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00:01Working at HHS to advance your agenda to make America healthy again.
00:06We've launched Operation Stork Speed to get the bad chemicals out of AB formula.
00:14We're working with governors across the country to get good food into the school lunch programs
00:21and to get rid of chemical dyes and other bad chemicals that are in our food.
00:26We have now 38 percent of American youth are pre-diabetic.
00:31Every child that becomes diabetic, there should be a headline about them.
00:36All right. Well, that is the HHS Secretary, RFK Jr., at President Trump's cabinet meeting just a short time ago.
00:42Secretary Kennedy will join us live in a moment.
00:44As House Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to cut Medicaid benefits, GOP leaders say that is not true.
00:51That's a lie.
00:54It's going to be very difficult for them because once the committee process starts,
00:58they can no longer pretend as if they're not intending to cut Medicaid.
01:03No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid.
01:06The Democrats are trying to, frankly, lie to the American people.
01:09Fifty one billion dollars a year in Medicaid is lost to fraud.
01:12That's unconscionable.
01:15HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. joins me now.
01:17Secretary, thank you very much for being with us.
01:19It's good to have you back on the program today.
01:22Happy to be with you, Martha.
01:23So tell me, let's start there.
01:25And I want to get to a few other topics with you as well.
01:27But you oversee the Medicaid program.
01:30Do you think they're looking for $880 billion in savings over 10 years?
01:36The fraud number is somewhere between 30 and 50 billion dollars a year.
01:41Do you think that they can cut that money out of Medicaid?
01:44And is it something you support, those cuts?
01:48Well, I certainly support any cut of waste or misuse or fraud.
01:54And we're in a very good position now to identify that and to eliminate it because we have DOGE working with us.
02:01And they've been really extraordinary about finding fraud in all of the agencies and and, you know, they're being very helpful with us.
02:09So we think we're going to be able to identify it and eliminate it.
02:12But, you know, I mean, I'm incidentally protecting the Medicaid or protecting the Medicaid program and improving services to our poorest Americans.
02:24I know you've just been out across the country supporting, you know, promoting Maha and talking to people.
02:32And you just dropped something at this news at the cabinet meeting moments ago where you said that you think there'll be an answer to what causes autism.
02:40And we have seen tremendous growth in autism in this country.
02:43And you're going to have that by September.
02:45Can you open the aperture on that a little bit and tell us what what you are working on or what you think this is going to show?
02:51Well, we are launching requests for scientists from all over the country and all over the world to start to directly answer that question.
03:02Nothing like that has ever been done before.
03:03It should have been done 20 years ago.
03:05You know, when I was a kid, the autism rates were about one in 10,000 to two in 10,000.
03:13Today, they are one in 36 officially.
03:16But the new ADEM reports are going to come out the next week.
03:19And the preliminary numbers look like it's dropped to an extraordinary and astonishing one in every 31 kids with some communities being very, very badly hurt.
03:30Black boys, it's down to I think about it looks like about one in 12 or one in 10.
03:38So this is an epidemic like nothing we've ever seen before.
03:41It dwarfs the COVID epidemic.
03:43The cause to our country.
03:45These are children.
03:46COVID was killing elderly people at the end of their lives.
03:50This is disabling children of their entire lives.
03:53So for a long time, there was a thought that vaccines might be related to this.
03:58Then they did several studies that said that there was no connection between vaccines and autism.
04:04So what are you seeing in this data that you're looking at?
04:08Or is it all going to be brand new?
04:11The studies that they did were very, very narrow.
04:14And there were about 17 studies.
04:15The Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences,
04:20says that 14 of those studies are invalid.
04:23And the biggest weakness in those studies is they never studied vaccinated versus unvaccinated
04:30group, which is the only way that you can really make this determination.
04:34And more importantly, none of the vaccines that are given to children during the first six months
04:41of life were ever studied.
04:43We're going to look at vaccines, but we're going to look at everything.
04:46Everything is on the table, our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting,
04:52all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.
04:57It is an epidemic.
04:58Epidemics are not caused by genes.
05:01Genes can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.
05:05So we know that it is an environmental toxin that is causing this cataclysm.
05:10And we are going to identify it.
05:12We are narrowly focused on identifying it and using as many scientists as we can from
05:16universities and research centers all over the world to focus them through NIH, through
05:23Jay Bhattacharya, to focus them on answering this question.
05:28Well, I think everybody would like an answer to it.
05:30And the numbers are astonishing.
05:32You were recently in Texas.
05:34You went to the funeral of Daisy Hildebrand, an eight-year-old girl, Mennonite girl, who died
05:40from complications after contracting measles.
05:44And then you went on to say in the story around that, that you do believe that the MMR vaccine
05:50is the most effective way to limit the spread.
05:53Do you believe that Daisy would have died or her cousin would have been sickened if they
05:59had had that MMR vaccine, which they did not have for religious exemption reasons?
06:04Well, it's very hard to tell.
06:08Daisy, you know, I've seen her medical reports.
06:11She had a lot of complications that could have killed her, particularly she had acute tonsillectomy.
06:17She had been hospitalized three times before.
06:20She also had acute mononucleosis that she could not shake.
06:24She was graft positive for bacteria in her blood system, which is a red flag.
06:33And her death was caused by pneumonia.
06:37So, you know, her parents said that she was over measles two weeks before.
06:41So it's hard to tell.
06:42Measles all often is accompanied by pulmonary and respiratory illnesses.
06:48But we need to do better at treating kids who have this disease and not just saying the
06:54only answer is vaccination.
06:55We also need to make sure that doctors know the appropriate treatment, those kind of diseases
07:01as well.
07:02With regard to fluoride, you mentioned this today in the meeting as well.
07:06Utah is now banning it in their water.
07:08Florida is not far behind.
07:09Some people are making fun of this whole push on fluoride that you're part of because
07:13most of us grew up thinking that it was good for us.
07:16But it's interesting that the CDC in 2019 put out a warning telling parents, don't let
07:21your kids use too much toothpaste.
07:23That tells you something right there.
07:25Also, Europe decided to take it out of their water a long time ago.
07:28Do you think this is going to be a nationwide effort?
07:33Yeah, both EPA and my agency, HHS, are now reviewing the fluoride science.
07:40There's a lot of recent science, including the National Toxicity Program, which is the ultimate
07:45arbiter of the safety of environmental exposures and substances.
07:52And in August, the National Toxicity Program put out a meta review that showed that children
07:58and people who are exposed, that there's a direct inverse correlation between exposure
08:03to fluoride.
08:05It's dose related.
08:06In other words, the more fluoride you get, the lower your IQ is going to be.
08:09So, you know, the benefits of fluoride Martha are topical.
08:16It was originally thought when we put it in the water back in the 1940s that they were
08:20systemic.
08:21In other words, if you drank it, it would do something to your body to prevent growth of
08:25cavities.
08:26That's not how it works.
08:27The entire benefit of it comes from topical application.
08:31So there's really no reason to have it in the water supply in this era where we have toothpaste
08:40and where we have mouthwashes, where you can get that.
08:43We also shouldn't.
08:44There's a moral issue.
08:46We should not be forcing people to take this if they don't want to.
08:51And then there's also the precautionary principle.
08:54Fluoride is associated not only with IQ loss, but with extreme losses in bone density.
08:59There's a Swedish study that showed people on fluoridated, on the most fluoridated systems
09:05have 50 percent more hip fractures than people who are on less ones.
09:10Well, it affects kidneys.
09:12It calcifies the thyroid and does a lot of other bad things.
09:17And in Europe, where they banned it, they have not seen any kind of dramatic increase in
09:22cavities.
09:23Thank you very much, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy.
09:26Always good to see you, sir.
09:27Thank you for joining us this afternoon.