Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Stephanie Psaki: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Elon Musk (audio voiceover): And I should say, we will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect, but when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly. So for example with USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention, so we restored the Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.
Psaki: Well, I’m guessing that’s probably not the example they would have preferred for him to have given in that moment. It seemed a bit off the cuff. I hope it does give us pause. I hope it gives Americans pause. Ebola is something that is pretty salient for Americans, and when they hear about something like flipping a switch of turning off Ebola prevention—which I think is a very simplified way of describing it—they should be concerned, particularly when there are ongoing Ebola and Marburg and unknown outbreaks happening in multiple countries right now.
Psaki: As a parent of two young children, I should say there are many children who are not vaccinated or not fully vaccinated against measles—not because their parents don’t intend to get them vaccinated but because you’re not fully vaccinated until you’re ages four to six. So children usually get their first dose around the age of one and their second dose of the measles vaccine around the ages of four to six. That’s when they’re fully vaccinated, which means that children who are not fully vaccinated can also be at risk even if their parents want to protect them with vaccination.
Sargent: Yes. We’re seeing a lot of alarm among public health professionals on social media and so forth. And it’s being exacerbated by the wanton and indiscriminate hacking away at government that Musk is doing right now. People are getting laid off all over the place in places like CDC, the NIH; medical researchers are getting pushed out. Putting it all together, it seems like there’s absolutely no serious concern on the part of the very highest people in our government right now about what you’re saying, which is that this measles outbreak is signaling a problem with our public health apparatus. Is there any indication that you see that they’re taking that idea seriously?
Sargent: Well, as it turns out, the people who have done the most to undermine trust in our public health system are now running it. The kid who died of measles came up at Trump’s cabinet meeting. A reporter asked Trump about it, and then Trump turned to RFK Jr. to get him to answer. Listen to this.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (audio voiceover): We’re following the measles epidemic everyday. I think there’s 124 people who have contracted measles at this point, mainly in Gaines County, Texas; mainly, I’m told, in the Mennonite community. There are 2 people who have died. We’re watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized mainly for quarantine. We’re watching it; we put out a post on it yesterday and we’re going to continue to follow it. Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year, there were 16. So it’s not unusual, you have measles outbreaks every year.
Psaki: It’s true that there were measles outbreaks last year and the year before. Although, if you look at the numbers even from 2024, they were much higher than 2023—so we’re going in the wrong direction. We should also keep in mind that we’re now about two months into the calendar year, so we shouldn’t be comparing what has happened already in 2025 to what happened throughout the entire year in 2024. Yes, it happens. I think we should be very concerned that we’re about a third of the way in 2025 toward the numbers that we got to in 2024.
To cast that aside as technically it’s true that there have been measles outbreaks in the past and there will be measles outbreaks, it’s a major problem for our public health system. It is very much the responsibility of the secretary of HHS to get this outbreak under control, and to make sure that we don’t see additional outbreaks and certainly that we don’t see additional deaths in children.
Psaki: There are a lot of things that RFK Jr. has said that I would not say and would not recommend for a secretary of HHS (laughs). I don’t know that he’s taking advice from me on that. I think he should be very concerned, and I think he should be telling his team that they should be on the ground working with CDC in Texas and New Mexico and in other states in getting this under control and surging any support they need immediately. And frankly, I think both he and President Trump should be expressing empathy and regret for what is happening because a child died of something that is preventable.
Psaki: If you look at how the meeting started, it started with Elon Musk speaking at the top about DOGE and the cuts that are being made across the government. That clearly is the headline that they are looking to have coming out of the meeting, and that’s what President Trump seems to be very focused on. The challenge is that there are downsides. There are reasons that these services were in place—and when you start to cut them and remove them, you are increasingly going to see crises that happen, emerge, are exacerbated because of those cuts.
Sargent: And don’t we want a president at a time like this to to use his presidential authority to tell the American people that things are being done, that the threat is taken seriously by them? Shouldn’t he want to do that?
Sargent: That is such an important point. RFK didn’t urge people to vaccinate. We should remember, by the way, that RFK has written that “measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear,” which has caused government officials to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.” There you have it. He didn’t tell people to vaccinate. He didn’t tell people that the government is surging resources. He didn’t reassure people in any significant way. Neither did Trump. I think that’s highly alarming, no?
Sargent: It sure seems clear to me that you’re absolutely right. I want to go back to something you said earlier. I haven’t been monitoring this, maybe you have. Has the CDC been saying what we would ordinarily want in this situation?
Sargent: So if you step back, here’s what you’ve got. You’ve got Elon Musk, who’s basically now a cabinet member, apparently, rampaging his way through the government, downsizing all sorts of different levels of government that are focused on public health in various ways, medical research, and biological research. You’ve got him “putting USAID through the wood chipper” and calling it all kinds of vicious names—he called it “evil” and “a criminal organization” and said “time for it to die.” USAID isn’t exactly a public health organization in the U.S., but it does a lot for health abroad. You’ve got Elon Musk saying, Oops, I accidentally turned off Ebola prevention.
Psaki: Yeah. Also, President Trump was elected by the American people. So the question is: Is this what people were anticipating when they elected him? And is this what they expect and want from him and his administration? We’re very early on. What worries me is the minicrises that we’re seeing right now. The measles outbreak is a crisis, but it’s not an unexpected crisis. There will be unexpected crises. And what worries me is what we are not doing right now to prepare for and anticipate those unexpected, much more difficult crises, and how they will be able to respond and handle those.
Sargent: Do you expect something like the Covid pandemic to come back, or maybe even something worse? And how do you think the response will be? I think there’s reason to believe it could be actually worse this time, right? What are you anticipating? What’s the worst-case scenario here?
That potentially could be much worse than the Covid pandemic was for a number of reasons. One of them being the distrust that we’re seeing in communities around the U.S. that was not there before Covid, at least not at the same level. Also, because many people have said that Covid could have been worse in terms of the health outcomes, it could have had a higher mortality rate, it could have spread even more easily, it could have mutated more quickly, it’s not the worst-case scenario. So we could find ourselves in a bird flu pandemic. We could find ourselves in a deliberate attack from one of our adversaries because the U.S. looks weaker right now.
Sargent: And if we do see something like the Covid pandemic—that level of seriousness or maybe something worse—do you expect our response to be worse this time than last time?
Another path to take is to delay recognition of a threat—they’ve already cut staff and cut funding, which puts you on your back foot to begin with—and even to suggest that we don’t need to take mitigation measures because we’re just going to live our lives through a pandemic. If we had an even worse situation with a worse threat or a worse response, we could have many more millions of Americans dying; we could have a pandemic that lasts longer. We were very lucky that we had a vaccine in a year; so we could find ourselves in a situation where we’re waiting multiple years for vaccines or effective treatments. It could be much worse.
Sargent: At risk of getting out of step with the serious tone you’ve struck here, I’m going to take a flyer and say that having two guys play around with the government like a pair of toddlers knocking over towers of blocks is not what you had in mind when you say that the state should be getting prepared.
Sargent: Right. We will just say now: All of you out there in the government who really want to do the right thing, best of luck to you. We really need you to do that. Stephanie Psaki, thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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