Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Anne Shoup: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
Reporter (audio voiceover): What do say to people who are worried that his views on vaccines will translate into policies that will make their kids less safe?
Sargent: Anne, that doesn’t sound to me like someone who thinks RFK’s confirmation is a sure thing. What do you think?
Sargent: You guys are running ads in some of these states. Where are you running them? Who are you targeting? What’s the message?
We’re targeting Lisa Murkowski, Chuck Grassley, Joni Ernst, Mike Crapo, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Tom Tillis, Mike Rounds, John Cornyn, John Curtis, Shelley Moore Capito, and Jim Justice. We think there is a path here. It’s obviously an uphill one because people are hesitant to go against Trump at this juncture, but we’ve seen Matt Gaetz fall. There’s some question about some of his other nominees, so we do think it’s possible.
Reporter (audio voiceover): What about the polio vaccine?
Reporter (audio voiceover): Do you think schools should mandate vaccines?
Sargent: Note that he still felt the need to say that he opposes vaccine mandates in schools.
What we know is that you don’t have to completely take away vaccines for real damage to be done here. By nominating someone like RFK, he is creating an environment that allows vaccine misinformation and disinformation to spread. And that can have real impacts on people’s health. We saw a real world example of it happen with RFK in Samoa, where he fueled vaccine skepticism. It led to 83 people dying, mostly toddlers and babies. This is real. This happens. We’ve been protected from polio and measles for so long that I don’t know if people really understand the real threat and what’s at stake.
Sargent: Even RFK is starting to back off now. On Monday, he was on Capitol Hill meeting with senators and was asked about the polio vaccine. According to CNN’s Manu Raju, RFK said, “I’m all for the polio vaccine.” This comes after we learned that his lawyer petitioned regulators to remove approval for the vaccine, and after Mitch McConnell issued a strong statement of condemnation of that. My guess is that someone around Trump, maybe Susie Wiles, had a pretty stern conversation with RFK about all this and said, You got to get on the right side of vaccines and quickly. What do you think?
He can try to walk this back all he wants. That’s what we’re doing here with Protect Our Care: We’re going to make sure that he’s held accountable for this, and that anybody that votes him through is held accountable.
Shoup: I think so. One way to have a winning strategy on defeating RFK’s nomination is we really have to make sure that people understand the stakes and what RFK believes. One of the problems here is that a lot of people in our country, rightly so, have skepticism about drug companies, about big corporations. So they take what they hear, the general things that RFK talks about, and say, Yeah, I like that. That sounds pretty good. But the place where RFK takes it is deeply anti-science, deeply dangerous, fringe beliefs. We can’t let that spread.
He’s opposed to life-saving vaccines. He’s pledged to stop funding for treatments and cures for deadly diseases. Let’s also not lose sight of the fact that he’s never run any major organization. He’s never run an organization. The idea that he has the experience and skills to run a major health care program like Medicare or Medicaid, or that he can run a huge Department of Health and Human Services that oversees healthcare for 125 million people, that oversees the health care system that makes up 17 percent of our economy is absurd. It’s quite literally life and death for people.
Sargent: It seems like Democrats, generally speaking, are taking a bit of a hands-off approach to Trump right now. Shouldn’t the party be saying in unison that these nominees have absolutely no business being anywhere near the agencies they’re being chosen for? You’ve got some Democrats playing footsie with some of these nominees to the degree that they just want to appear like they want to work constructively with the new president’s choices. That seems problematic when the nominees are this bad. Couldn’t the party be doing more to say clearly that any GOP senator who ...
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