Brian Lair on WNYC.

So with all the war news and other things dominating the headlines last week,

and now the White House Correspondents Association dinner shooting to boot,

you may have missed that RFK Jr., the health secretary, sat for seven different congressional

hearings, his first and more than half a year.

And he definitely made some public health news, including definitely on vaccines.

So let's catch up on some of that with some clips from the hearings and a journalist who paid close attention,

a little bit of last week's old business before we get fully to this week's new business.

PBS listed four key takeaways from the hearings, including Kennedy deflects blame for Americans not vaccinating.

Kennedy forcefully denies there are Medicaid cuts,

a claim experts call political spin, says PBS. Though another takeaway was that Kennedy acknowledged

that some health and human services cuts are painful, meaning he acknowledged cuts. A Washington Post headline said RFK defends budget cuts.

He also defended firing centers for disease control director, Susan Menares, after not that long

ago calling her unimpeachable, interesting choice of words, right? We'll play that exchange or in exchange

he had about that with

Senator Elizabeth Warren. He also said that AI could someday replace the FDA, the Food and Drug

Administration. Here's that clip that you probably haven't heard.

AI is going to revolutionize medicine, and it may at some point make FDA even irrelevant and it's going to give us the

capacity to develop new drugs personalized medicine for every citizen you know I just was reading

about a a dog that had cancer and his owner used AI to develop a personalized treatment that cured

the cancer.

We're going to see that now in medicine, across medicine, and we're very excited about it.

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