The MeidasTouch Podcast
Meidas Health, Episode 2: Dr. Gupta and Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf
06 Apr 2025
In this second episode of Meidas Health, two of the nation's preeminent health leaders join forces for a compelling conversation on the impact of ongoing HHS budget cuts on the nation’s health. Dr. Robert Califf, the recent former Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under President Biden, joins Dr. Vin Gupta, host of Meidas Health, for an action-oriented discussion detailing the many ways these continued cuts to federal health agencies threaten the health and overall well-being of all Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Hey, Midas Mighty. It's great to see you again. I wanted to share a few words ahead of episode two, which I'm so excited to be sharing with you. It's a conversation with recent former FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf. He is one of our nation's leading health officials. He was FDA commissioner under President Barack Obama and most recently under President Biden.
And he's somebody that, where there are very few candidates that could get through a Senate confirmation with bipartisan support, he's one of the few that did it. And so that's why it's really important for him, in my opinion, to be heard from at this moment.
When the FDA is being hollowed out, we're seeing all these cuts to HHS, more broadly to NIH, to CDC, to the committees and the personnel that are guiding our health information, communicating with the American public. They're pretty much all gone.
or they're people that we know have loyalties to the politics of the incumbent secretary, RFK Jr., not necessarily to the science and to the profession where their loyalties should be. And so I wanted to tee up and give you a sense of what to expect with me and Dr. Califf in conversation. We're going to talk about say, 35 minutes or so. And, you know, we were trying to make it real.
And I was trying to elicit from him and his expertise. Why are these HHS cuts? It may seem self-evident to us, but why are these cuts so impactful to all Americans, to families across the country? to people that may not be thinking about these issues the way maybe some of us are thinking about them every single day. Why does this impact everybody?
And how does it impact everybody from food safety, drug safety, especially as we're moving to secure more foods and more drugs from imported sources? It's important to note that a lot of these HHS and FDA cuts are gonna impact personnel and committees overseeing food and drug safety, especially from imported sources. That's number one. Two, he is effectively, RFK Jr.
has eliminated the expertise and the personnel that communicates with the American public on vital health issues. So who's going to do it now? We don't know. You've probably seen esteemed longtime experts like Dr. Peter Marks, who oversaw our vaccine approvals over the last many, many decades, including throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He basically resigned in protest.
and was recently came out saying that he was asked by the RFK Jr. team to come up and present data that was favorable to them on the measles vaccine and somehow linking the measles vaccine to autism. This is from recent reporting from the New York Times and other sources that he was asked to produce that information. Obviously, in his own telling, that information does not exist.
So he was being asked to invent false information. I think it's important, as we see inevitably more and more headlines on these topics and other budget cuts, to understand well beyond the headlines, why does this impact all of you, all of us? Why does it impact if you have children? Why does it impact your children? in an apolitical way, how does it impact maybe grandma and grandpa?
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