The RFK Jr. Problem

Malcolm investigates the origins of what the U. S. Secretary of Health and Human Services believes (and doesn’t believe) about viruses. Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Speaker 00

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• 0:37Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 2:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  I recently called up my friend Safi Bakal. I wanted to see if he could correctly guess the answer to a puzzle. First of all, before we start, I just wanted to briefly establish your bona fides for this conversation. You have a PhD from MIT, is that correct?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Stanford.

• 2:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  Stanford, Stanford. And you went on to be, to work on the development of a number of different drugs? Is that's correct?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  I did.

• 2:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Safi ran a drug company for a long time that worked on some of the hardest problems in cancer treatment. In preparation for our call, I sent Safi the package insert for something called Rotatec. As I'm sure you've noticed, when you get a prescription drug, there's a leaflet inside the box, all folded up, tiny print. That's the package insert. It tells you in great detail, every benefit, every side effect, every clinical study associated with your medication. The Food and Drug Administration and drug companies spend years working out the exact wording of that leaflet. And I'm assuming you've never read this before?

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Never read it before, just saw it 20 minutes ago, whenever you sent it.

• 3:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Rotatec is a vaccine to protect babies against a very nasty intestinal bug called rotavirus. What Safi first noticed was how well it worked.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Where I go to right away that's interesting is the efficacy data, which is post-marketing, adverse events, description, drug interactions, clinical studies, section 14. Yeah, that's amazing. You look at table eight on page 10 or whatever.

• 3:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yep.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  There was one incidence of any grade of diarrhea or gastroenteritis, which is what this virus is supposed to protect, and 51 on the placebo arm.

• 4:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  So it's 50 times higher, 50 times higher more kids will get.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Some serious or moderate diarrhea or gastroenteritis compared to those who got the vaccine. That tells me, of course, I want the vaccine for my kid.

• 4:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. If I told you, you had a, you had a drug on development that had efficacy data where there was a 50x difference between treatment and control, what would you, what word would come out of your mouth?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  That's absolutely astonishing. That's just jaw dropping. You almost never see that kind of efficacy in a therapeutic for treating active disease.

• 4:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  You see it once in a generation. You know, a 50x improvement is unbelievable, is incredible.

• 5:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  And now that Safi knew what we were talking about, it was time to see if he could answer my little puzzle. A puzzle connected to the co inventor of Rotatech, a man named Paul Offit. I want to read to you, now that we've done this, I want to read to you from a book, I'm going to have to tell you who wrote it, but it's someone in a position of real authority in the, in the world. "The best evidence indicates that Dr. Offit's rotavirus vaccine causes negative net public health impacts. In other words, Dr. Offit's vaccine almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction."

• 5:42Speaker 02

  That's just complete bullshit. I don't know what else to say. That's just, you look at this data. This is extremely robust, careful data. You look at the statistics are published and all of the, uh, the numbers and tables here. That is just absolute nonsense.

• 6:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Do you want to guess who wrote that?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Does it rhyme with genety?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, Safi, you win the prize.

• 6:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is the very strange story of rototech, a vaccine that every American infant is supposed to get three times in their first eight months of life. Or rather, the very strange campaign waged against rototech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the man in charge of every aspect of health, medicine, and research in the United States.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 7:36Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 8:15Speaker 03

  All curious at it, his first experience with high technology.

• 8:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  Tiny feline mind, blown. Check in on mealtime with a real time video feed and dispense food on demand even when you're away. In multi-cat households, the Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats uses facial recognition technology to track up to five cats. Visit P E T I V I T Y dot com slash cat feeder to learn more. A business gift is never just a gift. It's a thank you, a milestone, a moment of appreciation. It's a message about how much someone matters and what your brand stands for. At Fourimprint, you'll find thousands of customizable options like premium apparel,

• 9:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  branded drinkware, tech totes, and more, each chosen not just for function, but for meaning. You can tailor every detail, your logo, your message, your presentation, so your gift feels personal and on brand. And with expert support, dependable service, and thousands without a setup fee, creating something thoughtful doesn't mean making it complicated. Every order is backed by Fourimprint's 360-degree guarantee, so you can be Fourimprint certain it'll arrive exactly as expected, on time, and with the care your brand deserves. Because when the moment matters, the right gift speaks volumes and the right partner makes it easy.

• 9:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  Explore gifting with purpose and certainty at fourimprint.com. Fourimprint, for certain. If you are the parent of small children in the developed world in the 21st century, diarrhea is not high on your list of things you worry about. But that was not true of your parents when you were a child, or your parents' parents, or anyone else for that matter, going back as far as human beings go, particularly those living in the poorest parts of the world. This is what it used to be like.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  This one vivid memory that I can actually think of is going into these pediatric wards and you had patients, these children, literally to the point that you would actually have a diarrhea ward, a separate diarrhea ward, because that was the quantum of cases that you would see in hospitals without exception.

• 10:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is Vishwajit Kumar, a pediatrician and public health researcher in Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorest states in India, remembering his days as an intern in the 1980s.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  You have babies who come in, dehydrated, severely dehydrated, and the first thing, you know, sunken eyes, you know, you could just pull their skin and you'll find that, you know, they just don't retract because there's no tug of pressure.

• 11:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  A small child would get sick with the rotavirus. They would run a fever. They would start vomiting. They would develop severe diarrhea as the virus wreaked havoc in their stomach and intestines. That's three sources of dehydration, suddenly and simultaneously. And if the child was far from a hospital and already malnourished, they were in trouble. The best estimates at the time were the children in developing countries had between four and eight episodes of severe diarrhea in their first five years of life, each lasting from two to 10 days. For Dr. Kumar, this meant a giant room full of shrunken infants, two and sometimes three to a bed.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  So you have these sweepers whose job is to just keep cleaning the mess, or the parents would do it, or the parents would clean it, you know?

• 12:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  And of the children in that ward in that era, how many would you lose?

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Okay, so let's say there is 100 of them who come in with severe and life-threatening diarrhea. You'd lose 10% for sure.

• 12:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, my goodness. I mean, to lose one, to be a doctor and lose one baby must, is emotionally overwhelming. You're talking about... Over the course, so though over the course of working in a ward, you would lose dozens of children over the course of months.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. So to to give you an example. So we do these verbal autopsies because hospitals don't have good records. And so essentially reconstruct that event so that then experts can sit around and say, this possibly could have led to that. I have never been able to go through one verbal autopsy in one city.

• 13:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  What do you mean?

• 13:16Speaker 03

  It's so heartbreaking because you're like, oh, you know, this is, this could have been so, this could have been prevented. You know, it's like you, you, you look at these cases and see every newborn dies. There is one mother who also in some ways, there is some part of it dies with her.

• 13:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  The battle against rotavirus took years. First, the virus itself had to be identified, separated out from all the other pathogens that can cause diarrhea in young children. Then a vaccine had to be constructed from that newly identified virus, another time-consuming task. One of the leading groups working on the problem was at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia at a lab run by Paul Offit. You helped develop the rotavirus vaccine. In what year did that, did that come out?

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Two thousand and six.

• 14:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  Two thousand and six. How long did you work on that?

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Twenty six years.

• 14:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wow. Why was that a hard problem to solve?

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Um, I don't think it was terribly hard to solve. It's just takes a long time to solve these things. Although the veterinarians knew this to be a cause of disease in animals since the forties, it wasn't really described as a human pathogen until the seventies. So there wasn't a lot of information about this. So we developed a small animal model for the disease in the early eighties. And then we figured out and simply put, which part of the virus made you sick? And which part of the virus induced an immune response that was protective? And with that information, we then combined strains that were avirulent benign with virulent strains to to knock out the virulent part, but include the protective part. Thus summarizing 26 years of work in 40 seconds.

• 15:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  Offits Group took their candidate vaccine to the drug company Merck, which spent well over $1 billion to bring the candidate vaccine to market. The result was rotavirus.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  And with that, you know, the vaccine eliminate, really eliminated hospitalizations from this country. We don't really, most pediatric residents in our hospital have never seen an inpatient with rotavirus, which is amazing, because it dominated my residency.

• 15:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  It dominated your residency?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. No, you, over the winter, you were just flooded with kids, both in the emergency department and coming into the hospital, severe dehydration.

• 15:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. And now it's gone.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  And now the hospitalizations are gone.

• 15:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Other rotavirus vaccines followed. A group of scientists in India developed their own in 2016. Also, around this time, many developing countries made huge strides in sanitation, which cut down on the spread of the virus. Oral rehydration therapy became widespread. And now, the dedicated diarrhea wards that were such a big part of Kumar's training are all but gone. It's hard to find anyone who works with children and remembers the way things were, who isn't in love with the rotavirus vaccine. And you sort of list the most important innovations that you've seen that have affected the lives of children. Where does this rank?

• 16:14Speaker 05

  At the top, amongst the top.

• 16:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is Dr. Zulfikar Bhuta, co-director for the Centre of Global Child Health at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. He spent years as a pediatrician in his native Pakistan.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  We went down from 10 million child deaths under five in the year 2000. By 2015, to just under 6 million deaths. Today, they are down to around 3 million deaths in children under five. It's the fastest rate of reduction in child deaths in the history of mankind. And it hasn't just happened by happenstance.

• 16:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  And this is the vaccine that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hates.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 17:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  The new Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats turns everyday meals into meaningful health insights, helping you identify changes in your cat's habits and be more proactive about their health. My cat, Biggie Smalls, is the most demanding member of our household. He has specific mealtimes, or he lets out a massive howl. And last night, I introduced him to the Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats. It took no time to set up. I downloaded the app, plugged it in, filled up the feeder with delicious kibble, and watched as my cat entered the digital age. Biggie, look. All curious at it. It's his first experience with high technology.

• 18:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Tiny, feline mind, blown. Check in on mealtime with a real-time video feed and dispense food on demand even when you're away. In multi-cat households, the Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats uses facial recognition technology to track up to five cats. Visit petivity.com/catfeeder to learn more. A business gift is never just a gift. It's a thank you, a milestone, a moment of appreciation. It's a message about how much someone matters and what your brand stands for. At 4imprint, you'll find thousands of customizable options,

• 19:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  like premium apparel, branded drinkware, tech totes, and more, each chosen not just for function, but for meaning. You can tailor every detail, your logo, your message, your presentation, so your gift feels personal and on-brand. And with expert support, dependable service, and thousands without a setup fee, creating something thoughtful doesn't mean making it complicated. Every order is backed by 4imprint's 360-degree guarantee, so you can be 4imprint certain it'll arrive exactly as expected, on time, and with the care your brand deserves. Because when the moment matters, the right gift speaks volumes, and the right partner makes it easy.

• 19:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Explore gifting with purpose and certainty at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, for certain.

• 20:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  I have to confess that I knew very little about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before he ran for president in 2024. But as he loomed larger and larger in the news, I realized I had his most recent book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. His publicist must have sent me a review copy when it came out in 2021. I found it in a big pile of books on the porch, so I decided to read it, all 492 pages. And it was there, in Chapter 3, that I discovered the particular loathing that RFK Jr. has for the rotavirus vaccines. I couldn't make head nor tails of it, which is why I had to call my friend Safi Bakal up.

• 20:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  We were going over the package insert, which you thought was clean as a whistle. Yeah. Right? And so I was trying to figure out why, if it was as clean as a whistle, does Kennedy have such a problem with Rototech and rotavirus vaccines in general? And I want to read to you the key paragraph in his book, which, and we're going to try and solve this puzzle together, because I have a vague idea, but I think I'm, I can't, my idea is so, reflects so poorly on him that I, part of me thinks it can't be the right idea.

• 21:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is the key paragraph. Reported adverse reactions from Dr. Offitz's Rototech vaccine ranged from 953 to 1689 per year. These included fever, diarrhea, vomiting, irritability, interseption, SIDS, severe combined immunodeficiency. Kennedy lists 20 different really bad things he thinks are associated with Rototech, ending with gastroenteritis, pneumonia, and death. Then he writes the paragraph that I read to Sophie at the beginning of this episode, that the list of adverse reactions is so long that Rototech, quote, "almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and

• 22:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  injured prior to the vaccine's introduction." Now, I have to say that, at this point, things get deeply confusing. Because I couldn't figure out where that number, 953 to 1689, adverse reactions a year, comes from. In the real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy lists as his source the package insert, but those numbers aren't in the package insert. We hired a fact checker with a PhD in biology, and she couldn't figure out where Kennedy's numbers come from either. Then we thought, oh, he got the numbers from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which is the government-run database where anyone can report a side effect that they think is associated with a vaccine.

• 22:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Keyword "think." But VAERS isn't Kennedy's source either. We found the numbers. VAERS only has 344 reports of side effects over 15 years for all rotavirus vaccines, of which only 32 are serious, which is like miles and miles away from the massive number of problems that Kennedy's talking about. And even if he just made a typo and read the numbers wrong, it still doesn't prove his case. Because as the CDC says, quote, "A report devares does not mean a vaccine caused an adverse event."

• 23:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  So just because a baby vomited after getting his Rototech, doesn't mean Rototech caused the vomiting. Babies vomit all the time. To prove the vaccine was the cause of the side effect, you really have to dig into the data, look for patterns, or better yet, go back to the original clinical trial and see if there were any clues when the vaccine was first tested for side effects. In the case of Rototech, the clinical trial was enormous. 12 countries, 34,000 infants were given the vaccine. 34,000 were given a placebo. The babies were followed for a full year and absolutely every medical event that happened to them was recorded and analyzed. 68,000 babies. If in the course of a year, the babies who got the vaccine

• 24:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  had more complications than the babies who got the placebo, then that would raise a red flag. It would suggest, wait, maybe the vomiting was the result of the vaccine. But if there was no difference in the experience of those two groups, it would suggest any associated problems were just the kind of health problems that you'd expect to see, as a matter of course, in a very large group of babies. All of this data is laid out in the package insert.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Page five, the SAE, serious adverse events. And you would just look at that table and you would say, no difference.

• 24:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  The table is a comparison of side effects in the kids who got the vaccine and the kids who didn't.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Numerically, if anything, there were more SAEs on the placebo than the control arm, but it's insignificant. It's like the difference between eating a banana or an apple.

• 25:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  No difference.

• 25:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Together, we went through every one of the medical problems listed on the chart.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Gastro and bronchitis, 0.6%. Fever, 0.1%. Pneumonia, 0.2% for treatment. Treatment. Hemata, what's that? Placebo. Hematocytosis, is that where we are now?

• 25:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  We kept finding the same thing. No difference.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  No difference.

• 25:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  And any difference?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Uh, let's see, 0.6, 0.6, no, no difference.

• 25:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  And seizures?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Let's see, where are you, next page? Yeah, seizures.

• 25:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yes.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Numerically, maybe a little higher. But the SAEs were exactly the same.

• 25:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  But somehow, Kennedy reached the opposite conclusion. In his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy writes, quote, "Since its approval, Dr. Offitz's rotavirus vaccine has caused a wave of catastrophic illnesses and agonizing death."

• 26:11Speaker 02

  I mean, that's just astonishingly, it just makes, it's just astonishing.

• 26:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. So wait, what's he doing? He looked at the same thing you looked at and decided that the rotavirus vaccine was causing this enormous burden of adverse reactions? I have to say, I got completely obsessed with this. Where is RFK Jr. getting his information? And what about the data from the clinical trial? Did he not read it? Did he read it and not understand it? Or did he read it and understand it and just say, eh? You have a simple chart that has two columns. One column's called placebo and one column's called treatment. And he decided to completely ignore the column called placebo, right? Exactly.

• 27:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  He decided to reach a conclusion about the vaccine by looking at, by fundamentally, not just misinterpreting, he got a, he's 180, 180 degrees wrong in his interpretation of the data. And he had to, he had to place, it's as if he took his hand and placed it over the side of the chart that says placebo. Like, there has to be some agency here that allows you to look at something that has two rows and only see one row.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Well firstly, I doubt that he actually looked at this source. I'm sure he's a pretty busy guy and you know.

• 27:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  But Sapi, he writes half of an entire chapter denouncing the rotavirus vaccine. It's not like this is, this is not a, he's not making this observation in passing. He's going after at length, one of the most significant public health advances of the last 25 years. Right, something that has saved millions of lives. There's not trivial stakes here, right? He's big game hunting here.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, wasn't he trained as a lawyer? I don't know.

• 28:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  He's a lawyer, yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Because on the left, I guess I try to err on sort of generous explanations. And maybe you are, you go on the other side, I don't know. But aren't lawyers trained to do that sort of thing? Dig deep into facts and make a case or prove or disprove a case? You would think that would be part of your legal training.

• 28:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  But if you, if you were a lawyer and made this argument in court, you would be humiliated by opposing counsel.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it would take five seconds.

• 28:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Who would just hold up the chart and say, oops.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's the other side.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  One, one last, one last question, but a very specific one, which is, if you're going to do this, why does he link to the source that refutes his argument? He, so I can understand, I wanna, I wanna completely misinterpret the clinical data on rotavirus. I wanna make this argument about vaccines and I'm gonna cross my fingers and hope that 95% of my readers don't notice. But then he gives you the link to the very thing that shows you that he's absolutely wrong. Who does this? He's not even a good liar.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  What was that word that they used a few years ago? Truthiness.

• 29:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Right? There must be an equivalent word of scienciness. My book has scienciness because it has footnotes that are sciency. Done.

• 29:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  By the way, this isn't even the half of it. If you spend any time at all immersed in the words and thoughts of RFK Jr., it's pretty clear that the person who he hates above all others is Anthony Fauci. Kennedy really, really doesn't like Anthony Fauci. He wrote a 492-page book about how much he hates Anthony Fauci. But do you know who's a close number two? Paul Offit, the inventor of Rototech. In The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy spends pages on Offit. He writes, "Offit, quote, 'represents himself as an authoritative source of reliable information, but he is actually a font of wild industry ballyhoo, prevarication, and outright fraud,' end quote."

• 30:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Tune into any of the countless podcast interviews Kennedy has given, and you'll find the same thing. After he's gone after Fauci, he goes after Offit. To the point where after Kennedy goes on Joe Rogan and went on one of his usual Paul Offit rants, Offit got death threats and hate mail.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't know if you listened to the whole Rogan thing, but he attacks me all the time because I committed the unpardonable sin of being the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, which, by the way, saves about 165,000 lives a year in the world. I thought that was a good thing, but apparently, according to him, I'm just a pharmaceutical.

• 30:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. I keep seeing him go after you, and I'm trying to sort of understand, but he's never, to your knowledge, has he ever kind of acknowledged what you guys created was of value to mankind? Has he never, has he ever acknowledged that?

• 31:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 31:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  165,000 people a year?

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Doesn't believe it.

• 31:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  But did he, I mean, did he actually work through the logic of this? Or did he just?

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Not publicly. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what, how his brain works.

• 31:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Maybe it was that worm. Maybe the worm was telling him to do it.

• 31:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm sorry to keep harping on this, but this is just bizarre. If I was someone who really didn't like vaccines and I was writing my massive opus on the subject, I'd pick a really marginal vaccine to go after, something with dubious benefits, lots of side effects, something where the VAERS data was really alarming. I don't know, an inexplicable wave of strokes or seizures or something worrisome in people who got the vaccines. But what does Kennedy do? The opposite. He goes after maybe one of the most important public health triumphs of the last 100 years, a vaccine with a package insert that is so immaculate that he literally has to create

• 32:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  an objection that is transparently false. It makes no sense. By the way, if you're wondering why we didn't just call up RFK Junior himself and ask him directly, oh, we tried, over and over again, calls, emails, right up to the Department of Health and Human Services.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  ... thank you for calling the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

• 32:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  Total runaround. Then to his lawyer and longtime confidant, Aaron Siri, who was all willing to be interviewed until I told him I wanted to talk about the rotavirus vaccine, at which point he put all kinds of stipulations and restrictions on how our interview would proceed, including the fact that we couldn't tape-record it. And then, when we finally did talk, Siri couldn't come up with any kind of plausible explanation for what his good friend and client was doing either. I thought, is there someone else I could call? Was I ever going to get to the bottom of this? And then I realized, maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe I just need to keep reading Kennedy's book.

• 33:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  And so I did, and sure enough, there it was, the answer, in Chapter 9, entitled, "The White Man's Burden."

• 33:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the preeminent figures in modern medicine was the 19th century French microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur is the pioneer of germ theory. Infectious diseases are the result of foreign microorganisms that invade the body. Every time you get a vaccine created specifically against a particular virus, or take an antibiotic optimized to fight a specific strain of bacteria, you are following Pasteur's logic. Germ theory is one of the foundational ideas of modern medicine. And in chapter nine of The Real Anthony Fauci, we learn that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't believe in germ theory.

• 34:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  He is, instead, a follower of Pasteur's nemesis, another 19th century French microbiologist named Antoine Beauchamp. Beauchamp argued that Pasteur had it backwards. You don't get sick because you've been infected by a bug. The bug emerges in response to the fact that your body was already sick. The bug is a symptom, not a cause. What matters is the terrain of the body, an individual's internal state of health. It's really hard to find people who believe in Antoine Beauchamp's theories. I spent hours on the internet looking before finally stumbling upon another disciple. Maybe you'll recognize his voice.

• 34:57Speaker 07

  And Pasteur believed the germ theory, obviously. That's the theory that he pushed, right? And then Beauchamp believed in the terrain theory. Now, that's what I believe.

• 35:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is the actor Woody Harrelson, on Joe Rogan, of course.

• 35:14Speaker 07

  The terrain theory, the germ theory, obviously, a pathogen, a germ, a virus, whatever, lands in your cornflakes, or on your eyeball, or whatever, it gets inside you. Right. And then in this blank, pristine, blank slate environment, it causes damage, maybe sickness, and eventually death. To me, I don't believe this theory as much as I do the terrain theory, which is that your health is dependent upon your internal biological terrain and your internal filthiness or cleanliness. And so that's what I believe is where people's immune system gets messed up from what they're consuming.

• 36:01Speaker 07

  And in a nutshell, that's why I believe in Bechamp's theory as opposed to the germ theory.

• 36:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  I should point out, guess who Woody Harrelson is good friends with? RFK Junior. So maybe what we're looking at here is not two Bechampians who arrived at the same conclusion independently, but one Bechampian who infected another in defiance of everything Bechampian. Of course, there is some truth to terrain theory. Diabetes and heart disease are the result in part of what Bechamp would call a disturbed terrain, a body that because of obesity, or smoking, or bad nutrition, or a lack of exercise, has become vulnerable to chronic disease. But Kennedy doesn't stop there. He's a radical Bechampian. He believes that if you're otherwise healthy, the cold virus is just not going to be an issue.

• 36:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  HIV is probably not going to give you AIDS, not if you take care of yourself. There's a whole chapter on HIV and AIDS in his book, making a version of this argument. Early in his time as Secretary of Health and Human Services, there was a major outbreak of measles in Texas, and Kennedy's response was so lackadaisical that his press secretary quit, it seems, in disgust. "Measles? It's only a problem if you're unhealthy. The virus is the symptom, not the cause." It took several months, two children dying, and over 500 cases for him to finally give an interview where he said, "Okay, you should get the measles shot."

• 37:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kennedy is unhappy to this day that in the 19th century battle between Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp, Pasteur came out on top. Listen, this is from the audiobook version of the real Anthony Fauci, being read by what really, really seems like AI.

• 37:51Speaker 08

  For better or worse, the champions of germ theory, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, proved victorious in their fierce, decades-long battle with their miasmist rival, Antoine Bechamp.

• 38:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  Just so you're aware, if you're thinking of getting the audiobook, you're in for 27 hours and 20 minutes of this.

• 38:13Speaker 08

  The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A one trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons, and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology led by little Napoleon himself, Anthony Fauci, fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory.

• 38:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  What doesn't RFK Junior like? Pills, powders, pricks, and potions. The very things that the Department of Health and Human Services brings to the world. And of all the pills and powders and pricks within his domain, the one he hates the most is Rototech. And why does he hate Rototech? Because he's a Bichampian. And a Bichampian has to hate Rototech. Because if Kennedy admits that Rototech works, then the whole edifice of 19th century pseudoscience that he has committed himself to comes tumbling down. RFK Junior likes to pretend that he is alarmed by vaccines that do not work. No.

• 39:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  He's alarmed by vaccines that do work. Heaven, help us.

• 39:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Next time on Revisionist History, the plot thickens and the virus spreads from RFK Junior to Joe Rogan.

• 39:59Speaker 09

  Then we run into each other in Aspen. Just randomly.

• 40:03Speaker 10

  That was the weirdest moment because we were both staring at each other.

• 40:06Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 10

  And then we almost did it like a full 360.

• 40:09Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed you walking. I'm like, that's... Yeah, it is. So I said, hey, what's up?

• 40:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence, and Ben Dedaf-Haifry. Our editor is Karen Chikurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Marcelo de Oliveira. Production support from Luke Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Jefe Greta Cohn. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

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• 41:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  For I don't know how long, maybe 12, 13 years, I've worn a Whoop band on my wrist. I started doing it because I met the founder of Whoop at a conference. He heard that I was a runner and he said, oh, you'll love this. It's perfect for athletes. And he was right. I've worn one ever since. Every time I work out, I see how hard I worked, how long I need to recover. I wake up in the morning and I get a complete picture of how my sleep went, which helps me understand the kinds of things that lead to a bad night and the kinds of things that lead to a good night. It's sleek, long-lasting battery. And now with AI looking at all my numbers and coaching me. Whoop is a winner. New members can try Whoop with a 30-day free trial before committing to a membership.

• 42:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop.

• 42:22Speaker 13

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed ZOLAR, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 42:35Speaker 14

  ZOLAR 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking ZOLAR, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to ZOLAR. ZOLAR may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. ZOLAR should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. ZOLAR is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolar.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about ZOLAR. This is an advertisement for ZOLAR

• 43:20Speaker 14

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