RFK's War on Vaccines Is a Political Loser
The Mona Charen Show
The Bulwark
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jonathan Cohn joins Mona to discuss the growing public health crisis under RFK Jr.’s leadership at HHS. From vaccine rollbacks to misinformation about autism and common medications, they walk through how policy decisions are already affecting real people—and why diseases like measles are making a comeback.
They also look at the politics: internal pushback inside the Trump orbit, warning signs from polling, and whether any of this can be stopped before the damage spreads further.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That which does not kill me makes me stronger, said Nietzsche. |
| 0:03.4 | But, of course, a lot of the time it did kill you. |
| 0:05.6 | Yes, yes, exactly. |
| 0:07.3 | It kills you part of the time. |
| 0:12.9 | Welcome to the Mona Charon show. |
| 0:15.3 | So glad you could join me today. |
| 0:17.9 | I'm going to take you behind the scenes at the bulwark today. I'm talking with my |
| 0:22.8 | great colleague Jonathan Cohn about his beat, which is all deep dives on policy matters. |
| 0:30.4 | And he focuses a lot on health. And this is a particular interest of mine. And honestly, |
| 0:37.3 | going back to the beginning of the second Trump administration, I remember thinking that of all the horrors and depredations that this administration was going to visit upon us, maybe one of the most galling and one of the hardest to tolerate was the complete |
| 0:57.0 | degradation of public health and the choice of RFK Jr., a crank to lead our most important |
| 1:07.9 | health agency in the government that has such an incredible role. Anyway, |
| 1:12.7 | that struck me as one of the most pernicious acts in this presidency. But of course, there's so |
| 1:23.9 | much competition. But Jonathan, I want to check in with you on how this is all going. |
| 1:30.8 | You keep a close eye on what's happening at HHS. |
| 1:35.7 | And I think it's fair to say that there has been, they've hit some bumps in the road in their effort to kill us all. |
| 1:48.1 | Yeah. Yeah, they have. Thank God. |
| 2:01.9 | So can I actually start with like a bulwark behind the scenes? No. So first of all, I don't know if you know this. We are coming up on my one year bullwork anniversary or whatever we call. Congratulations. Thank God. I love it here. Love working with you and everybody here. It's wonderful. And it's funny, you know, you described the newsletter I write the breakdown as about |
| 2:06.3 | being policy, which it is. It's a broad mandate to do all kinds of policy. And, you know, |
| 2:12.0 | I always knew I was going to be writing a lot about health because it's what I know best, |
| 2:16.1 | it's what I've written the most about. But I honestly thought that, you know, when I started this, that, you know, |
| 2:21.7 | it would be a mix of about half, maybe getting closer to two-thirds on health care, and then, |
... |
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