Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Today I'm talking about the incoming administration's approach

to health care, especially RFK Jr., President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of the Department

of Health and Human Services, and a man who has some extremely unorthodox ideas about public health.

HHS isn't the sexiest agency in the federal government, but it is one of the

most consequential. I want to focus on it because I think it's critically important to think

about public health right now, and it's really critical that we don't have people with

questionable theories in charge of it, especially when people's lives are at risk.

My guests for this conversation are critically important, too.

They're Dr. Zeke Emanuel, Dr. Selene Gounder, and Donald McNeil Jr. Dr. Emanuel has written and

edited 15 books and over 300 scientific articles. He has way too much experience to list here,

but Emanuel was the chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act,

and he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Celine Gounder is an internist, infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist, a CBS News

medical contributor and editor at large for public health at KFF Health News, and she teaches at New York University.

Donald McNeil wrote for the New York Times from 1976 to 2021, where he was a health and science reporter and the lead reporter on the COVID-beat.

I have huge respect for him. He won the prestigious John Chancellor

Award in 2020 and was on the New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

in 2021. This is a powerhouse group of experts. They're not just smart and experience. They're

very opinionated and they have plenty of disagreements. And they're not part of what a lot of anti-science people think is the deep state.

They are smart and interesting people.

...