The MeidasTouch Podcast
Meidas Health, Episode 2: Dr. Gupta and Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf
Sun, 06 Apr 2025
In this second episode of Meidas Health, two of the nation's preeminent health leaders join forces for a compelling conversation on the impact of ongoing HHS budget cuts on the nation’s health. Dr. Robert Califf, the recent former Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under President Biden, joins Dr. Vin Gupta, host of Meidas Health, for an action-oriented discussion detailing the many ways these continued cuts to federal health agencies threaten the health and overall well-being of all Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Robert Califf and why is he significant?
Hey, Midas Mighty. It's great to see you again. I wanted to share a few words ahead of episode two, which I'm so excited to be sharing with you. It's a conversation with recent former FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf. He is one of our nation's leading health officials. He was FDA commissioner under President Barack Obama and most recently under President Biden.
And he's somebody that, where there are very few candidates that could get through a Senate confirmation with bipartisan support, he's one of the few that did it. And so that's why it's really important for him, in my opinion, to be heard from at this moment.
When the FDA is being hollowed out, we're seeing all these cuts to HHS, more broadly to NIH, to CDC, to the committees and the personnel that are guiding our health information, communicating with the American public. They're pretty much all gone.
or they're people that we know have loyalties to the politics of the incumbent secretary, RFK Jr., not necessarily to the science and to the profession where their loyalties should be. And so I wanted to tee up and give you a sense of what to expect with me and Dr. Califf in conversation. We're going to talk about say, 35 minutes or so. And, you know, we were trying to make it real.
And I was trying to elicit from him and his expertise. Why are these HHS cuts? It may seem self-evident to us, but why are these cuts so impactful to all Americans, to families across the country? to people that may not be thinking about these issues the way maybe some of us are thinking about them every single day. Why does this impact everybody?
And how does it impact everybody from food safety, drug safety, especially as we're moving to secure more foods and more drugs from imported sources? It's important to note that a lot of these HHS and FDA cuts are gonna impact personnel and committees overseeing food and drug safety, especially from imported sources. That's number one. Two, he is effectively, RFK Jr.
has eliminated the expertise and the personnel that communicates with the American public on vital health issues. So who's going to do it now? We don't know. You've probably seen esteemed longtime experts like Dr. Peter Marks, who oversaw our vaccine approvals over the last many, many decades, including throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He basically resigned in protest.
and was recently came out saying that he was asked by the RFK Jr. team to come up and present data that was favorable to them on the measles vaccine and somehow linking the measles vaccine to autism. This is from recent reporting from the New York Times and other sources that he was asked to produce that information. Obviously, in his own telling, that information does not exist.
So he was being asked to invent false information. I think it's important, as we see inevitably more and more headlines on these topics and other budget cuts, to understand well beyond the headlines, why does this impact all of you, all of us? Why does it impact if you have children? Why does it impact your children? in an apolitical way, how does it impact maybe grandma and grandpa?
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of HHS budget cuts on health agencies?
I do want to, you know, I noticed you posted on LinkedIn and other social channels something to the effect that the FDA, as we've known it this week, you had posted this, is now finished. And, you know, when you talk about the impact of these cuts, I understand it's just having, you know, living and breathing health and health policy.
But I'm wondering if you can make it real for our listeners who maybe aren't thinking about medical device safety and food safety. even if there's a self-evident quality to some of these cuts and their impact, how is this going to impact the life of an everyday American?
Well, I think there are many analogies that are all kind of similar for something like this. And maybe pothole repair is an easy example to grasp. If you decide I want to cut the city budget, the expenses, you could say we're not going to fix any potholes for the next couple of years. And right away, you don't notice anything different.
But then over time, the risk of something bad happening goes up incrementally over time, and eventually someone's going to hit a pothole and something bad is going to happen. And so, I mean, we have industries in America and globally that supply America that produce pretty good products.
And so you wouldn't see something right away for the average person, but there will be harm done by products that are deficient that didn't get inspected on time. or safety reports that go out. One place that was cut substantially was the communications part of government. Someone's got to actually notify people when there's a safety problem.
The company has a role, but I don't think we want the companies taking full accountability for that. That's problems there is part of what led to the FDA being in place in the first place. But a place, just to mention one group I'm particularly worried about where who could see really big losses from expectations would be people with rare disease.
You're very aware, Vin, that we're on the threshold of treatments and cures for hundreds of thousands of diseases that were previously completely untreatable because of gene editing and other ways to affect the human genome. This is not possible until just now. But it's very complicated and it's a risky development process that needs a lot of interaction with the FDA.
And we're already seeing, for example, investors backing off because of the uncertainty as to whether there's enough staff left at FDA to work with the industry to develop these treatments. So I mean, this is not a matter like many of the diseases you and I deal with. I'm a cardiologist. We have a lot of treatments already. We're talking about people with no other treatment.
It's just one extreme example.
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Chapter 3: How do budget cuts affect food and drug safety in the US?
Dr. Kauff, I know that you're in an airport and we only have limited time with you. I do wanna zoom out a bit and just when we think about HHS cuts more broadly, the impact that this is gonna have on our talent pool, good jobs across biomedicine,
And frankly, what this means, again, I mean, I really want to laser in on things that impact the everyday America that may not be thinking about things that you and I think about often. Wondering if you can zoom out 10 years from now and assuming that what's happening today with these cuts across NIH, research funding cuts, impacts on...
committees and expertise across FDA that oversees quality and safety across a range of products. What does that mean for the American patient 10 years from now when it comes to access to treatments that might save their life for a cancer or say a chronic cardiometabolic disease or something in between? Can you make that real for us? What's the real patient impact here five, 10 years from now?
Well, when you talk about broader HHS, It's a bit different, I think, than the FDA in that some of the impacts are very immediate. People that were getting access to helpful medical care at community centers where the funding was cut, massive cuts to the public health infrastructure that many of our most vulnerable people are very dependent on.
You know, I am unretired from Duke University again, so I'm looking at universities. A lot of the people entering graduate school had their acceptances revoked because there's no money to pay them because the funding has been dramatically cut for training programs.
This means we'll have fewer scientists, fewer knowledgeable people, much higher risk that things will slip through the system that are unsafe when it comes to drugs and devices, higher risk of unsafe food. Now, all this is contingent on, you know, what happens now. Are things going to be rebuilt in the Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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