Confessions of a White House Public Health Priestess
I kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of the West Wing. Now I owe him an apology.
[The below essay originally appeared on Katy Talento’s Substack, here. Republished with Katy’s permission.]
It was 2017. We had hauled the CEOs of a bunch of pharmaceutical companies into the Oval Office so that President Trump could berate them about their drug prices. (Always a good time.)
Somehow, the word “vaccine” came up in the conversation. When that happens in the president’s presence, then, now, last month, and probably next week, like clockwork, he always starts telling the same story. A woman who worked for him at the Trump Organization back in the day. Her two-year-old son, who was “perfect, beautiful, magnificent, flawless.” Then he got a shot and he was “just gone. Gone. Never the same. Beautiful boy. Then, just gone.”
The CEOs all shrank back and turned the response to this story over to their colleague Ken Frazier, then-CEO of Merck, a prominent vaccine manufacturer. I don’t remember what he said. I’m sure it was the usual safe-and-effective incantation.
The president had an instinct. I had the credentials. What I didn’t have was an answer.
But it brought me back to 2002.
The autism moms, like other groups of moms did every day, were lobbying me to do something to help their children. I was a staffer on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees CDC. It was my job to recommend, when it came to public health, which bills to write, which bills to move, which bills to kill, which issues to conduct oversight on and which agencies to subpoena.
Each mom told the same story of a vaccination, and the subsequent regression of their children into the signs of autism. They wanted the CDC to rigorously study the safety of vaccines and assess the relationship of vaccination to the subsequent diagnosis of autism.
I was torn.
I was a Harvard-trained infectious disease epidemiologist. I believed, religiously, that vaccines were the gold standard of public health interventions.
Not because I had been shown the evidence for their effectiveness and safety in public health school, by examining the seminal clinical trials demonstrating as much (I hadn’t). But because I had been trained in the orthodoxy of public health, where it was assumed that someone had studied this and it had been demonstrated at some point - so now we could all focus on more pressing matters, like how to get vaccines in more kids’ arms around the world. I had spent my early career gallivanting overseas, controlling infectious disease from guinea worm in South Sudan to HIV/AIDS in Russian drug users and inner city DC prostitutes. I was the hero in the story I told myself.
But also, I am a woman. And I deeply revere the intuition and wisdom of mothers. And it was not my nature, when a bunch of moms tell me about an observed fact pattern in their children’s lives, to disbelieve or dismiss them.
So I did what any young, naive staffer in her first job on the Hill would do: I called the CDC.
They gave me some bland pablum about debunked studies and how “correlation doesn’t equal causation” and what-not. I was left with a weird disquiet and wasn’t sure what to do. But I knew my boss, the committee’s Ranking Republican, would be loath to wade into such a hornet’s nest. Not to mention that the committee’s chairman, (ironically) Ted Kennedy - whose party controlled the Senate - would try to thwart us at every turn - and we were already in enough battles with him.
Besides, Rep. Dan Burton and Rep. Dave Weldon, MD, were already holding hearings over on the House side - if something came of those, I could maybe interest my boss then. So I went on to the next meeting and the next ask from the next group of moms of kids with the next condition.
Fast forward fifteen years and several other Senate staff jobs. It was 2017, and I was now President Trump’s lead health advisor on the Domestic Policy Council, and we were all still trying to find the bathrooms in the White House.
I was now far more experienced and savvy a staffer, and utterly untrusting of federal agencies - especially the CDC. But I still believed with all my heart that vaccines were life-saving, critically-needed interventions to protect children, and that they worked best when uptake and the subsequent herd immunity was high.
I was told that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, an acquaintance of candidate Trump, had gotten him to commit to establishing a Vaccine Safety Commission once he was in office. Mr. Kennedy was now calling and wanted to get the promised commission going.
It was my job to make this problem go away.
I was all in.
We couldn’t have a meeting, an event, or a commission that communicated to the world that vaccines were anything less than the Greatest Public Health Victory we all believed them to be (can I get an “amen?”). So I called up NIH leaders Francis Collins and Tony Fauci and asked them to go ahead and take the meeting, but off-site somewhere, far from the White House and the public view.
That meeting, which took place at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, has become somewhat notorious in MAHA lore.
Mr. Kennedy, as well as Del Bigtree and Aaron Siri with the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), met with The Authorities about The Science. All of them have spoken publicly about that meeting, where Dr. Fauci assured them of the mountains of studies demonstrating vaccine safety. Reportedly, when asked to produce them, he rifled through his papers as if they were just at the tip of his fingertips. When he couldn’t find them, he promised to deliver the studies later. Which never happened. ICAN filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to get them.
HHS settled the lawsuit with a stunning admission - on the record - that no such studies existed.
But I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that I had done my job and saved children.
For the next few years, I worked on a variety of policies I was really proud of (ending secret health care prices, lowering drug prices, combatting opioid addiction) and others that didn’t go quite as well (the doomed repeal-and-replace-Obamacare misadventure). The demands of working in the White House are brutal. While many of my colleagues had become like family, my real family could no longer pick me out of a line-up.
By mid-2019, my stress level had peaked. For many reasons, it was time to move on. My younger sister, a 39-year-old mother of two, was dying of colorectal cancer, and I spent the next five months taking care of her, thinking a lot of deep thoughts about the limits and the hubris of medicine.
When COVID landed on our shores a few months later, there was certainly some FOMO.
Global respiratory disease popping off, and I just left the White House?
I published an op-ed in March of that year, expressing relief that my friend and former colleague, Deborah Birx, had just been appointed the head of the White House COVID response. In the summer and Fall of 2020, I helped the Trump re-elect campaign by doing media interviews defending the administration’s COVID efforts.
I put on a happy face for the cameras, but as the year wore on, the unscientific demands from The Authorities were causing cognitive dissonance.
Masking mania made no sense in light of the size of a viral particle. Masks worn loosely, re-used, touched with unsterile hands all day, and forced onto children were a crime against epidemiology. And yet, The Authorities like Birx and Fauci, who I knew would know better, were still pretending.
Lockdowns were being implemented in ridiculous and scientifically unjustifiable ways. Churches - no. Mom-and-Pop restaurants - no. Gyms - no. Walmart - yes. There seemed to be no effort to explain the totalitarian disconnect that was being imposed from on high.
I had moved to Loudoun County, Virginia shortly after my sister passed away, in order to be close to her two young boys. We wanted to make friends in our new community, and the only people daring to gather were the patriots and dissidents involved in the Loudoun County Parents’ Resistance™, fighting the school closures and other policy malpractice. That put me in touch with the hodge-podge of nontraditional allies that the COVID era united: Catholic homeschoolers and hippie homesteaders. Medical freedom activists and election integrity watchdogs.
We loved the meetups with these unafraid humans, one of whom was a mom of a vaccine-injured child who ran our state’s medical freedom group.
She persuaded me to watch the documentary Vaxxed.
The movie narrated the tale of CDC’s early 2000s vaccine/autism research - the kind those autism moms had demanded, not knowing that the CDC had already done it but was hiding the results.
It documented the U.S. House hearings by Reps. Weldon and Burton, trying to uncover the truth, and the later whistleblower, William Thompson, who confirmed all the moms’ worst fears. It was a searing indictment of my own paralysis during these events decades ago.
Here is the text I sent that same friend as the credits rolled, along with the tears down my cheeks:
Still, because I was an epidemiologist, people in my circle would come to me for answers about The Science, including potential prevention and treatment for COVID.
I became the Underground Railroad in our community for hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, nebulized steroids, and other countermeasures frowned on by The Authorities. Whenever someone in our social circle would fall desperately ill, I would help them get medicines from the semi-secret network of doctors, bravely providing these lifelines by telemedicine across the country.
Wanting more knowledge and credentials to help people, I enrolled in a degree program to become a naturopathic doctor.
I watched in disgust and confusion as the new administration doubled down on crazy, with so many in federal and state governments seeming to throw basic rules of microbiology and epidemiology out the door.
And then, something happened in late summer of 2021 - a set of legal contortions between Big Pharma and the FDA that started to make everything painfully clear.
I was familiar with a public health law called the PREP Act that passed when I had worked in the Senate. It provided liability protection for manufacturers, doctors, and even employers during a declared public health emergency, provided that certain criteria were met. One of those criteria, when it came to drugs or other emergency countermeasures, was that the law’s legal immunity only applied to products with either FDA licensure or Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
The government had a number of problems brought on by aspects of the PREP Act and the law establishing the EUA process:
Problem #1: To get an EUA for a product, there have to be no other “approved, adequate and available” therapies. And there seemed to be quite a few: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, for starters. Since it was going to take a while to get FDA licensure for the product that was going in all those arms under the EUA, the EUA had to be protected.
That would only be possible if cheap, generic, widely used, safe and FDA-licensed hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (or anything else) were intentionally not recognized as effective therapeutics for COVID.
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