WaPo bombshell: RFK's CDC burying report on Covid vaccine success

Saving Seekers, we hear you! Seeking energy savings, always keep your energy prices under the price cap. With Next Pledge, your energy prices are guaranteed to always stay below the price cap. Satisfy those savings cravings. Check out our full range of tailored energy solutions at eonnext.com forward slash save. Eonnext, we make energy savings work. Next Pledge is a 12 month fixed time trucker tariff with variable rates lower than Ofcham's price cap for standard variable tariffs. Direct debit required. T's and C's apply. Home to the Rachel Maddow Show. Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Psaki and more voices you know and trust. MS Now is your source for news, opinion and the world. Learn more at MS.now. Good evening from New York. I'm Ali Velshin for Chris Hayes. We are now 48 hours into a two week ceasefire in the U.S. war on Iran. At least we are in theory if not on paper anywhere that you or I or anyone else could see. Because in a normal ceasefire, in a normal world, you'd be able to see things progressing toward peace. You wouldn't see what's happening in Lebanon where the deadliest attacks of the war are taking place. As Israeli bombs continue to devastate that country, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands of people. You should be seeing free and open commerce instead of the 20% of the world's gas and oil supply that's still being held in limbo by an Iranian controlled choke point in the Strait of Hormuz. In short, you should be seeing peace taking hold during a ceasefire. So it's fair to ask if that's even what we have here. The parties in this conflict don't even agree on what they apparently agreed to. Normally, instead of all this back and forth, we could all just look at the ceasefire in writing to see what it says. But there's nothing to look at. When he announced the deal on Tuesday, Donald Trump posted, quote, we received a 10-point proposal from Iran and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Iran followed that by releasing what it says was that 10-point agreement and almost as soon as it was reported, the White House called that fake news. The Pakistani prime minister, who brokered the deal between Iran and the United States on Tuesday night, described it as, quote, an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, effective immediately. And, quote, those were his words. Iran said that was their understanding, too. But then Israel just kept on striking Lebanon and U.S. officials like Vice President J.D. Vance played it all off as some sort of misunderstanding. First of all, I actually think, and there's a lot of bad faith negotiation and a lot of bad faith, you know, propaganda going on, I think this comes from a legitimate misunderstanding. I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn't. We never made that promise. We never indicated that was going to be the case. It's sort of a big part of the ceasefire for the vice president to not be clear on. The speaker of Iran's parliament, a man that the White House insiders once called a hot option to lead the new U.S. friendly Iran, that man says the attacks on Lebanon violate the ceasefire. He also said yesterday that the U.S. had violated the ceasefire itself by denying Iran's right to enrich uranium at all, even for energy production. And so, again, here's the U.S.'s chief negotiator, J.D. Vance, doing his This Is No Big Deal routine. He said, we refuse to give up the right to enrichment. And I thought to myself, you know what? My wife has the right to skydive. But she doesn't jump out of an airplane because she and I have an agreement that she's not going to do that because I don't want my wife jumping out of an airplane. What a remarkable time to be alive. When you listen to the government of the United States talking about a ruthless authoritarian overseas regime and you have to wonder to yourself, who's telling the truth here? We don't even have the most basic clarity on what this temporary peace deal is, let alone on questions such as who controls the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait which was, never forget this, fully open before Trump and Netanyahu launched their war of choice. The war was not started to open the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait was open. The ships were getting through as usual. The U.S. and Israel attacked and then Iran closed the Strait. Just over an hour ago, the president posted, quote, Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing oil through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have, end quote. And while markets reacted with excitement to the ceasefire deal on Tuesday night, on Wednesday, I guess, once they started trading, today oil prices inched back up on skepticism that this deal will last. In the meantime, your average price of gas is now $4.16 a gallon according to the AAA, and still more likely to go up than to go down. And so now, J.D. Vance fresh off his campaign appearance for Viktor Orban, who's in a fight for his political life in elections that take place in Hungary on Sunday, is reportedly traveling to Pakistan to lead a U.S. delegation for Iran talks there on Saturday. The U.S. says it will now open direct ceasefire talks with Lebanon, but the bombs are still falling until that happens. We're not sure where this is going, but the clock is ticking on Donald Trump's two weeks. This is what it looks like when there's no real plan, no apparent off-ramp. When you start a war without an exit strategy, ignoring all the best intelligence available to you, just sending your press secretary out to declare mission accomplished isn't going to cut it. Thanks to the unmatched excellence of our warriors at the direction of the commander-in-chief, the world has just witnessed a historically swift and successful military triumph. President Trump started Operation Epic Fury with strategic military objectives, and the United States has clearly achieved them. Strategic military objectives in the United States has clearly, clearly achieved them. Right? The oil, the straight-and-form moves, the peace. In Congress today, in a shortened pro-forma house session, Democrats tried to pass a resolution limiting Trump's war powers in Iran, not that he ever bothered to ask Congress for permission to conduct the war. Republicans blocked the resolution. The Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern serves as the ranking member of the Rules Committee. He supported today's war powers resolution. He joins me now. Congressman, good to see you. Thank you for being with us. Happy to be with you. This is a particular pickle. The Congress will not discuss a war powers resolution, but the administration hasn't asked for one in the first place. Donald Trump would rather this debate just not occur. He would rather be able to conduct a war which he has caught himself a few times calling a war, but not calling it a war because that wouldn't be legal. How do you get yourself out of this? Yeah, well, first of all, Donald Trump doesn't know what the hell he's doing, and the people around him don't as well. As we are talking right now, 13 American service members have been killed. Hundreds have been wounded. You know, civilians have been killed. Iranian civilians, Lebanese civilians. I mean, this is a mess, and nobody knows what the hell they're doing. And quite frankly, we should not even be in this predicament to begin with. I mean, don't forget, the Straits of Hormuz are now closed. Yes. They're trying to get them open, but they were open before Donald Trump decided to use U.S. military and get involved in this thing. So we've created a mess. We've made things more difficult for the things that we care about, and quite frankly, you know, enough is enough. Rather than saving face, they ought to end this right now, get back to the negotiating people with people who know how to negotiate. You know, not a real estate developer or, you know, a nepo baby. We need to have real people who have the trust of the Iranians and the Lebanese and others in the region, and we ought to find a way to bring this to an end. This should never happen. So the interesting thing... The interesting thing is, J.D. Vance is now apparently in charge of these negotiations, and whether you share any views with J.D. Vance or not, he seems to be the one person in the administration who didn't think this war was a good idea. And I don't know whether that's an ideological view, that he doesn't want America in wars, or he actually read the intel that said, this was not going to turn out well. But for whatever, better or worse, a guy who didn't think we were supposed to be in this war is now in charge of the negotiations. Does that give you any hope? Well, you know, my observations of J.D. Vance is he always seems to cave. And privately, he says one thing, and publicly, he does another. Look at, if he stands by his convictions, and if he understands that this was a mistake, and that we need to come to some sort of understanding to get beyond this, then that's a good thing. But I'm not going to hold my breath. Again, what I've been noticing in the last several hours is that people in the Trump administration just seem to want to rally around the president, and not even concede that maybe they have mishandled this. This has been terribly mishandled. We should not be in this position right now. We are worse off today, and even trying to find a solution will be worse off than if we had done nothing. Now, it's a strange situation in which Iran, whatever one's beliefs are about Iran and the authoritarian regime there, they could end up stronger than they went into this whole thing. They're talking about a toll on ships going through the Strait of Hormuz. Donald Trump seems to be endorsing that idea. That would be actually illegal. It's against international maritime law to impose a toll, so it's illegal for Iran to suggest it. It's illegal for Donald Trump to suggest that it be a joint venture. But they're actually talking about this. Can you imagine that we could end up in a world where Iran's getting paid for ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz that were going through freely before this war started? Right, and don't forget, prior to all of this U.S. involvement, there was no toll on the Strait of Hormuz. So, you know, this is the compromise. This is what we're going to agree to. You know, this is the deal we're making with Iran. We're going to pay them to be able to utilize the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, look it. You know, gas prices are up, and they're going to continue to go up. And if you're going to be charging, you know, to use the Strait of Hormuz, those gas prices are going to remain high. But we need smarter, cooler heads to prevail here. We need people who know about the region, who know about Iran, who know how to figure out a way to get beyond this. Because quite frankly, we're in a mess that is our own creation. And shame on Donald Trump. Shame on Pete Hegseth. I mean, you know, these people are, you know, are, you know, I mean, kind of are weapons grade stupid, if you will. That's the only way I can describe their behavior to get us into this mess to win right now. Well, let's talk about this, about Hegseth. This is tricky because this is a guy who, again, would have had access to the intelligence. The intelligence community in the United States, confirmed by the DNI, Telsa Gabbard, says that there was no nuclear threat from Iran. They do not have a nuclear warhead. They do not have a ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States. And yet Donald Trump somehow put that all together, that they've got a missile, that they could put a nuclear warhead on, and now the United States, because of him, is safe from a nuclear attack from Iran. There was no threat of a nuclear attack from Iran under any circumstances. Pete Hegseth knew that. Right. I mean, Pete Hegseth knew that. Donald Trump knew that. Everybody in the administration knew that. I wish they would have had the guts to have actually said that to the president before he went down this road. Right. I mean, now things, you know, are more, you know, dangerous, not just for the United States, but for all of our allies in the region. I mean, you know, and the fact that Iran seems to have the upper hand. I mean, even this compromise negotiation that they're talking about, Iran ends up better than they did before. So this is ridiculous. This is embarrassing. I mean, this president is totally out of touch. He has no idea what's going on. I don't, quite frankly, I don't think he's up to the job. And, you know, I wish the Republicans in the Congress, you know, would confront him on some of these issues, but they're all afraid of him. I mean, right now we're still in recess. Yeah. Confronting is too high a bar. Mike Johnson will not let a vote on war powers come to the floor. That wouldn't be a confrontation of Donald Trump. That would be an assertion of your rights under the Constitution as members of Congress. Yeah. Well, Mike Johnson believes that his role as speaker is not to be the speaker of the entire House or to do what's right by the American people. He believes it's just to make Donald Trump happy. And unfortunately, there are too many people in the Republican leadership who fall into that category, both in the House and the Senate. I mean, they're not, I mean, where is the Republican leadership? Where are the Republicans voicing some concern about what is happening right now? I mean, this is not good, no matter how you look at it. And quite frankly, the White House, you know, even when you think that they're beginning to realize that they made a mistake, then they double down on stupid stuff and you realize that they've learned nothing. So, you know, by the way, this is costing us over a billion dollars a day, a billion dollars a day. You know, they're cutting money for education, they're cutting money, you know, for food assistance. They got a billion dollars a day, over 40 billion dollars, you know, to waste on this. And none of this is making us more secure. It's making us less secure. This has been a stupid move by this administration. And you know what? Rather than try to continue to double down on the stupidity, they need to back up, realize there's a mistake, and find other ways to move on. Congressman, good to see you. Thanks for joining us today, Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. All right, still to come. Paul Krugman joins me on some of the stuff we were just talking about, rising oil prices amid Trump's Iran incoherence. Plus, an update on the Artemis II mission set to splash down on Earth about 24 hours from now. I think if we're lucky, we're all going to be watching this together. But first, Lisa Rubin joins me on First Lady Melania Trump's bizarre Epstein speech today. That's next. And more, plus new episodes of all your favorite MS Now shows, ad-free, and ad-free listening to all of Rachel Maddow's original series, including Rachel Maddow presents Burn Order. Subscribe to MS Now Premium on Apple Podcasts. And now, let's hear from Melania Trump's former husband, when Melania Trump walked out to the lectern in the Grand Foyer to say... My email reply to Maxwell cannot be catarised as anything more than casual correspondence. My polite reply to her email, that I'm not a catarised person, is that I'm not a catarised person. I'm not a catarised person. I'm not a catarised person. I'm not a catarised person. I'm not a catarised person. I'm not a catarised person. I'm not a catarised person. 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I was not a participant, was never on Epstein's plane, and never visited his private island. Total lot of explanation for a question I didn't know was out there. Lisa Rubin is a senior legal reporter for MSNOW. She joins me now. What happened there? What was that? I didn't know that was coming and I didn't know, I don't know why she did that. Well, let me say first, I don't think the president knew that it was coming because he was reached today by our colleague, Jacqueline Alameini, by phone. And when she asked him about it, he said she didn't know him and then probably hung up the phone, presumably to go on to handle things dealing with Iran. It's not clear that anyone at the White House knew she had this plan today, and yet we still don't know why today. We don't have any upcoming congressional testimony dealing with Jeffrey Epstein. Pam Bondi was the next person who was supposed to testify on April 14th. That's been cancelled. And as far as we and our congressional reporting colleagues know, the next time anybody is going to testify is April 30th, when the committee will hear from a gentleman named Ted Waite. Ted Waite is perhaps best known to people who follow this saga as Glaine Maxwell's boyfriend for roughly seven years. He is the reason Glaine Maxwell, for example, is pictured on the edge of the seats at Chelsea Clinton's wedding as she is walking down the aisle. People have talked, why was Glaine Maxwell there? She must have had a relationship with the Clintons. No, Ted Waite had a relationship with the Clintons. And she was the plus one. But what that has to do with Melania coming forward today, we don't know. Obviously, the journalist Michael Wolfe has taped recordings that he says reflect conversations he had with Epstein. On the eve of the 2024 election, he released some of them in which Jeffrey Epstein says Donald Trump was his closest friend for 10 years and that he is the one who introduced them. But none of that would seem to be the impetus for today in 2026. Melania Trump coming out and saying, A, that she didn't have a relationship with either Epstein or Maxwell before going on to say something that is wholly divorced from the messaging from this White House and the Justice Department, which is that the survivors deserve an opportunity to go under oath in public and tell their stories. Because true or not, most people who are concerned with the Epstein story are not concerned with whether or not Epstein introduced Donald Trump and Melania Trump. No, for the most part, they're not, with one exception. Melania Trump says that she was introduced to Donald Trump by a man named Palos and Poli, who also operated in the same we'll call the Modelizer circles as Jeffrey Epstein and others. John Luke Brunel, who was indicted in France before he committed suicide, was another one of these people to the extent that Melania Trump was involved in sort of the universe of women who came from Eastern Europe, came to the United States to model and fell in with a crowd of people that were feeding women to Jeffrey Epstein. I think people would want to hear from her about what she observed and what she knew. But there's never been a credible accusation, as far as I know, Ali, that Melania, her Trump herself, was a victim of any sex trafficking or abuse. Right. So that was a pretty forceful statement. It wasn't sort of a generalized statement, right? It wasn't a, typically things like this happen. If she just wanted to put something out there, it's often done as a press release. This whole don't draw too much attention to it. It seemed like it was a response to something. Or an anticipation of something. And obviously, we know from Trump world, they often will react in advance of something that is leaked. We know, for example, that Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan have a book about President Trump. That's coming out a couple of days ago. He reacted to something we didn't know was coming until an element from the book was leaked. So could it be something like that? Right. It obviously could, but we still don't know what that is and what it is that she is reacting to. And to your point, Melania Trump is often seen, but very rarely heard. Yes. For her to take the step of walking down that hallway at the White House alone and taking the podium alone and making a statement about her relationship to Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell before centering the survivors. That's a big A step and B evolution in terms of how this White House is positioning itself. You mentioned that the Pambandi testimony is not happening on April 14th. Interesting reasoning there. James Cumber saying, well, she's not Attorney General, so it sort of doesn't matter anymore. That's just not true in sort of the annals of justice and how things work. No. The fact that she doesn't hold that job doesn't mean she doesn't have important information. If anything, she's got slightly fewer protections than what she held the job. It also doesn't mean, by the way, that the subpoena isn't valid anymore. Let me give you an analogy. If I sue you and you're the Secretary of Agriculture and you resign and our camera guy replaces you, then he gets substituted in as the defendant in the lawsuit. It's not like the lawsuit stops. Theoretically, the same should apply to a subpoena. Either it's valid as against her and her personal capacity, or it survives as against the Attorney General, whoever is filling the role. But put both of those things aside, I don't understand why the Republicans and the Democrats are skirmishing about this, because Todd Blanche is right in front of them and he knows more in his pinky about the handling of the Epstein Files Transparency Act than Pam Bondi ever has or could. Why they are not calling for his testimony? Because that's real ageing. He's the guy who, again, hard to explain why. He's the one who sat there with Gellane Maxwell. He's the one after he talked to her, she ended up getting some sort of sweetheart deal. There are a lot of questions for Todd Blanche. He is with Bondi, part of the team that, according to public reporting, briefed the President on what was in the Epstein Files, including his own appearance. But they were caught by surprise with respect to that birthday book reported by The Wall Street Journal. And I wonder, going back to the original subject, Melania Trump's speech today, I wonder if we're on the bubble of some big reporting event, much like that birthday book that was first revealed by Attorney Brad Atmard. That's why everybody's bracing for it. To Lawrence on this network. Let's ask about this whole idea of Pam Bondi. She was going to be subpoena, then she said, you don't have to subpoena me because I'll come and talk on my own. Where did we land with that? She was going to go on her own, so she's not under subpoena. No, she is under subpoena. And the validity of that subpoena is what's being contested right now. The Department of Justice says it's no longer enforceable, it's moot because she's not the Attorney General. Members of the House Oversight Committee are saying, no, that's not how this works. But in any event, should House Oversight look beyond Pam Bondi, does she have important things to say? No doubt. But is there somebody else in the Department of Justice right here and now who knows much more? Absolutely. Because he stood before us, Allie, on January 30th and said, we are producing nearly three million pages today of the roughly six million that we reviewed. If anybody at the Department of Justice has an understanding of roughly what's in those three million pages that we're never going to see, according to him, it's Todd Blanche. And I think the American people should want to hear from him about that. I can't understand why the House Oversight Committee Republican or Democrat hasn't prioritized that. I'm really glad you're here because when this news came out, when Melania Trump did that today, I was thinking to myself, I don't really understand this. Like a lot of things in this Epstein story. So I'm glad you're here because you're the only person that makes me understand it a little bit better. Lisa, thanks as always. Thank you. Lisa Rubin. All right, coming up next, the price of oil rose again today amid growing uncertainty with Trump's war on Iran. The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman joins me next on what you can expect to happen. As we mentioned earlier, the price of oil rose again this morning, topping $100 a barrel as the Straits of Hormuz remained effectively closed and the price of gas continued to edge higher, with Americans paying more than $4.16 per gallon on average, about 40% more than before Donald Trump started this war. So how are red states that voted for Donald Trump dealing with this? Some have apparently decided to suspend their taxes on gasoline to quote blunt the impact of Trump's Iran war. So they're artificially lowering the price per gallon by simply starving their states of revenue. And then later on, when prices are low again, they'll add back the taxes and the prices will go back up. That makes a lot of sense. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He's the author of Krugman Wonks Out blog on Substack. He joins us now. Paul, good to see you. Thank you for being with us. Good to be on. I mean, we've talked, I don't know how many times in the last year about all the reasons why this economy could be doing better and people could be enjoying a more affordable lifestyle, but for things that Donald Trump did, particularly erratic things like the imposition of the tariffs. And then we have this situation. I remind people that Donald Trump is bragging about the straits of Hormuz being open, which it's not clear that it is at all, but it was fully open six weeks ago before we started this war with Iran. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is, you know, if we could get back, just reverse the clock and go back to the way things were on February 27th, that would be a huge improvement over even if the ceasefire is real. And, you know, so far, there's really almost no oil passing through the strait. So this is a big thing. And of course, at the moment, markets are sort of half pricing in the belief that, well, eventually this will be a real ceasefire and the strait will open. It's not at all clear that's going to happen. Right. And you're saying half pricing in because oil was about 60-something a barrel before this war and it went up to almost $120 a barrel. Now it's sitting at about 100, which means it's not a given. The oil markets are not saying this is over for sure. You're an expert on a lot of things, including trade, but one doesn't need to be an economist or an expert in trade. One needs to have access to Google Maps to be able to have looked at the strait of Hormuz and said, you guys sure you thought this one out? Oh, this is crazy. I mean, it's not just the strait, by the way. I mean, given the drones, given modern technology, which is available, not only high tech, it's not just America. Now, Iran has got drones, it's got missiles, and it's basically the whole Persian Gulf is a shooting gallery. And if you want to indent the most vulnerable target in the world, it would be an oil tanker or a liquefied natural gas tanker. It's big, it's slow, and it's explosive. So the idea, the area from which Iran could launch attacks is enormous. So it's impossible, basically, to secure this unless we have a genuine ceasefire, a genuine deal. Right. It has to be a deal. This idea that military ships can do this is, first of all, impractical. Secondly, we have, you know, we do actually have a finite number of military ships and we have threats all over the world. So this idea that this is going to be a military escort of oil ships, it's just not a practical thing. Yeah. And by the way, one really important thing to note is when we talk about the price of oil, the price that people usually quote is a futures price. It's actually oil a month or two months from now. There is, it's less easily tracked down, but there is the actual price of if you want a barrel of oil now. And that price is there for $140. Yeah, which you have got to buy today. I want to play something that Kevin Hassett said, Donald Trump's top economic advisor about where we are now. I want to have this discussion with you about where we are in the economy now and where we could go. But here's what Hassett had to say about it. In the long term, his policies are going to create a golden age. And so I began the year with the guests that we'd probably be in the four to five range for economic growth because of all this. And I'll stick by those numbers. I think this is a temporary distraction that will very, very quickly go away. So you know, Kevin, I've interviewed him a lot of times. He tends to be a pretty upbeat positive guy, but wow, that's something else. A golden age, four to five percent range for economic growth, a temporary distraction that'll go away very quickly. That's some optimistic thinking about the economy. I'm not sure there's a single true word in that statement. I mean, you know, first of all, nothing's going to go away quickly. Again, even if we had a genuine ceasefire and everybody cheerfully said, okay, it's now safe to sail the Strait of Hormuz, it would still be months before we're back to anything like normality in energy markets. That's, you know, just the technical, the physical features of what's involved. And four to five percent growth, my God, we haven't had that in generations, not on a sustained basis since the great post-war, war two boom, especially with, you know, a shrinking native born labor force and immigration having brought to a standstill. There's just no way that that's a number that makes any sense. So this is just pure fluffery. This is somehow asserting that there's something magic about Donald Trump's policies, which is invisible to the rest of us. And I don't know. I mean, I'm no surprise. But why would Hassett stick his neck out like that? But I guess, right, I'm not, that's why I'm not in the White House. Yeah, these things don't tend to age well. Okay, let's talk about where we really are. We have a tricky situation. The president would likely fed to continue to reduce interest rates. The Fed is concerned that inflation is a bit sticky. Inflation is a bit stickier now because the price of oil is up and that affects what people pay. So now we've got ourselves in a situation where the Fed might be considering not cutting rates, but increasing rates. You and I have talked about this. We can get ourselves into a very, very dangerous situation here where you have both inflation and a slowing economy at the same time. Yeah. Now, the economy, we're not, we're not looking like a recession, at least not yet. And you never, you know, there are some warning straws in the wind, but it's not, that's not the worst. But the inflation thing, we were, we were running the Fed's preferred measure of inflation was running at 3%, which is a point above target, even before the effects of this war in the Middle East kicked in. That measure will be kicked up by not just gas prices, actually in some ways more important and more strategic is diesel and, and petrochemicals, you know, that stuff. So no, there is no case that I can see for the Fed to cut rates. Trump may be screaming that they must, but in fact, there's a, you know, they're not quite the point where you would definitely say raise rates, but it's, it's, there's no case of all for cutting rates, given that the inflation is, was running above target anyway, we're about to get a big inflationary hit from the, from the, the oil price. And the, you know, the economy is not weak enough to justify a cut under these circumstances. You talked about job growth and, and birth rates. This is really important. JD Vance was just in Hungary. Donald Trump has just formally endorsed Viktor Orban, who's in an election on, on Sunday, in which there's some chance he could lose. But he's really the, the, he's the example that the, the far right in this country use of what they'd like their country to be. He wants to limit immigration. In fact, there's virtually no immigration into Hungary. They try to encourage births by giving people tax incentives to have lots of children. It doesn't actually work. We've got a situation in the United States where we have, we have a negative replacement rate without immigration. And we've, we've sort of put a halt on, on most immigration. You can't really grow an economy that way. That's right. I mean, and think about, particularly if you're thinking about the federal budget, you know, the federal budget has two main expenses. It mostly takes care of senior citizens, social security and Medicare, and a lot of Medicaid as well. And it pays for defense. And all of that comes from taxes that are levied on younger working age adults. And we set ourselves up to have a stagnant or shrinking number of working age adults, while at the same time, you know, the defense needs are whatever they are, and the number of old people will continue to grow. So this is a, you know, this is a truly self-destructive strategy. Yeah. And you said the defense needs continue to grow. I mean, depending on what estimates you use, this is a billion to $2 billion a day. Hopefully if there's a ceasefire, it's a lot less, but it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money for a government that started out a year ago, cutting all sorts of services across the, across the government and cutting government jobs because they said we couldn't afford these things. A billion dollars a day is actually real money. Yeah. This is a billion here, a billion there, but this is, this is actually real money. And this is going fast enough. I mean, if you look at the things that have been cut in the name of saving money, like USAID, you know, but a lot of, basically our foreign aid has been eliminated. We've run through more than the total foreign aid we were giving already. And we're, I mean, it's some ways even more important is the fact that there's a lot of specialized stuff that will take a long time to replace. We've run through our stocks and munitions and all that. But yeah, this is, this is, you know, war, especially the way America wages war with multimillion dollar missiles for everything is incredibly expensive. And it does really get in the way of your ability to do anything else. Yeah. Paul, good to talk to you as always. Thank you for joining me again, Paul Krugman. All right, still to come. A new study confirms what we've known for years, that the COVID-19 vaccines are both safe and effective. So why is the Trump administration trying to suppress the report? That's next. Listen to your favorite MS now shows any time as a podcast, enjoy new episodes of Morning Joe, Deadline White House and the Rachel Maddow show. Every small D democratic muscle that we have is flexing. Plus the last word with Lawrence O'Donnell, the beat with Ari Melbour, the weeknight and more on the go, wherever you get your podcasts for ad free listening to all of your favorite shows, subscribe to MS now premium on Apple podcasts. Everywhere you look in this administration, there are irresponsible people making terrible decisions on life or death matters. And thanks to the major debacles of Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, keeping everybody occupied, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leading who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, has mostly been off the front pages. But make no mistake, his department has done serious long term damage to American health and safety and things could get a lot worse. Just since he's been in office, Kennedy has overseen the country's largest measles outbreak since before we eliminated the virus in the year 2000 for all effective purposes. It was gone from the United States. Last year, three people, including two school age children, died from it. This year, measles cases are rising faster. The epicenter is now in Utah, where there have been nearly 600 confirmed cases of measles surpassed only by South Carolina and Texas, where just last year, dozens of kids wound up in the hospital with both measles and signs of liver damage. Liver damage because they took cod liver oil that RFK Jr. recommended as a cure for measles instead of a proven vaccine. There is no cure for measles. There is only the vaccine, which is 97% effective, but RFK Jr. doesn't like vaccines. And so that shows up in everything the HHS touches. Today, the Washington Post reports that the CDC is burying a public health report that was supposed to have been published two weeks ago, a report that showed the ongoing success of the COVID vaccine. According to whistleblower scientists, the report says, quote, the COVID-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half. Apparently, the CDC director had concerns about the methodology, which has been used to evaluate the flu vaccine for 20 years. Abdul Al Sayed is a physician and an epidemiologist. He served as the director of the Detroit Health Department. He's now running to represent the state of Michigan in the United States Senate, and he joins me now. Great to see you. Always good to be here. We're going to talk about your run momentarily, but it's sort of opportune that you're here because I think we have to keep coming back to this health question. There are people who think that there are damaging people in the cabinet and it is costing American lives on immigration, on this war in Iran, but it's quite possible that the greatest amount of damage is being done at the HHS because of this anti-vaccine nonsense. There's no doubt about it. I mean, if the war in Iran is like the acute illness of the Trump administration, RFK Jr. is the chronic disease, and the consequences are going to last many lifetimes. It's really hard to reverse mis and disinformation when you put it out there. When you start telling people that the things that they take are more important, they give to their kids to help them actually do damage, at some point the consequences last for a very, very long time, and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. It didn't just start when he became HHS secretary. It started years and years before when he decided to declare, I don't know, a jihad against vaccines for God knows what reason. Well, there are some speculations about the reasons, and one of them is that he launches lawsuits and makes some money out of it. That part. And here's the thing. This is the key point. Him and the grifters around him have made huge amounts of money lying to the American public because, of course, if they tell you that the thing that actually works doesn't work, they're trying to sell you the thing they tell you does work. And guess what? At the end of the day, when they've cut all the objective science out, they leave you going back to them. So let's talk about cutting the objective science out. The CDC, and one can argue that it's got its flaws and needs to, everything can be done better, it was the gold standard. The funding that goes to universities, the NIH, that is the gold standard. Right? It is much better than setting up a big building and saying the government will research all these medications. We have some of the best ways to identify and cure illnesses in the entire world, and they've been slowly dismantled. Yeah. I mean, I want us to understand that we've taken for granted our leadership on science and healthcare for a very long time. That didn't just happen. It's because we invested in rigorous science. We followed questions where the answers went, and then we invested in those solutions. And over time, when you start cutting that away, the long-term consequences become pretty great. I mean, think about this. There are people who are going to die of diseases. We might have been able to find the cure for, but for the fact that because of Dozen or RFK Junior, that we defunded the incredible scientific. And that might be a disease that I get diagnosed with in 20 or 25 years that we can go one of two ways. The doctor could say, hey, there's just great new medication. Take it and we cure you. Or sorry, you've got six months to live because I don't know. Somebody's working on something today or may have had their funding cut today for something I don't know will result in a cure 20 years from now. And that's the thing, is when Doge happened, they started just cutting where they thought, oh, this doesn't make any sense. Right. Think about GLP-1 drugs. Yes. I mean, these are pretty close to a miracle drug. And it happened because of obscure research on something that had nothing to do with the saliva of the Gila monster. Exactly. And people would say, why would we be studying such a thing? Why do we care about the saliva of Gila monster? Well, it turns out that when you characterize the world around you, people can connect dots and it turns into things that can be miracles. Right. And really a miracle because it will reduce people's weight. It will reduce people's risk of diabetes and heart disease. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, all of it. So let's go back to measles for a second. Declare to eradicate it in this country in the year 2000. No cure for measles. If a little child, if 10 people are in a room and they're exposed to some of these measles, likely all of them will get measles. If they're unvaccinated, yes. Yes. And this is the thing about it, is that measles is like the genie that escapes from the bottle. You can't put it back in. You're talking about outbreaks now that are immensely difficult to trace. And the hard part about this, and I want folks to understand is that not everybody can be vaccinated against measles. You are not eligible for a vaccine until you're one year old. Right. Now think about what happened to these. So you're a little baby who gets on a plane, you're not vaccinated and somebody there has measles. That's exactly. That choice is now putting all of our infants at risk. It turns out that we live in a society with each other. And the things that we do affect each other. So when somebody makes a choice not to be vaccinated because of misandist information from the HHS secretary, the consequences can ripple into a baby who gets sick and potentially dies as a function, not because their parents made a bad decision, but because that child does not have an immune system that can even undergo vaccination. So as a public health official and an epidemiologist, talk to me about, that you saw, you were talking about mis and disinformation. Back before we had political mis and disinformation, the first mis and disinformation on the internet was about health. Yeah. It was nonsense about rubbing potatoes on your child's feet to keep them from getting diseases. That spreads faster than anything. It does because here's the hard part about vaccine. You're asking somebody who is healthy to willingly put something in their body. And that is an intervention that that's not an easy thing to do. Right. It's not a natural thing to think about. It's not a natural thing to think about. And so anyone who tells you that that thing might do you harm, especially considering the fact that right now you are taking a bet that you might not be exposed to the disease in the first place, makes it really easy to target. And here's the hard part about it. Pharma has something to do with this because at the end of the day, they make good medications. They just make them too expensive to be able to afford. But when you feel like they're trying to pick your pocket, it's not a far leap from that to, well, maybe the things they actually make are bad. Right. That leap is one that unfortunately our healthcare system so focused on the money that gets made has created an opportunity for because you've created a push factor for people. Yeah. And I want us to understand what the impact of that looks like over time. And so you've got folks who are mis- and disinformation mongers, folks like RFK Jr. who say, well, you can't trust anything big pharma does. And by the way, we've got the solution for you. Right. And so you've got grifters who are feeding off of the greed of the industry to create a perfect storm in which people are making decisions that are putting a lot of folks at risk. Does this come up when you're campaigning? All the time. I'll tell you a story. I was out in the city of Detroit at the height of the pandemic and I was trying to get people to take this vaccine for COVID and I was having a conversation with them. There was one gentleman who said, listen, I know you, I've seen you around. You're the health director. I trust you. I'm going to take this vaccine. But I want to tell you something. You're asking me to take a vaccine that didn't exist a year ago for a disease that didn't exist a year ago. I'm diabetic. How come y'all don't show up to make sure I can afford insulin, which has been around for a century for a disease I know I have and I've had my whole life? Yeah. And at that moment I was like, you know what? I said, damn good question. That makes a lot of sense. And so we've got to understand that public trust is earned and it's easily lost. And so it's not enough just to push back on RFK Junior if you're not doing the structural work of making sure people have access to the health care they need. Yeah, there was a chance of giving everybody their insulin at a low rate and we didn't. I mean, they do that across the river from where I live. I know it well. That's where I'm from. Nice to see you again. It's an honor to be here. Thank you for coming in. Abdul Al-Sahid is candidate for Senate in Michigan. All right, coming up next hour, my friend Jen Psaki's exclusive interview with the former Secretary of State John Kerry, who was instrumental in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal that Donald Trump tore up. You want want to miss that? We'll be right back. In just about 23 hours at 8.07 p.m. Eastern time, the Artemis II mission will make its return to Earth. The four astronauts, three Americans and one Canadian, will splash down off the coast of San Diego, California tomorrow evening following their record-breaking 10-day trip around the moon. They'll return to Earth having traveled farther from it than any human being before them. I will be back for live coverage of the whole thing right here on MSNOW and you can always catch my show Vellce on weekends starting at 10 a.m. Eastern. I hope to see you there. But for now, that's all in for this busy Thursday. Simone Sanders Townsend and I have known each other for more than a decade, tussling over politics and policy when she worked in the White House and I reported on it. And now we're friends and colleagues and on our podcast, Clock It, we are positioning ourselves at the intersection of culture and politics. Clock It is where we talk about what we see and hear in the news so you can start to clock it too. Clock It with Simone Eugene. All episodes available now.