From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, May 6th.

New developments on RFK Jr. and vaccines. New York Times Food and Drug Administration reporter Christina Jewett is with us. She's very much on the RFK Jr. and vaccines. New York Times Food and Drug Administration reporter, Christina Jewett, is with us.

She's very much on the RFK Jr. Beat. Her latest article is called Kennedy Issues Demands for

Vaccine Approvals that could affect fall COVID boosters. Some of you heard the basic headline on this,

maybe just as much as I just said. Last Thursday, Kennedy

announced that all new vaccines would need to be tested against placebos. The question is,

will each new annual tweak to the existing COVID vaccines like you do with flu vaccines

now be treated like a brand new vaccine, which might make them impossible to produce.

Let's see what's happening.

We'll touch on a few other things, too.

Christina, thanks for coming on.

Welcome to WNIC.

Glad to be here, Brian.

Start at the beginning.

What was this announcement last Thursday in a little more detail than I just gave?

Sure.

Yeah, there was a bit of a curfuffle with a vaccine by Nova Vax that sort of caused some journalists to ask some more questions of the administration

about what they were, you know, really looking for in terms of these updated COVID vaccines,

which, you know, a lot like the flu vaccine, the viruses evolve,

and the formula has changed each year to sort of, you know, attack the most recent strain of the

virus. And so the administration came back and basically said there's not going to be sort of a blank check of approval based on,

you know, large studies from a few years ago. We're going to, you know, be requiring, you know,

...