MAHA doc: Vaccines became tools of social justice
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Why did the White House decide to prune the childhood vaccine schedule?
We have parents demanding respect, demanding to be treated as partners in their kids' health and in their own health. We look at vaccines as really important, but they're not all the same. They're not all equally important. Immigration is part of the infectious disease story that we're not talking about. Um
and we should. Dr. Monique Johannan, thank you so much for joining PodForce One. You are a public health physician. You are Stanford and Harvard trained. And you currently are writing public health guidelines that are used in hospitals and across health state health authorities. authorities across the country. And I think uh I'll call you Monique if you don't mind. Please. I think your um the importance of what you do is really highlighted by the fact that you are a senior fellow now at Independent Women. And your research and your ad advice about childhood vaccine schedules has been used by President Trump. Trump in his recent executive order, in which he's streamlined the number of vaccines that children are are mandated, I guess, to get, which is uh a crucial factor in restoring public trust in medicine.
So let's start there, uh, Monique. Tell us how did you come to Decide that the vaccine schedule for kids needed to be pruned.
Sure. And thank you again, Miranda, so much for having me. Um I really start, I I put I have three hats that I wear when I come to this. Um the first is as a physician. The second is having a master's in public health, and then the third is as a mom. And I put all those things together and it's really kind of how I approach most things in my work. Um, when I became interested in vaccines specifically was a few years ago during COVID, I wrote guidelines for the COVID uh virus uh related to hospitals and ICU care in 2020. And this was the summer 2020 when I started writing them. And became very interested in vaccine policy. I definitely saw a disconnect in what I saw in the published literature, as opposed to what I heard a lot of public health authorities saying.
I really come at vaccines from the principle that vaccines are an extraordinary achievement. They are one of the great public health achievements of my lifetime, or frankly, any lifetime. And what they do that is really special is for certain types of diseases, like measles, they can break transmission. They can take it out of the community. And that's a truly valuable thing. We think of most of the Lives saved with infectious disease or about uh sanitation and housing reform and things like that. Those are really important, but vaccines have this very specific role. But starting in the late eighties to early nineties, I think in the United States we really changed what our philosophy was that instead of thinking about vaccines as this intervention to in a for a limited number of diseases to help protect the community.
That we were going to use vaccines as a tool for social policy. So it's difficult, for example, to reach out to men who are IV drug users. Wouldn't it be easier if we just vaccinated babies? And it's difficult to address sexually transmitted infections. So wouldn't it be easier if we just vaccinated nine-year-olds? You know, we we started looking at vaccines in Kids as a way to deal with complicated and complex social problems. I also think, you know, when we started making that change, we still had paper charts. Um, electronic health records were very, very basic. So we saw this explosion in the number of vaccines to the point where I think within the last few years, Enough parents really got to a place where they said enough is enough and
The one thing I would say when you have the COVID lockdowns, a lot of parents realized they could opt out. They could opt out of public school and they could have other ways to educate their children. And we had this democratization of expertise that I put all those things together. And I think we have the Maha movement. And so I look at vaccines as really important, but they're not all the same. They're not all equally important. And I think we've gotten ourselves in trouble.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did the White House decide to prune the childhood vaccine schedule?
0:00–11:36
2
How did COVID‑19 lockdowns and school‑vaccine mandates erode public trust in medicine?
11:36–21:27
3
What role did Dr. Fauci’s communications play in the loss of confidence in public‑health guidance?
21:27–31:35
4
How do mRNA vaccines work and why are they considered a “quick‑and‑dirty” solution?
31:35–43:40
5
Why are measles outbreaks at the U.S. border linked to immigration and school policies?
43:40–55:11
6
How can AI and large‑language models improve precision‑medicine and vaccine outreach?
55:11–1:05:50
7
What personal experiences shaped Dr. Monique Yohanan’s view on parental rights and vaccine choice?
1:05:50–1:17:04
8
What actionable steps can parents take to regain agency over their children’s health decisions?
1:17:04–1:26:57
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Pod Force One
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