Jay Bhattacharya

A proposal comes in that's a new way of addressing hypertension that doesn't require you to take a pill every day, but is more effective, cheaper.

Well, that will have a huge benefit for the health of African Americans.

What I want is improvements in the health of African Americans, improvements in the health of white Americans, improvements in the health of every American.

And research that advances the health of people is really what I care about.

It's like putting an equity lens around that essentially undermines the real thing we care about, which is improved health.

Broadly, it's trying to solve that trust problem.

That's the central pillar.

And you have to try to understand, I think, what has led to the position we're in.

And we talked so much about COVID.

I think that you can't think about why there's this lack of trust in some vaccines without understanding the failure of public health on the COVID vaccines.

I think it's spilled over.

And it's extremely distressing to me, like, to watch this, because I think the MMR vaccine, for instance, is a tremendously important vaccine, the best way to prevent measles, which is a preventable illness that's going to kill kids.

I think the uptake now is like 92%, which is too low.

Yes, but go on.

One of the major root problems is the decline in trust in those kinds of basic traditional vaccines that are vital to the health of children and also some vaccines that are vital to the health of adults.

And so the Trump administration policy, as far as I understand it, is to take actions to address that distrust.

That's the core philosophical underpinning for the actions that we've taken.

And now there's a tremendous amount of controversy within the public health community about how to restore that trust.

And let me just characterize it in two basic camps.

One camp says, well, the problem is misinformation.