MedPod Today: Healthcare Policy in the Second Trump Administration

The following is a transcript of the podcast episode:

Rachael Robertson: Hey everybody, welcome to MedPod Today, the podcast series where MedPage Today reporters share deeper insight into the week’s biggest healthcare stories. I’m your host, Rachael Robertson.

Today, we are doing things a little differently. I’ll be talking with reporter Kristina Fiore about the latest developments in Washington. And as you’re well aware, there have been a lot.

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Robertson: Back to the show.

Okay, so we are well into the third week of the second Trump administration, and there has been a lot of healthcare related news to say the least. We can’t cover every story in this brief podcast, because there’s just been so much. So we’re going to try and take a 30,000-foot view and explore some of the most critical impacts the new White House has had on healthcare and health policy. Kristina Fiore, director of MedPage Today‘s enterprise and investigative reporting team, is going to get us started. Kristina, take it away.

Kristina Fiore: Hey Rachael. Yes, it’s been quite the past few weeks. So I think it might be helpful to start at the beginning. During the very first week of the second Trump administration, acting HHS Secretary Dorothy Fink, MD, sent a memo to employees pausing all public communications — press releases, social media, posts, websites, you name it — until February 1. And caught up in that communications pause was the CDC’s very respected journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. You did that story, so I’ll let you explain what happened there.

Robertson: Right. Basically, it was the first time in more than 60 years that MMWR did not publish as scheduled. Past CDC leaders and editors of MMWR told us that this was unprecedented, and they lamented that a scientific publication was getting caught up in a communications pause. Now, MMWR hasn’t published for 2 weeks straight, and reports suggest it will be published this Thursday, February 6, but you and I are recording this podcast on Wednesday, February 5, so it remains to be seen whether that will actually happen.

(Listener note: A version of MMWR did go out, though H5N1 bird flu updates that were supposed to be published 2 weeks ago were not included.)

Fiore: It’s also unclear if the communications pause has actually lifted, even though we’re past that February 1 deadline. But another way the administration has been dampening communication has been through its orders on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Do you want to talk about our Washington editor, Joyce Frieden’s, reporting from last week?

Robertson: Yeah. Joyce reported that the CDC was removing pages from its website that mentioned DEI issues. This includes pages on health disparities among LGBTQ youth, preventing HIV, guidance on the mpox vaccine, and so on. Some pages have been restored, but not all. For instance, CDC’s ‘Let’s Stop HIV Together’ campaign regarding PrEP is still down. Ob/gyns are worried that CDC guidance for contraception and vaccines may be purged in the coming weeks, so the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is now hosting PDFs of government-issued guidance that they’ve endorsed. We’re watching a lawsuit brought by a physician group called Doctors for America that has sued federal health agencies to get the pages restored.

Fiore: And we’ll see how that goes.

So MedPage Today‘s editor-in-chief, Jeremy Faust, MD, also had a scoop over the weekend that CDC told its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any manuscript under consideration at any journal to make sure that no “forbidden terms” appear in the work. Jeremy obtained a copy of the list of terms, and it includes things like gender, transgender, pregnant people, and LGBT. At least one journal — the Journal of the American Public Health Association — has pushed back, saying it won’t be complicit in that kind of censorship. Basically, it will be using its peer review process to make sure the work meets its own standards of publication.

Robertson: It is seriously so hard to believe that all of this has happened in basically just 2 weeks. And amid all of this, we’ve also had the confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is Trump’s pick to lead HHS. This week, the Senate Finance Committee gave him the thumbs up, and now we’re waiting for the full Senate vote. It wasn’t clear he would actually get over that initial hurdle, though.

Fiore: That’s right. Cheryl Clark reported for us that during his confirmation hearings, RFK Jr. didn’t seem to know a lot about Medicare and Medicaid. He was conflating Medicaid with the Affordable Care Act exchanges. He didn’t really know the differences between Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D. He was also pressed extensively on his views on vaccines, and this was a real sticking point for one physician senator, Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.), who people thought might vote against RFK Jr., but after many negotiations, Cassidy said Kennedy and the Trump administration pledged a very close working relationship and made some promises about not pulling certain info from CDC websites and abiding by current vaccination standards. But public health experts were a bit skeptical of that deal.

Robertson: And then there were a few other healthcare related DC stories we’ve been following this week. President Trump signed an order for the government to stop funding youth gender-affirming care through programs like Medicaid and Tricare, but even some private hospitals are now pausing their gender care programs. Families with transgender or nonbinary children have filed a lawsuit challenging that order.

Fiore: We also saw the gutting of USAID, which does a ton of work in global health, including administering parts of PEPFAR, a 20-year-old bipartisan initiative to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS across the world. Apparently an exception for life-saving humanitarian assistance, including medications, was made, but it’s not clear exactly how the program is functioning right now.

Robertson: Okay, so Kristina, it’s been quite the run.

Fiore: It sure has, Rachael.

Robertson: And we don’t expect things to slow down anytime soon. So keep checking back with MedPage Today, because we will be covering it all.

And listeners — if you or someone you know has intel that MedPage Today should report on, send us an email or contact us on the encrypted messaging app Signal. Kristina (@kristinafiore.bsky.social) and I (@rachrobertson.bky.social) both have our Signal contact information in our Bluesky profiles.

We’ll keep digging into the many ways the Trump administration is changing the landscape of healthcare.

That is it for today. If you like what you heard, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts and hit subscribe if you haven’t already. We’ll see you again soon.

This episode was hosted and produced by me, Rachael Robertson. Sound engineering by Greg Laub. Our guest was MedPage Today reporter Kristina Fiore. Links to all the many, many stories we mentioned are in the show notes.

MedPod Today is a production of MedPage Today. For more information about the show, check out medpagetoday.com/podcasts.

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