Hi, it's Ira Flato, and you're listening to Science Friday.

This week, NIH director, Dr. J. Badacharya, was named acting director of the CDC.

We have been following the turmoil at the agency, including the widening gap between vaccine science and policy under RFK

Junior's Department of Health and Human Services.

Now, the American Medical Association and the Vaccine Integrity Project, based at the University

of Minnesota, announced that they would be partnering to create their own vaccine review process, in effect,

creating a parallel system to the CDCs. Joining me now to explain the role of this new review

system is my guest, Dr. Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research

and Policy, Executive Director of the Vaccine

Integrity Project at the University of Minnesota based in Minneapolis.

Mike, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks, Ira. It's great to be with you.

All right. Let's start with how we got here. Why did you feel it was necessary to create a review

process for vaccines independent from the CDC's

review panel? Well, first of all, just to put into historic perspective, I wrote an op-ed

piece in New York Times in November of last year right after the election saying, be prepared

world of vaccines, because in fact, with Mr. Kennedy likely to become the Secretary of HHS,

they were going to come under heavy attack. And most notably, it's likely that the advisory community

utilization practices are what we call ACIP, an independent group of experts that advise the CDC

on how vaccines should be used would be dismantled

and it would no longer be science-based. Well, that all came true. But the work groups that the

ACIP has had over decades has been the group that did the heavy lift to make all the information

...