English translation of the content:

Walker Bragman: ”This administration has, I don’t know a nicer way to put it, taken a hatchet to Americas’ public health systems and frozen research and appointed some pretty outlandish picks to lead critical agencies or named some pretty outlandish people to lead critical agencies.
MAHA, Make America Healthy Again, represents the merger of the anti-vaccine movement or medical freedom movement as they call it and the political right today in America.“

Narration: “The US investigative journalist Walker Bragman speaks of an ‘axe’ that the new US administration under President Donald Trump has unleashed on the healthcare system. An image that is strongly reminiscent of Argentina's President Javier Milei's infamous chainsaw.
Among other things, Bragman is researching the hidden flow of money from the US right-wing for projects that spread doubts about vaccinations or spread misinformation about protective measures during the pandemic. Bragman calls ‘dark money’ groups those organizations that do not have to disclose their sources of money.
An example of this: The new Secretary of Health Robert Ford Kennedy Jr. was involved in the past with the organization 'Children's Health Defense', which regularly spread misinformation about vaccinations. According to Bragman, it was a lucrative deal for Kennedy.“

Walker Bragman: ”Kennedy used to run this group called Children’s Health Defense. On its website it lists him as the founder of the group. It started as a different organization and became Children’s Health Defense and lists Kennedy as its founder. And the group is essentially an anti-vaccine dark money outfit.
It occupies a space in this sort of wellness industry that has become so massive in the United States. Children’s Health Defense markets I would say that there target audience is probably pretty white, somewhat affluent and increasingly I think right-wing.
They get a lot of money through donor-advised funds, which means that we can’t really tell where the money is coming from, but we do know that Kennedy, while he was there was taking a pretty big salary from the organization. So, there was a financial incentive for Kennedy to continue spreading lies about life-saving vaccines“

Narration: “Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and has been working on the anti-vaccination movement in the USA for years. Among other things, he writes for the blog “Science Based Medicine”, which is also respected in Germany and specializes in medical misinformation.
Howard speaks of a ‘war on science’ that Kennedy will wage and is not only concerned about the future of the approval of proven vaccines.“

Jonathan Howard: “He is going to wage a war on science from within. Vaccines have been his number one target for about twenty years and he is already taking steps to build mistrust in vaccines.
The CDC had a webpage, encouraging people to get the flu vaccine, which has been taken off, and just this week he announced that the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, who was supposed to meet last week and to vote on recommendations for flu vaccine and other vaccines, he cancelled that meeting.
So, we here in the United States may not be able to get flu vaccines next year, we may not be able to get COVID vaccines next year. We’ll find out and I think eventually, knowing who this guy is and his twenty year long obsession with vaccines, will likely start to produce junk science to justify taking off the MMR vaccine or the HPV vaccine, but I think that is one thing he is gonna do.
He is going to similarly try to attack psychiatric medications and any other part of mainstream science that he can.“

Narration: “Walker Bragman sees responsibility for the rise of anti-vaccination groups like Kennedy in the lax requirements for disclosing the financing of such groups in the United States.“

Walker Bragman: ”We have a broken campaign finance system in the United States and that has allowed right-wing money’d interests to steer our politics for decades. So, bringing it back to the anti-vaxx movement and Kennedy, with COVID, business aligned right-wing dark money groups started spending their time pushing out propaganda to get people to not take the virus seriously and demand that states reopen.
Telling people that: ‘Hey, the virus isn’t that bad. Natural immunity will build herd immunity very quickly, like, lets just get back to normal.’”

Narration: “With the supposed 'return to normality', Bragman is referring to the so-called 'Great Barrington Declaration', the 'Brownstone Institute' and another name that is being discussed in the US government as the future director of the National Institutes for Health. Jay Bhattacharya.“

Walker Bragman: “October 2020; Bhattachary, Martin Kulldorf, formerly of Harvard Medical School, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford write a declaration, called the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, which calls on governments to abandon large scale mitigation measures in the face of COVID and instead basically return society to normal, while somehow squirreling away the most vulnerable to protect them.
They called it ‘focused protection’, which I think is sort of ‘cover your rear end’ language to justify doing government inaction in the face of the virus.
What’s interesting is that the declaration was organized with the help of a right-wing think-tank that was funded by some wealthy individuals, including Charles Koch, its a billionaire, fossil fuel billionaire, petrochemical, and it also had organizational help from inside the Trump administration, which at the time was facing pushback for its inaction in the face of COVID and Trump was facing reelection in November, next month.
So, the declaration, viewed in that context, was an effort by the Trump administration to justify its pandemic response, which favored herd immunity and natural immunity over interventions to save lifes.
He helped found the ‘Brownstone Institute’, or helped launch it as one of its early scholars. He was involved with that. ‘Brownstone’ itself was supposed to be the spiritual child of his ‘Great Barrington Declaration’. The whole point of the organization is to wage information war against public health. That’s what ‘Brownstone’ is and Bhattachary is one of their favorite scientists.
I would say that he’s probably akin to those scientists that the tobacco industry bandied about back in the day, to cast doubt on research showing that tobacco was linked to cancer. He’s sort of the modern equivalent of that.
Or climate denying scientists, that right-wing groups love to amplify, because they are willing to buck consensus and say what industry wants them to say.”

Narration: “Proponents of Bhattacharya like to spread the narrative that he was censored in the past. Jonathan Howard sees little reason for this and points to the US administration's current treatment of scientists.“

Jonathan Howard: “He may have had a few tweets deprioritized and he did have a YouTube video removed, but obviously he became a famous celebrity during the pandemic, which is how he came to Trump’s attention to run the NIH in the first place.
Had he truly been silenced, we wouldn’t have heard of him. If there was a silenced doctor, we don’t know who they are, but just type his name into YouTube and you will find countless videos, many of them lamenting the loss of this YouTube video or the deprioritization of a couple of tweets of his.
And meanwhile, here in the United States, we are currently living in an era of mass censorship of science. Government scientists are forbidden from speaking out, they are being purged in large numbers. Our government has created lists of banned words. All of this is much more drastic than the removal of a single YouTube video, but Dr. Bhattacharya has not protested any of this, and once he is confirmed by our senate, he will be joining the censorship regime, seemingly without any protest.“

Walker Bragman: “Voices like Bhattacharya’s weren’t censored. He was on cable news all the time, he was a favorite of right-wing groups. His social media audience grew to the hundreds of thousands. He got to speak before the ‘Council for National Policy’, a christian-right organization. He has been prolific.
He has been used as an expert in multiple court cases by republican states trying to defend rolling back mitigation measures. He advised the frigging president to the United States on COVID policy. He advised the governor of Florida and other states.
This man was not censored. If he was censored, we should all be so lucky.”

Narration: ”Howard is skeptical that Bhattacharya will have much latitude as director of the National Institutes for Health, but also admits that he has underestimated people like him in the past.“

Jonathan Howard: ”By the time he arrives at the NIH, the way things work here in the United States is that he has to be confirmed by our senate and I think once that happens, by the time he is confirmed, his hearings are gonna probably be in the next couple of weeks, the NIH is gonna be decimated.
A lot of top people have left or been fired, so I am not really sure who is gonna be working at the NIH, when he gets there and I don’t think he had that in mind, I don’t think he envisioned himself presiding over a wasteland, and he is gonna be facing countless furious scientists, whose funding has been taken away, including many at his home university, Stanford University, where they are losing a $160 million a year.
So he is gonna be facing a lot of pressure to restore that funding, but I think he is gonna be powerless to do it. So I think, he is gonna be in for a miserable time, but time will tell.
This is a very loosely made prediction. One thing I have learned about myself over the years: I can’t predict everything that is gonna happen and I consistently undermine these guys and their desire to destroy.“

Narration: ”Howard also calls people like Bhattacharya ‘contrarians’. Perhaps best translated into German as ‘Querdenker’ [also known as 'lateral thinkers’]. He says they have repeatedly questioned the sense of measures by citing evidence-based medicine. A phenomenon that could also be observed in Germany.“


Jonathan Howard: „Well, obviously, every doctor and scientist is gonna say that they are in favor of Evidence Based Medicine, but I think a lot of doctors abuse that term to cast doubt on mitigation measures that they didn’t like.
So, they would note that some mitigation measure for example hadn’t proven itself in a Randomized Controlled Trial. Fine, but they would then make the leap and say: ‘We should therefore assume, that this mitigation measure didn’t work and we shouldn’t use it.’
And in some was, what they are saying is: ‘We just want more evidence and we want better evidence’, and the way they set that up was anyone that opposes them is seen as being ‘against evidence’ and ‘against good science’ and ‘good data’, no one wants to do that.
But we don’t have Randomized Controlled Trials for seat belts, or bike helmets, or fences around pools – these sorts of things – and you can’t subject everything to a Randomized Controlled Trial, especially in a pandemic, where the virus hits you like a tsunami. You have to make decisions in real time.
And I will add that these guys are about to assume power now here in the United States. So, they are in a position to do all the RCTs, that they demanded of others and we’ll see if they actually do them. I don’t think they are, because it is much, much, much, much, much easier to sit at your computer and say: ‘Do an RCT’, than to actually do an RCT. “

Narration: ”What gives Howard and Bragman hope at the moment could perhaps not be more different, but one can also hear a common hope in overcoming an administration that has declared war on free science in the USA.“

Jonathan Howard: “I think that the main thing that gives me hope is that most parents here in the United States are gonna vaccinate their children. So, while these people are winning the war at the federal level, I think in the doctors’ office, in the exam room, 99.9 % of pediatricians here in the United States are smart, and intelligent, and pro-vaccine.
And most parents are gonna wanna continue to vaccinate their children, and if things do get bad enough, there will be a backlash against these guys. I hope we don’t get to that point, but I think that is what gives me hope, that most average people are not against science and embrace vaccines.”

Walker Bragman: “There’s a lot of anger right now. Anger can be power if you know how to use it, to quote ‘The Clash’. I’m hopeful, because people are angry.
And I know that the democratic party right now is a bit of a mess, and has been, I think, for some time, but we are really seeing it now, how unprepared it is for this moment, but people are getting frustrated, and they are seeing what is happening in Washington, and they do not like it.
As soon as the impacts of these policies really hit us, I think, we are gonna see mobilization unlike anything we have ever seen. I don’t think that the people in charge right now really understand what they are awakening.
So, yeah, that gives me hope. And at OptOut, we are undergoing some changes in our own organization, to better fit this moment, and so I am pretty hopeful about that, those changes, or new direction we are going in, so, I am excited about that.
The reporting is going to continue obviously unchanged. We will continue to do hard hitting reporting, and people are starting, I think, to pay attention. So, that gives me hope against the rise of fascism in America.”