For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pura-Pier-Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman.

This week, federal officials announced major revisions to the U.S. vaccine schedule for kids. The number of immunizations the health agency now recommends has dropped from protecting against 17 diseases to 11.

And these changes come as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert of Kennedy Jr., has transformed

the department over the past year, from firing several top health officials to handpicking a new

CDC vaccine panel. He says these changes are part of his Make America Healthy Again, also known as

Maha initiative, despite the fact that much of it seemed to defy the best-known practices of public

health. I talked with Dan Vergano, a senior editor at Scientific American,

to understand what this drastic overhaul to the backbone of the country's public health system

will do to well public health.

Thank you for joining us today.

Great to be with you.

I think for most people, we've grown up under a system

where we take a lot of things for granted,

whether it's access to medicine or food safety.

And I think for a lot of us, we're having difficulty maybe wrapping our heads around what

this kind of upheaval would actually mean practically.

And so can you talk a little bit about, like, what are the consequences of this kind of

massive shift?

RFK Jr. is now the head, essentially, of the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy

Again, which is this sort of agglomeration of people concerned about food additives, vaccines,

pharmaceutical industry in general. So basically, your federal government is going to do less for you

when it comes to your health, is the gist of the Maha movement and RFK Jr.'s influence on HHS.

...