RFK Jr. adviser Calley Means explains why so many Americans are suspicious of food and pharma companies, and what the HHS secretary nominee plans to do about it if he's confirmed. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Avishay Artsy, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the key arguments made by RFK Jr. regarding health?
Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?
Chapter 2: Is Lyme disease a military bioweapon according to RFK Jr.?
I probably did say that. Kennedy makes two big arguments about our health, and the first is deeply divisive. He is skeptical of vaccines.
Well, I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.
Science disagrees. The second argument is something that a lot of Americans, regardless of their politics, have concluded. He says our food system is serving us garbage and that garbage is making us sick. Coming up on today explained a confidant of Kennedy's, in fact, the man who helped facilitate his introduction to Donald Trump, on what the Make America Healthy Again movement wants.
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You're listening to Today Explained. Callie Means is an informal advisor to RFK who went viral on Twitter about two years ago with this explosive claim. Callie had worked as a consultant for Coca-Cola, and he said that he'd witnessed Coke give millions of dollars to various groups to ensure that sugar taxes failed and that soda was included in food stamp funding.
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Chapter 3: What is Callie Means' view on the food system in America?
The NAACP took millions of dollars from Coca-Cola to say that we should maintain Coca-Cola on food stamps, which is just an absolutely insane public policy because that's literally poisoning lower-income kids with a supplemental nutrition assistance program.
Callie went on to co-author a book with his sister, Dr. Casey Means, called Good Energy, and he founded a company called TrueMed. Today, he maintains deep skepticism of big food and big pharma, and he contends that these industries have economic incentives not to make Americans well, but to keep us sick.
In hindsight, what I saw is that the healthcare system is working to propagate a system where more Americans are sick and to perform interventions on those Americans, not to cure any disease, but manage it. And that's 95% of our medical spending. 95% of our medical spending is management of chronic disease.
So examples of that are in this invisible hand at work where I don't even think people realize what they're doing is working for Coca-Cola, funding millions of dollars to the American Diabetes Association. I saw that. So why is Coca-Cola funding the American Diabetes Association?
Chapter 4: How does Callie Means describe the healthcare system's role?
And why would the American Diabetes Association be accepting money from Coca-Cola when we have a diabetes crisis among children when it's liquid diabetes, it's high sugar drinks? Right. So there's actually this interplay between our food system, our ultra-processed food system that's getting people addicted, that's getting people sick, and then a healthcare system that stands silent.
So that's on the food side. On the pharmaceutical side, it's the rigging of institutions. The pharmaceutical industry is the lifeblood of institutions. of academic research and the NIH and the federal bureaucracies just by definition are a revolving door, an orgy of corruption between industry and government.
I mean, 11 of the 12 past FDA directors literally left the FDA and the next day walked into a pharmaceutical office. I had a list of Stanford and Harvard professors that we were going to funnel money to. These aren't apparent corruption. It's rank corruption. And I saw that.
Kelly, what do you hear as the main pushback against you? What do your critics argue?
Well, they resort to ad hominem attacks. If you really stay on these unimpeachable messages, I think they're pretty hard to disagree with. It's a demonstrable fact that our scientific and healthcare agencies are co-opted. 75% of the FDA department that oversees drug approvals is funded by the pharmaceutical industry itself.
NIH bureaucrats are able to take royalties from drugs, which they did during COVID. It's also impossible to argue with the fact that we're the sickest country in the developed world and there's a true chronic disease crisis among children. That's pretty hard to argue with. So what happens is the healthcare industry is the largest and fastest growing industry in the country.
It's the most powerful industry in the country. The pharmaceutical industry Industry is the biggest funder of politicians themselves, scientific research, regulatory agencies, the media itself. So they control a lot of our institutions just by definition.
I've seen some of the ad hominem attacks. I wonder if you can explain that aspect of your message. Why does everything, because you know that many people will be turned off by kind of what they view as conspiratorial thinking. Might it make sense to temper this a little bit? Do you think part of the problem is, like, you know, it sounds a bit nutty, someone might say, right?
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Chapter 5: What are the economic incentives of the pharmaceutical industry?
What sounds nutty that I said?
The idea that everybody is in league to keep Americans sick.
I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I completely dispute the premise of your question. I said that the pharmaceutical industry makes money when people are sick and loses money when they're healthy. That's not a conspiracy. That's a demonstrable statement of economic fact. And hospitals make money from fee-for-service.
Many friends from Harvard Business School of mine work at hospitals, and their job is dependent on filling the beds. That's not a conspiracy.
Chapter 6: How does Callie Means address criticism of his views?
I'm going to push just a little bit further on this, Kelly, because there are statements of fact that you are making. Yes. And they will pass a fact check. It's it's the idea that pharmaceutical companies want to keep us sick. I didn't say that. Companies want to keep us.
I didn't say that. I said their economic incentives.
Well, the economic incentive is the want. I mean, it's America. It's a capitalist society.
No, I didn't talk about their motivations.
What are their motivations?
This is the largest industry in the country is healthcare. A pharmaceutical executive gets fired if there's not growth. Growth of pharmaceutical, the pharmaceutical industry presupposes and necessitates more sick people.
You're saying there is an economic incentive.
Somebody gets fired unless the company grows. The company requires more sick patients to grow. That's an indisputable fact.
I think that many people would agree with you that when there is money involved, the incentives to grow, to grow the company can lead to perverse outcomes like a lot of sick Americans. You are the founder of a company that sells, among other things, supplements, fitness classes, fitness equipment. I was on this morning. You have some good sales.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of RFK Jr.'s views on vaccines?
Let me ask you a last question. If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed. Maha, the Make America Healthy Again movement, is very close to being inside the system, maybe even in a couple of years being the system. And some people might say, well, that's when the work gets really hard, right? It's easier to be an outsider than it is to be an insider.
Do you have any thoughts on that, on what it might be like for this, at the moment, outsider movement to operate on the inside? Do you think it'll be tough?
What the promise of Maha is, is Bobby, a reform-minded person, I would say a magnetic, incredible leader, is putting a stake in the ground that we need to move to a more preventative model and a more chronic disease reversal-focused model of health. That's his stake. And I had a really profound conversation with the dean of a med school recently, and he was honest.
And he said, listen, everyone in the faculty lounge thinks Bobby's a whack job. And if you steer NIH funding to more preventative outcomes, and that's kind of where the NIH is going, they're going to kick and scream and complain and say that's stupid. But they're going to write grants for what the NIH is saying they want.
Chapter 8: How does political corruption relate to health issues?
And if you can win and keep this kind of vibe and this movement towards that more preventative pull, in four years and six years, Bobby, you'll be gone. But if that preventative direction that the health incentives go towards... stays that way, in six years, it'll be the norm. In six years, it won't be about body being crazy. It'll just be like, this is how things are done.
And that's the stakes right now, is we're trying to, we've lost our way a bit. Our health incentives are too focused on waiting for people to get sick. and then managing those conditions. I would argue profiting from those conditions.
What we're trying to do is get conflicts of interest out of the system and steer the sizable incentives that the government creates towards a more preventative future that asks, how can we actually prevent and reverse these diseases? That's the fight right now. And we just have to continue to win that argument. At the highest level, these are unimpeachable ideas that most Americans agree with.
It's not going to be total shock and awe. We're not going to be able to change everything at once. But we really have changed the country if we can accomplish that momentum shift to that world.
Callie Means, the book is Good Energy. The company is TrueMed. Thank you so much for taking the time for us today. We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Before we go, you heard Callie say that the health care industry is the biggest in America. In fact, the biggest industry in America is quite hard to determine when you get right down to it. The biggest funder of academic research is not, as he said, the health care industry. It is, in fact, the federal government.
Regulators and media do get a lot of money from the health care industry, but it is not their biggest funder. And now, a note from our funders.
Hey, it's Scott Galloway. In today's marketing landscape, if you're not evolving, you're getting left behind. In some ways, it's easier than ever to reach your customers, but cutting through the noise has never been harder. So we're going to talk about it on a special PropG Office Hour series.
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