Jesus.
Jesus.
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This investigation found that the Hallmark Maha Commission report that was released last week cites studies that appear to not exist.
We know that because, in part, we reached out to some of the listed authors who said that they didn't write the studies cited.
So I want to ask, does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?
Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS.
I understand there were some formatting issues with the Maha report that are being addressed, and the report will be updated.
But it does not negate the substance of the report, which as you know is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.
Can you talk about what tools or research goes into production of these kinds of reports?
For instance, is it AI that's used to put together these reports now?
I can't speak to that.
I would defer you to the Department of Health and Human Services.
