SAM Live: Vax Facts

A live vaccine Q&A with Anita K. Patel, MD for The Save America Movement. Recorded August 25, 2026. Lightly cleaned for readability — this is a verbatim transcript, not a rewrite. (Note from Angie: Claude is becoming more transparent about its transcription services. That said, there may be errors because it’s Claude we’re talking about here).

ANITA: Look at you.

ANGIE: Yeah, I mean, I have in the past tried to make actual intros and stuff. It’s so much work.

ANITA: No, stop it.

ANGIE: Hi, everybody. Anita and I were just chatting during the little countdown and I was complaining about how I don’t make things anymore because it’s too much work. But anyways, guys, I’m so happy that you joined us here for Save America Movement Live at Vax Facts. This is my wonderful co-host for today, SAM’s friend, Anita K. Patel. She is a double board certified pediatrician and critical care physician. I am Dr. Angela Rasmussen. I’m a virologist and the science chair for the Save America Movement. I’m also the co-editor-in-chief for the journal Vaccine. And we are here today to answer your questions about vaccines, whatever they may be.

Anita, what can you tell us about what’s been going on in the vaccine world on the front lines of pediatric care?

ANITA: Well, not enough. I’m rarely succinct, but I can say it like that: not enough.

ANGIE: Less and less every day, in fact.

ANITA: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And obviously we’re here because of the absurd executive order that came out of — I don’t call him by his name. My daughter calls him Donnie, so we could use Donnie. I like orange guy down the street. Yes, I’m in Washington, D.C., so anyways. Yes, I digress.

But after that executive order, honestly, there’s a couple things that as a PICU doctor — I work full time, content is my fun side of life — but we are terrified. Because as a pediatrician, PICU doctor, the one thing that fills up reliably our ICU in the wintertime is — you could probably answer this question, Angela — RSV. RSV.

So we are — are the RSV vaccine — and actually, I was part of a really big, actually, now two JAMA studies about RSV, the RSV vaccine and really the potential impact that it will have on our population. And I will tell you within two years, I had a year where we barely had any RSV thanks to the monoclonal and the maternal vaccine. And now that Donnie down the street — oh, I like that, Donnie down the street — is making it optional. It is not making it optional. He is essentially telling the world you don’t need this, shared decision making, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I’m terrified, because guess what? 10% of infants under one get hospitalized with RSV. And the hospitalization is not fun, because you’re generally with a doctor like me and we’re helping you with your breathing. And in worst cases, we’re taking over your breathing and putting you on heart-lung bypass. So I know that RSV and all these diseases seem like colds, but they’re not colds to your kid and they’re not colds to a pediatric ICU doctor. And that’s why we’re here today, to talk about all this.

ANGIE: Yeah. And I think you bring up such a great point. This is what I find, Anita, to be one of the hardest things to communicate about this, especially when trying to answer people’s questions. Because you mentioned the executive order that just came out and the shared clinical decision-making recommendation. And we can unpack what all of that stuff means. But basically, I think a lot of people are really confused about the fact that these things seem like orders. They seem very official. And now the recommendations are changing. They’re the gold standard recommendations, as this executive order said.

But in reality, they’re not. And there are legitimate consequences that you and your colleagues who are actually taking care of these sick kids see every single day when these kids end up in your ICUs. And I think that that’s one of the things that’s really the hardest type of question to answer about all of this, because you tell people about what the consequences of this will be, but it’s not happening right in front of them. And even though most people don’t want other people’s kids to get injured or sick or hurt — if it’s not your kid and it’s not happening to you in front of your eyes, I think sometimes it’s really hard, with everything else that’s going on, for people to actually connect these two things.

ANITA: Absolutely.

ANGIE: Non-binding executive order, which is essentially meant to trick you into thinking that the recommendations have actually changed when they haven’t.

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: Somebody like Anita can tell you very specifically, when you are in your office with your child and she is treating them as her patient, can tell you exactly why those recommendations should be ignored. But that’s the point of them. It’s to make you think that they should be followed. And those are the consequences then that will ensue.

And I know that we are now starting to get a lot of questions.

ANITA: Oh, let’s go. I was like, I could talk forever about this. And Angie, before we keep going, I do want to just say one thing.

Parents, people, this is not your fault. And I say it at almost every vaccine live, whatever I give, because I know that the rhetoric around vaccines is really tough. And what I want to make sure everyone knows is that us pediatricians don’t consider you, the parents, the enemy. I consider you guys the victims. Genuinely, you are the victims of misinformation, and it is freaking government-wide misinformation. So I don’t want anyone to feel scared about talking about vaccines. Never be scared about asking questions. And just know that we will take all questions in good faith online and also in real life.

Okay, sorry, I had to say that.

ANGIE: I think that’s a fantastic point, Anita, because one thing I was a little bit worried about is that because I am sometimes quite forceful in the way I express my opinion of this administration’s actions, that people might think I would respond to a genuine question about vaccines in a similar way. And I absolutely will not.

I completely agree with you, Anita, that there’s been a lot of discussion in this space about how should we handle MAHA? Should we become friends with them? Should we work with them? What should we do with them? Because people who agree with MAHA stuff, the people who make up the base of MAHA — our people who came to it, not because they’re political people or anything like that, they came to it with genuine concerns about the environment, about their kids’ health, about food safety, about corporate capture, about all of these things that are real problems. My issue with that is not the people who think that MAHA has a good message for them, or that we should not listen to those people or not engage with them. But I think that it’s really important to note that the people who are running things at MAHA are lying to everybody about all of those things. And they are not proposing solutions that are based in evidence or science, and they are politically motivated.

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: And so I, like Anita, promise that any question — there’s no such thing as a question that’s too simple, too complex, too political, too off limits. I’ll tell you what I think.

ANITA: Nothing’s off limits. Not with us two. You guys want to know.

ANGIE: So I think that’s a great point. What we really want to do, and what the Save America Movement is doing by committing to science — even though, you know, why is SAM involved in a vaccine Q&A session when they’re involved in a lot of political activism? Because this stuff is political. Your family’s health is political and it has everything to do with who’s in power right now. And it’s really important when we’re talking about defending America, defending Americans’ health, defending America’s well-being and our future, to think about health and our kids’ safety and uncontrolled infectious diseases rampaging through our country. These are really important issues. And that’s why we’re here trying to communicate it to you today, because we want you to know what’s going on. We want you to be fully informed and we want you to have reliable information.

ANITA: Exactly. All right, let’s go.

ANGIE: Maybe start getting to these questions, because boy, am I happy about this. A lot of these questions are going to be directed towards you, Anita.

So Wendy Docs — thanks for joining us, Wendy — has a question. Her grandson is a liver transplant patient. Actually, maybe this is a question for me, too. I did my postdoctoral fellowship on hepatitis C.

ANITA: There you go.

ANGIE: The transplant study was a major picture of my life for three years.

ANITA: I need to know about transplants. Not me, but care for them.

ANGIE: Try not to get hepatitis C virus infection is the moral of that story.

ANITA: Got it.

ANGIE: Not a big pediatric problem anymore. Anyways.

ANITA: Hepatitis B might be, though. I was going to learn. Yeah.

ANGIE: Anyway. Liver transplant. Thank you for that. Liver transplant. But he was unable to get an MMR until recently. Which makes a lot of sense. It’s a live attenuated vaccine. Transplant patients have to take a lot of immunosuppressive drugs. Now that he has the vaccine, they’re waiting to see if it will be successful. Is this something that’s only going to be an issue in transplant patients, or are there children who don’t develop immunity after they get vaccinated?

ANITA: Okay, that is a very good question. Let’s take this beyond just liver transplants, because I think that’s where we’re going with this. For your — it was nephew, right? Nephew?

ANGIE: Grandson.

ANITA: Grandson, I’m so sorry. So for your grandson, I don’t know, but I assume, having taken care of these kiddos, that he’s on continued immunosuppression, which he needs, because we need to keep that liver working and functioning. Unfortunately, it could attenuate — and I will pass the biology stuff to Angela — but we do know that when you give vaccines to children who are immunocompromised, we do need to make sure that they mount an appropriate response. Because those immunosuppressants are there to blunt and protect your body from rejecting the liver. But in this case, we also want it to make antibodies to the vaccine.

So really this applies to all children who are on immunosuppressants, that they do need to be more thoughtful and more proactive about making sure that they’ve received their vaccines, and also that their doctors are monitoring them. But guess what? Transplant doctors are amazing at this stuff, because they do not want you to get sick.

Angela, anything to add?

ANGIE: Yeah. I mean, not about the transplant doctors — although they are amazing, because when I was a postdoc, I did work with them.

ANITA: They’re the same.

ANGIE: All these core needle biopsies from transplant patients. It was a very interesting project, but I digress.

This is a really strong argument for other people who don’t have kids that are immunosuppressed to get vaccinated, because the rate of vaccine uptake that you have to have in a community to prevent measles outbreaks is 95%. Measles is incredibly contagious as a virus. So you really need to have as many vaccinated people as you can.

Now, there will be transplant patients. There will be people who are on different types of cancer chemotherapies. There will be people who have different autoimmune conditions. There will be people who are taking different types of medications who won’t be as responsive to vaccines. And there are also people who have genetic immunosuppressive conditions who just don’t develop durable, lasting immunity after vaccination. This is the small percentage of people — when you hear that the MMR is 97% effective at preventing measles, this is that 3% that it doesn’t work for. Are people who just don’t have immune systems that are capable of what most other people’s immune systems are capable of. Now, that can change again with different transplant medications, stuff like that. But the best way to do this is to make sure there’s no measles circulating in the community at all, by making sure that as many people who can get vaccinated, and who the vaccine will work for, are getting vaccinated.

So that’s one of the places where I’ve really been focusing a lot of my communications, because in addition to people who are immunosuppressed, a lot of the people who are getting measles today are actually in two categories. There are adults — actually younger adults — who were never vaccinated, who are now getting measles. And there are infants who are not old enough to get the MMR vaccine, because it is a live attenuated vaccine, meaning that it contains measles virus, mumps virus and rubella virus in weakened forms that don’t cause illness. You can’t give it to a newborn infant because those viruses can still grow and they can potentially cause disease in a brand new newborn baby.

You don’t have to worry about something like that for the hepatitis B vaccine, because the hepatitis B vaccine is not a live attenuated vaccine. It cannot replicate. It cannot make new virus. So you’re not getting infected with it. So it’s safe to give it to a newborn. But these ones, you have to let the immune system develop a little bit before you actually give them a vaccine like that for it to work. And so that’s why, again, you need everybody who is eligible to get the vaccine, who is old enough to get the vaccine, to get it, to make sure that you’re protecting those people who just haven’t grown up enough to get the vaccine.

ANITA: That’s exactly right. And I just want to add one statement to that. This is where you blame your doctor, or blame me. Literally blame me, and say, hey, we can’t wait for you to come over, but we’ve been advised by — you can literally say Dr. Patel, or you can say your own doctor, that’s probably more relevant — that we ask whether you’ve been vaccinated, because our grandson, he has some immunosuppression, he just had a liver transplant.

And I will tell you, I don’t just tell people to do this. I did this myself. I have my pandemic April 2020 baby, and I have my December 2022 baby who was born in the tripledemic. So I mean, I swear, I didn’t let anyone in my house for the first couple of months. And then even after that, I asked everybody. No shame. Because guess what? I don’t care if you’re taken aback by my question. I’m just trying to protect my kid. And you, Wendy, are just trying to protect your grandson. So don’t hesitate to ask, and blame your doctor. Blame me. Seriously.

ANGIE: Yeah. And when it comes down to medical freedom — I am a big proponent of medical freedom. And I really resent, actually, the idea that medical freedom means saying no to vaccines, the freedom to say no to vaccines, because we’ve actually always had that freedom. You’re not required to take any vaccines. You choose to take vaccines if you want to participate in certain parts of life. Because it’s also our right to not have our kids getting sick from preventable diseases.

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: And we also have a right to insist that when people come onto our property, into our home, when we invite them into our space, that they are going to respect our customs, including our desiring not to have our children get preventable, horrible diseases that could potentially kill them.

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: I think that it has turned into this discussion now where it’s like about who’s morally correct.

ANITA: I know.

ANGIE: To me, vaccination has never fundamentally been an issue of what’s morally correct, because it’s pretty obvious to me that the solution that’s safe and effective and saves kids’ lives is the morally correct one. To me, it’s more important that it’s scientifically justified, that we know that vaccines save kids’ lives. And when they don’t get them, they’re at risk of getting sick or dying from that. So to me, it’s pretty simple.

ANITA: It is simple. And one thing that bothers me at times is, in the ICU, if a kid is in a life-threatening situation and the parents disagree — let’s give a concrete example. I have a kid who’s having a respiratory arrest, meaning they’re not breathing anymore. Obviously, that’s a heated situation. There are times where parents say, I don’t want you to intubate. I still intubate, because the patient is the patient and I’m supposed to do everything I can, especially because it’s a kid, to keep them alive.

So it is really — I don’t know how we got to a place where we are fighting to just educate parents about sound science to protect their kids. And it is so counterintuitive. We’re just trying to protect them so that they don’t get diseases. And because of all this misinformation, our measles cases have risen to levels that we haven’t seen in decades. One of our friends just mentioned that two additional people may have died from the measles.

So there’s real consequences to this. I know it seems like a fun fight to have on the internet, but it’s not a fight for us. These are people, patients, and people like you who’ve dedicated their lives to study these things, because we know that this research now will save people’s lives for decades to come.

Gosh, we’re waxing too philosophic.

ANGIE: Is there more questions? No, I think it’s also really important for people to understand why we do this. Because why am I so enthusiastic about vaccines? It kind of is tough sometimes to be like the cheerleader for, oh yeah, get a bunch of clot shots for your kid or whatever.

ANITA: Right, right.

ANGIE: The fact is, vaccines — we’ve never thought that much about them because we’ve never actually seen the diseases that they prevent.

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: And I’ll never forget this. So I did my PhD at Columbia, in Vincent Racaniello’s lab. And Vincent is one of the world’s greatest living polio experts.

ANITA: And so it was, you know, we both were at Columbia.

ANGIE: Yeah. I mean, I was there. Well, and then I was faculty there too. So I’ve done some.

ANITA: Oh my God. Okay.

ANGIE: But I studied viral pathogenesis and I use animal models for that. And I’ll never forget the first time, when I was learning how to work with mice, that I saw a mouse with polio. I mean, it’s one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. It’s actually more horrific, I thought, than seeing a mouse with Ebola. And I’ve never been able to get that out of my head.

And I never thought about it until really last year: that I unfortunately am probably going to start seeing American kids with polio. And so are you, unfortunately. And it breaks my heart that the goal of these vaccines was to never see these diseases again.

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: Because it’s like we forgot how terrible they were. Now we’re going to unfortunately start seeing them again, because it’s politically advantageous for truly terrible people.

ANITA: That’s right. I’m such a pediatrician. I’m like, oh, parents, you’re okay.

[~25 seconds of audio missing here — check the source recording.]

ANGIE: As a viral enthusiast too, I love to sing the praises of the great Jonas Salk. So I’m happy to talk about anything about the polio vaccine or polio that you guys would like to know — even though I’d rather never discuss polio again, because we eradicated it. Sadly, no.

ANGIE: But let’s talk about some other viruses there are vaccines for. Robin P. had heard something about a new flu vaccine for seniors, and that is correct. Do you want to chat about that, Anita?

ANITA: I’m going to let you do the adult stuff. I stick to the kid stuff.

ANGIE: Yeah, I figured as much. This is actually an mRNA vaccine story. This is kind of my department, because it’s also the stupid gossip about the clowns that are running our federal agencies — in this case, the Food and Drug Administration.

So the former director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research was a guy named Vinay Prasad. And he was, I would say, probably the most anti-vax CBER director we’ve ever had. Now, the CBER director is the nation’s top vaccine regulatory official. In this role, he decided basically on his own, because he didn’t like the clinical trial design, that he was going to not even review Moderna’s biological license application — which is an application for FDA approval — to approve that the mRNA seasonal flu vaccine that Moderna had made.

Now, this was really controversial for good reason, because the phase three clinical trial costs hundreds of millions of dollars. And Moderna had already done it based on the FDA’s previous letter that they wrote saying this looks like a good trial design, go ahead. So he said, no, we’re not going to do it. There was a lot of public outcry, and then they reversed that decision, and then he left FDA, and then so did the FDA commissioner.

And now nobody really knew what was happening, because obviously the federal government and the FDA is still part of HHS, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They’re still anti-vax and they still really don’t like mRNA vaccines like Moderna makes. The clinical trial data for this vaccine actually showed that it was 27% better at fighting flu than a conventional flu vaccine. So they ended up actually reviewing the BLA, and they approved it. And so now people over the age of 50 will have the option of selecting the mRNA flu shot this flu season.

Yes, that was a very long way of saying that there was some drama involved, because, again, the people running our federal government are a bunch of anti-vax clowns. But, you know, good triumphed over evil, and the Moderna mRNA seasonal flu vaccine is now approved and available for people over the age of 50 this upcoming flu season.

ANITA: I’m going to add a Vinay — oh, can I add a quick Vinay story?

ANGIE: I’d love to have a discussion about Vinay. Were you going to do more science?

ANITA: Because what I wanted to say was, I first got to know, quote unquote, Vinay during the pandemic. That’s I think what you’re referring to in terms of his very loud anti-vax statements. And I got into a bunch of Twitter fights with him, and that caused me — and whenever you get into a Twitter conversation, debate with someone, they like to throw out lots of credentials. So he was like, well, I’ve written like hundreds of papers. So I was like, okay, let’s go see what these papers are. Because he was using that as justification for being an expert on clinical trial design. So I looked up his papers.

Have you looked up his papers, Angela?

ANGIE: I’ve looked at many of them. Including the ones that claim that COVID vaccines cause myocarditis at rates more than 10 — I believe 80 times higher — than they actually do.

ANITA: Yeah. So Vinay Prasad, he has made his career on getting funding from private industry. So let’s just say that this guy in the federal government is not — I’m sure he’s had federal, I don’t know, maybe he’s had federal dollars in the past, but he has a big industry funding. And if you look at his compendium of research — and we are both researchers — it is mostly commentary on other people’s trial designs. And basically saying, I think the compendium of work is essentially saying, we’re not doing any trials right.

Now, does he have solutions for these problems? Whatever solutions he comes up with are either unethical or not plausible to do. So it is rarely solution-based and it is mostly just commentary on how everyone else is doing everything wrong. The question is, well, how have you done it right? Haven’t found that yet.

ANGIE: Yeah. And this is the real problem with this administration. This illustrates one of the tactics I think that they like to use the most. They try to say that this is unsound science when it’s actually sound science and it’s been the accepted standard. Oh, but it’s not the gold standard — which, by the way, has never been defined. When they say a standard, that usually means like some kind of number or something.

ANITA: Yeah.

ANGIE: Like the gold standard was actually a standard. It was like this much gold means this much money.

ANITA: Yep.

ANGIE: So saying that something is gold standard really doesn’t mean anything if you’re not going to attach it to an actual quantitative standard.

ANITA: Yep.

ANGIE: Which they’ve never done. But that’s very common. Just like RFK Jr., every time he’s on cable news, will say, oh, these vaccines have never been tested in a placebo-controlled trial. Well, that’s not true. And what you were saying about Vinay Prasad just a moment ago, that some of his solutions to these trials he doesn’t like are unethical — that’s a great example. He thinks that everything needs to be done with a randomized placebo-controlled trial.

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: For something like a flu vaccine, this would be incredibly unethical. For something like the polio vaccine or the MMR, this would be unbelievably unethical, because we already know that those vaccines work. Maybe they’re not perfect, but they work, and we’ve approved them, and the risk-benefit ratio is such that you cannot justify withholding that vaccine from somebody just for the sake of doing an experiment.

ANITA: Yes. Basic bioethics. No IRB, institutional review board, which is required to do any research — no IRB would approve it, because knowingly exposing people to a potentially deadly pathogen without something that we know could protect them from hospitalization, severe disease and death... Who would enroll in that trial? Would you put your child in that trial, saying, yeah, we know we have treatment, we know we have preventative strategies, but we’re going to throw your child into the gauntlet and just see what happens?

ANGIE: Yeah. I mean, good luck. Like, it’ll help some other kid in the future. What kind of parent is going to take that decision? And the fact is, you don’t need to have a placebo-controlled trial for every single vaccine. It doesn’t make any sense. So these demands that we keep hearing from the administration — oh, there’s not enough data, oh, we haven’t collected the right kind of evidence, oh, we did clinical trials wrong.

I mean, keep in mind that Vinay Prasad has no experience with infectious diseases. He’s a hematologist, oncologist, and I guess he is an MPH, so he can call himself an epidemiologist. You know what he does now? Besides being back doing whatever the hell he does at UCSF, he’s running a longevity podcast now. Of course he is. That seems like the perfect career move for him. For those of you who don’t keep up with the wellness grifting space, longevity is where all of the tech guys go. They’re all trying to figure out some way to become immortal so that they can upload themselves to the post-human cloud or whatever. It’s really, really unbelievably stupid.

But what it comes down to is that you have doctors, physicians, and scientists like Vinay Prasad who have willingly chosen to embrace policies that they know will result in injury or death to Americans and to American kids. And they’re okay with that, because for them, it’s more important to design the clinical trial right. I mean, give me a break. Like, this is not why we do this business. Those of us who actually do this type of work do it because we actually don’t want children to die or get sick. Like, we want as few children to die or get sick as possible. So there is no policy that could be more important than that. And that’s kind of where I always come down on it.

ANGIE: We’ve got a couple more questions.

ANITA: Oh, let’s do it.

ANGIE: When do you recommend getting the flu vaccine? I can tell people when adults should get it, but maybe you should tell people when their kids should get it.

ANITA: Okay, so we always say flu before boo, which means get your flu shot before Halloween. I’m going to add a caveat here, though. Our flu seasons are really wonky. They really have been wonky. So what I will say is I’m still recommending flu before boo. But if we start to see signals that the flu season is happening earlier, then I would get it earlier. So I would just listen to people like Angela and all these amazing science communicators out there. I will be monitoring as well. But those are the general guidelines. Flu before boo. It’s really hard to mess up.

ANGIE: And one thing, I mean, I should mention, Anita — and this is something — Anita and I are both too busy. And so we keep trying to have like work conversations.

ANITA: Yeah, again, this is our — this is our —

ANGIE: Like, find the same hour. No, I know. Or even like a FaceTime or something.

ANITA: I know. It’s actually ridiculous. It’s absurd.

ANGIE: We’ll figure it out. We’re going to do it. I have faith in our ability to do this. If we can do this, then we can figure out —

ANITA: Exactly.

ANGIE: But one of the things I’m working on for the Save America Movement is trying to track a lot of different things that are going on in America, especially infectious disease, and try to understand how that’s changed because of the policies that are being implemented, but also how that’s affecting people’s daily lives and how it’s impacting other aspects of people’s lives too — like their ability to attend school, what’s happening in their communities with their hospitals, what’s happening because of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and all the people that are going to lose healthcare as a result of that in 2027.

So I think that this is something that going forward we’d really like to be able to help out with, with the Save America Movement, in terms of letting communities know, hey, now’s a good time for you to get your flu vaccine because this new policy is in place that will enable you to get it. I think especially going forward, as these services continue to be cut from an economic perspective, we’re going to — and organizations like SAM that are really involved in every aspect of American life — we’re going to start having to think about ways that we can help deliver healthcare to people. Because a lot of people in the U.S. are going to be needing that more than anything. And there’s not really anything in place right now, except for at the community level, to really replace a lot of the services that are being lost. And if we think about this, in some ways, this actually becomes —

ANITA: Oh, of course it is.

ANGIE: I mean, the healthcare system is potentially disastrous.

ANITA: I just want to say this. I know you’re talking about this in theoretical terms. We have been there — and not with measles, but the number of compounded infectious disease conditions we’ve had in the past several years has filled up pediatric ICUs across the country.

And what keeps me up at night is what you were referring to. And let’s just say it concretely: the BBB, the big, beautiful, big, ugly bill, is going to shut down a bunch of rural hospitals. And it already is. It’s also going to galvanize the already messed up — God, you’re getting me on this topic and it’s going to make me really mad — but all the freaking private equity bros are gonna then be in the situation where they get to buy up all those rural hospitals and then run them like a business, not like a hospital. And what that means is they’re going to treat the entire medical staff — they’re going to underpay them and they’re going to under-resource them. So if you are even lucky enough to have the private equity bros buy up that rural hospital and try to salvage it, the kind of care that these people are going to receive is going to be greatly under the standard that we should be providing to people.

So this is the microcosm we’re talking about. How many headlines do you have to see? Like the tripledemic a couple of years ago — whatever, it’s a dramatic term for lots of viruses. I will tell you, in my own hospital, we are already preparing for surge. We have multiple contingencies in place, because frankly, we were full a lot this summer because of all the viruses. So this is not theoretical, this is real.

And that’s why we’re here, Angela, to tell people that these vaccines are not this scary entity. They really are just there to protect you and your children. That’s it. And the way healthcare is going, the more preventative care we can have, the better we can protect ourselves from everything that’s coming out of the government right now.

ANGIE: Absolutely. I mean, I think that is one of the most important points to make. And we’ve got a couple more questions here. Our friends at SAM are also helping us monitor the chat.

ANITA: Oh, thank God, because I can’t see it.

ANGIE: We’re not professional producers.

ANITA: I’m essentially a Luddite who does big data AI research.

ANGIE: I’m literally like an AI expert. I know. It’s terrible, Anita, because AI has revolutionized the way that I work. I’m able to now do stuff that it used to require me hiring people to do.

ANITA: 100%.

ANGIE: The problem is, because I know what I’m doing, but I am not a software developer, I can’t even tell. We’re going to have to have a whole therapy session that’s going to involve a lot of cocktails, like me talking about how Claude is basically the most toxic — just honest, and yet also a competent collaborator — I’ve ever had in my life. All of the things I have to undo that Claude has done.

But I think that this is a great point, that the way that we do a lot of these things is changing, but I think we still face the same challenges even if we have new tools to do it. And that is that we are always going to be contending with infectious diseases emerging. We are always going to have to stay on top of it. And we’ve unfortunately really shot ourselves in the foot by allowing a lot of these things that we had already conquered to come back.

ANGIE: And this is one point that I really want to make about things like flu shots and COVID shots, which we’re getting these questions about.

ANITA: Great.

ANGIE: They might not be perfect. They might not prevent you from getting flu or COVID. But like last year, for example, a new subtype of the H3N2 — so there’s two types of influenza A that circulate every season. One is H1N1, and that is derived from the 2009 pandemic strain. It’s essentially the same pandemic that’s been circulating, except it’s just seasonal now. And then there’s H3N2. H3N2 is usually more severe, especially in kids and older people.

ANITA: And it was. Yes, and it was.

ANGIE: A new subtype of H3N2 emerged that was vaccine evasive. So they pick the strain in February for the flu season the next year. And if the flu virus changes, well, then it’s going to be a bad mismatch.

And so like most people in Canada, I think that H3N2 paid our home a visit. We don’t have any little kids. My kids are in their 20s and they live in the US, but my husband is 65. And so he is in the age group where he is also at a higher risk. He had flu symptoms, pretty classic flu symptoms. I didn’t subtype him, but I’m pretty sure it was H3N2, because everybody in Canada — I was literally doing a national news interview about the H3N2 surge. Well, I’m pretty sure my husband had it in the other room.

Both of us were vaccinated. I didn’t have any symptoms, and I don’t know if I ever got infected. I’m pretty sure that he was infected with influenza. But you know what? He didn’t go to the hospital. He felt terrible. He had a mild fever. He had some body aches. He was better in three days. The reason why: he was vaccinated. He could have had a much worse outcome, because he is an older person, he is in that age group. But he didn’t, because he was vaccinated.

And even when vaccines don’t work, they still do work, because that’s what they’re intended to do. They’re intended to prevent disease. They’re not intended to prevent infection. And so I do want people to keep that in mind when you hear the administration say things like a flu shot would be optional or a COVID shot is optional, because it really doesn’t matter to most people, it only matters to people who are really sick or whatever. That’s absolutely not true, as you can attest, being that you see kids really sick with COVID — which a lot of people say, oh, kids don’t get sick from COVID, they’re not at risk at all. I bet you have a lot of personal stories that say that.

ANITA: I do. I do. Luckily, I will say this, and this is thanks to the vaccine program and also natural immunity, the number of severe COVIDs we’re seeing are significantly lower. And that wasn’t by chance. That was because, again, we all have immunity and the vaccine immunity, and we addressed the COVID pandemic in the best way we had at the time.

I will tell you — just let’s talk about the flu shot for a second, I want to get to those questions too. The flu, I will always say, is a great equalizer. Yes, it can absolutely, we know it’s going to take out the elderly, immunocompromised, and young children. I have taken care of far too many children who were previously healthy — lacrosse players, football players, who never had a medical issue — that have ended up on heart-lung bypass. Because I do that in the PICU. We do that in the PICU when you are that sick, where your body is just not doing its job.

So I really want to impress upon everyone that [a banner overlay sits on top of the audio here; the raw transcript reads “…we are not a football player…” — check the recording] we probably think there is some underlying something or other that predisposes them to this. But there is no test for those predispositions. And that is why we tell everybody — I have never missed my flu shot. I mean, good God, the second it’s available, I’m like, please, please inject me. I don’t have time for the flu and I certainly don’t want to end up in the hospital.

So it’s important to know that with the flu, it’s not just high risk populations. And that’s why we recommend it to everybody. There’s a reason for it. We don’t just say stuff. We do it because of the evidence.

ANGIE: Yeah, absolutely. And for anybody who’s had the flu — like an actual flu, not a cold, not just like an upper respiratory thing — you might not be in the hospital, but... The last time I know that I had influenza, I was in my mid-20s. And I mean, I lost like six pounds in a week. Like, I was just, I was so sick. I wasn’t sick enough to go to the hospital, but I was so sick in that I just felt like shit. And I was feeling terrible, and I don’t want to go through that.

So I mean, I’m a vaccine enthusiast, but that’s because I don’t like getting sick. I don’t have time to be sick and I don’t enjoy the experience at all of being sick. I don’t like it when people take care of me either. I like going to the spa, but I’m hoping for that.

ANITA: Yeah. Yeah. Spa, good. Being taken care of, bad.

ANGIE: Yeah. Like having my mom bring me chicken soup because I’m totally sick. Even though I love hanging out with my mom.

ANGIE: So for adults, and to follow up on Robin’s question about when we recommend getting the flu vaccine, I’m just going to add very quickly that you mentioned for kids, flu before boo.

ANITA: Flu before boo.

ANGIE: For adults, the vaccines are usually not available until mid-September-ish. So you’ll have to wait until then. But as Anita said, the flu seasons have been really weird. So last year, there was a huge outbreak of H3N2, this subclade K variant that emerged in September in Japan, which is really early for a Northern Hemisphere flu outbreak.

So the virus has been doing weird things, and that’s probably because people are doing weird things. Viruses don’t come out of nowhere and they don’t have a place where they can just like hang out secretly. They have to travel through populations because they’re obligate parasites. So seasonal flu travels with people. We have big outbreaks at a season — it’s probably because things have changed with people, which they have. I mean, recovering from a pandemic, which is now part of the new sort of global ecosystem of infectious diseases, our society’s in great turmoil. So I feel like a lot of things could potentially explain why the flu seasons are wonky, but we don’t really know.

But for adults, it’s more or less the same as with kids. You generally don’t want to get the flu vaccine too early. The main reason for arguing for kids to get it maybe a little earlier than adults is that they go to school. But most of us who get it for work are offered it usually sometime in like October at the latest, early November. But I do want to say also that it’s never too late to get it.

ANITA: No, never.

ANGIE: So if it’s January and you’re like, oh shit, I didn’t get it — you could still get it. You should still get it. Because there’s also epidemics of flu B in the spring. And we’re not as well protected against those, because we get our vaccines in the fall, and by the time the spring comes around, those antibody titers have kind of gone back down a little bit. So we get to be more susceptible.

ANITA: I totally agree with you. And I will say, even children I take care of in the PICU — most of the time, if you are in the PICU with the flu, you’re not vaccinated. I offer the vaccine and talk about why. Because as you just eloquently said, it covers multiple strains. And even if you have one version of the flu — if you have flu A, you can still get flu B. So I always encourage and offer it to families, even in the hospital with the flu after they’re recovered, because it’s real and it can happen.

ANGIE: I think that’s great. And I think that parents also should think about asking about vaccinations when they happen to be somewhere. Because one of the things I’m most concerned with right now is because there is a federal court order that is staying the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Now, the way that vaccines are made available in the US is that the FDA approves them, and then they are evaluated based on the evidence supporting them by a committee called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — or the ACIP — which is a committee made of external experts convened by the CDC that evaluates all of this stuff through these standardized frameworks, votes, and makes recommendations that are then approved by the CDC director. And that determines what insurance companies pay for, as well as programs like Vaccines for Children that fund low-income children to get vaccines. So the ACIP recommendations are really important.

Last year in June, Kennedy fired the entire ACIP, all 17 members, who were esteemed vaccine researchers, vaccinologists, and regulatory experts, and replaced them with a bunch of people who were either unqualified and/or anti-vaxxers for the most part, with a couple of exceptions.

ANITA: Yeah.

ANGIE: The AAP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, sued in federal court, and there was a ruling in March that stayed the ACIP and basically stayed all the decisions they had made — including banning thimerosal, descheduling the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose, and trying to turn everything into, quote unquote, shared clinical decision making, which is just a way of saying they’re creating an extra barrier where you have to talk to a doctor before you can get a vaccine.

ANITA: Yep.

ANGIE: There’s no real point to it, unless I guess you have questions for your doctor. But there should be no need for that, because previously the ACIP, who are, again, experts, looked at the evidence and said, you don’t need a doctor, these are the recommendations. And those recommendations, by the way, are not mandates. You’re welcome to say, no, thank you, I’m not going to follow this and I’m not going to vaccinate with any of these vaccines, if you want. There’s no law forcing you to vaccinate. The recommended vaccine schedule is just that. It is a recommendation for when you should give those vaccines to your kids.

So the ACIP can’t meet. They can’t make vaccine recommendations. The only recommendations that continue to go through are for COVID and flu vaccines, because there was already a process for changing those every season. But the vaccines themselves aren’t a new vaccine product, so they don’t have to go through a new thing. But we’re in real trouble, actually, with regards to all vaccines if we don’t resolve this situation with the ACIP. And obviously, we can’t resolve it by replacing the ACIP with whoever Kennedy wants to put on there.

ANITA: That’s the issue.

ANGIE: So next year, I think we’re going to be in a position where parents might actually find it a lot harder to actually vaccinate their kids. Because even though they’re not banning vaccines or anything, they’re putting all these different barriers in place to make it harder for people.

So if I were a parent right now and your kids are going through the schedule and you don’t know what to think — do ask your doctor. I guess do avail yourself of shared clinical decision making. Do ask your doctor if they can offer your kid any vaccines while you happen to be in there, because that’s one less trip you have to make. And also, some of the vaccines — the recommended schedule is based on evidence, but there is a little bit of a window. It’s not like, oh, you didn’t get your MMR at exactly 12 months post birth, so it’s not going to work now. There are ways where you, working with your doctor, who is going to have the best idea of your medical history and whether or not that’s right for you — they can make those recommendations for you and potentially help you get access to those.

ANGIE: So with that, our next question is actually about COVID mRNA vaccines. And this is probably something — I don’t actually know how this is dealt with in terms of pediatrics. But a lot of people, as you probably know, have found the mRNA vaccine technology in particular to be very reactogenic, meaning that there’s a lot of side effects from it. I’ve heard this complaint before, too.

I’ve never personally had any problems with it, but I compare that — I had the original J&J, you know, clot shot. I did not have a problem with it.

ANITA: Yeah, that was super fun.

ANGIE: I got called into a meeting with — oh, these were such weird times. I got called into a meeting with a bunch of, like, media, you know, infectious disease people like me, and then like Fauci and Xavier Becerra, who’s the HHS secretary, and Anne Schuchat and stuff, because it was eight days, I think, after I had gotten the Johnson.

ANITA: Oh, my God.

ANGIE: And it’s like your highest risk is if you’re a woman under the age of 50 who got it within the last two weeks.

ANITA: Oh, God.

ANGIE: But it was really helpful, actually, because the thing that they had observed was that it was similar to this other weird condition that you can get that’s a reaction to heparin, which is an anticoagulant.

ANITA: Oh, HIT?

ANGIE: Is it somebody who’s having one of these reactions — heparin, it makes it worse. So they were like, whatever you do, do not give your patients heparin, because that’s one of the frontline treatments for if somebody has a blood clot.

ANITA: Yeah.

ANGIE: And so I just like got off of that call and I was like, honey, if I have like aneurysm symptoms —

ANITA: No heparin.

ANGIE: No heparin. Tell them no heparin.

ANITA: You get bival— you’ll get bivalirudin. It’ll be fine.

ANGIE: Crazy stuff. But I actually had really bad side effects from that vaccine. The only vaccine I’ve ever had that’s worse is yellow fever. It really made me feel for about 24 hours like I had the flu.

ANITA: Oh, I was sent home from work. I got the mRNAs and I was literally sent home from work.

ANGIE: Yeah. I mean, and so with that comparison, I’m like, ah, the mRNAs, whatever. It’s like a little sore. But I know that a lot of people have had your experience too.

And it sounds like this questioner said that COVID mRNA vaccines make me really ill for the first three days, I started getting Novavax with hardly any reaction. Novavax is a protein subunit vaccine. So it’s not messenger RNA, which encodes a protein and makes the protein when you get in — protein subunit vaccine is just the protein itself, already made. And I’ve heard that anecdotally as well, that there are fewer reactions with Novavax, other protein subunit vaccines. And then — it’s never used in the US, but the inactivated vaccine did not have as many side effects as the mRNA.

And some of that might be because of the lipid nanoparticles. So because the mRNA — mRNA means messenger RNA. It’s a molecule very similar to DNA that encodes a protein. And the reason it’s called m- or messenger RNA is that it’s a message from inside the nucleus, where the DNA is, to the cytoplasm, or the part outside the nucleus of the cell, where the protein-making machinery lives. And so it’s just the message being carried there.

You need the lipid nanoparticles in the mRNA vaccines to get that mRNA into the cells so that it can make protein and then that can trigger the immune response. For that reason, it’s thought that they’re more reactogenic, because they actually stimulate a more durable immune response and they’re actually getting into the cell via this lipid nanoparticle, which is essentially what we call a transfection reagent. It allows things to get through a cell membrane and into a cell. That causes more nonspecific immune stimulation. And that is the explanation for those additional symptoms. On the bright side, it might mean that you have a little bit more robust immunity. On the downside, it means that you feel like shit for three days.

ANITA: Yeah. And I will tell you, I had some reactogenicity. And so did my daughter. My son didn’t. So it’s not like it’s a guarantee, but it’s very real. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that we tell people. And I would say the good news is that for most people, it’s really just you don’t feel great. You feel like you’re a little bit sick. You might have a low-grade fever, including your children. And then it goes away, and it generally goes away in 24 to 48 hours.

So it’s real. And I think it’s good that we talk about it, because it would be much worse if people got a vaccine and then they felt ill and were wondering why. But it’s all a trade-off. We all know that. And we’ve been talking about that a lot. The risk of having a fever versus the risk of getting COVID is an equation that we all need to grapple with. And that’s why you have doctors.

And I will tell you, I always take offense when people are like, oh, yes, well, now it’s your decision making, so you’re going to talk to your doctor. Pediatricians don’t give vaccines to kids without talking to the parents. And I’m just going to say that. It just always offends me. I’m like, what do you think we’re doing, like slipping a vaccine in your kid’s arm? We’re just like this.

ANGIE: Exciting not to get informed consent.

ANITA: Yeah, like we have to do that now. The amount of time that you have to discuss these things is always an issue. I’m not an outpatient doctor for a million reasons. And we just discussed how it may or may not get worse. So there may be barriers to this shared clinical — there will be barriers.

I always tell parents, and I say this in any live I do or any post, is print out the vaccine schedule. I also tell my parents to print out the vaccine — actually, I just do it for them. I’m like, did you get this, this, and this? But for parents, the biggest level of comfort you can give yourself that you are doing the right thing for your kids, because I know that’s what any of us want to do, is print out the American Academy of Pediatrics schedule. It has not changed because the evidence hasn’t changed. And the AAP is an apolitical, nonpartisan organization for a reason, because they don’t want any parent to think that they’re treating a side. There are no sides in pediatrics. It’s just the kids.

Print that out, screenshot it, keep it on your phone. And that is the best sort of defense you have against all of the confusion that’s coming out, because they are manufacturing the confusion to confuse you out of making decisions. They keep saying autonomy, autonomy, autonomy, but they’re actually taking away people’s autonomy when they’re putting them in positions to get sick and hospitalized. And then that’s kind of extra evil, that they’re ruining the healthcare system as they do this, because that safety net of the doctors, nurses, healthcare workers that are supposed to be taking care of you when you’re sick are also going to be strained.

And I’m not saying this to be alarmist. That was quite alarmist. It’s just to say, follow the evidence, follow the societies, the AAP, et cetera, because they’re not going to steer you wrong. They don’t care what comes out of the administration. They care what decades of science have told us to do.

ANGIE: That’s absolutely right. And we’re almost at an hour.

ANITA: Oh, gosh.

ANGIE: And I know that you have to get back to work and see other patients, but I think we should do this again.

ANITA: Absolutely.

ANGIE: We actually still have a couple other questions that are kind of about like, what’s the status of these? I’m just going to answer this quickly.

ANITA: Yeah, please.

ANGIE: An update for seniors. All COVID vaccines — they will be updated, they will be available this fall. As I mentioned, they are part of an existing process, much like flu vaccines, where they don’t require an ACIP recommendation every year. So those will still be available.

The thing to watch is going to be next year, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act comes into effect and a lot of people lose their health care coverage, after the midterms, depending on how they go. No matter what, there’s bound to be a lot more ridiculousness coming forth from this administration.

And I think really I’m right there with you, Anita, where I think the most important thing is — they talk about autonomy, autonomy, autonomy, medical freedom, all this stuff. Blame doctors for not listening to people enough. Blame us for getting things wrong during the pandemic. You don’t know who to believe. You don’t know who to trust. The most important thing, I think, is that people have a place where they can go to get informed from people who aren’t going to lie to them. And I think that you and I, Anita, will both tell people if we don’t know something. We’ll say, I don’t know. I already passed on questions to you.

I don’t think that this is right, because I think that it is immoral and it’s un-American.

ANITA: It is un-American.

ANGIE: It’s profoundly un-American. And it’s a huge violation of our liberty and our autonomy to make it so that we don’t get to have a choice about vaccination, because none of the vaccines are available to us, we don’t know how to get them, or they’ve been defunded.

And I think that people really need to know about this in a way that they don’t have to seek out the information themselves. Because let me tell you, going through government policy documents is a special kind of hell. So you should let us do that misery. Let’s let Angela do that.

ANITA: I’m joking.

ANGIE: I’ll read them too. I’m teasing. I don’t really read them. I make AI do it now.

ANITA: Oh, well, that’s great.

ANGIE: I think all these people who want to just give everything over to AI and let them take over are completely full of it. AI is the first type of ethical slavery that has existed in the world, and I am all for making Claude do everything for me that I don’t want to do. With no apologies.

ANITA: Good for you.

ANGIE: So that’s how I’m regarding it.

ANITA: Yeah. Anyways. It’s my coding.

ANGIE: We’ll have some really cool tools for keeping you informed as a result of these efforts. And me and Anita — we’re going to do more stuff with SAM and hopefully do a lot more stuff for community outreach as well.

And Anita is going to continue the outstanding work that she’s been doing with SAM, as well as a number of other organizations, to deliver justice for the children and their families who have been detained by ICE. I am working on aspects of that as well, trying to understand how infectious disease factors into all of that, and how it impacts communities and their health as a result, and how it might impact the elections as well. So a lot of interesting stuff, I think, coming up from both of us. And we would love to be able to talk to you about it.

We are so grateful to all of you who’ve joined us today.

ANITA: Yes. Thank you. I’m always amazed that people want to hear me talk. But I suspect most of you guys are here for Angela.

ANGIE: I doubt that. I’ll tag along. You know what? You do those makeup videos that everybody likes on Instagram. Makeup — yeah, where you put makeup on and you’re saying really funny, clever stuff. Like, I can’t do that. Usually I’m like, oh, shit.

ANITA: I don’t do that much, Angela. I’m more of a, like, I don’t have time, so I’m going to do my makeup and yell. That’s my MO.

ANGIE: I’m really impressed that you can do the makeup and yell coherently at the same time.

ANITA: Oh, I can do that. I can yell anytime.

ANGIE: All right, we’re definitely going to have to have another live to just talk about all of this stuff.

But — oh, getting first shingles shot on Saturday, which is tougher, first or second? I’ve never had the shingles shot yet, but I’d say second, because when I got my second mpox shot, my arm swelled up like the size of a basketball.

ANITA: Oh, my God.

ANGIE: It didn’t hurt. It was just really swollen.

ANITA: Oh, God.

ANGIE: It was nuts.

ANITA: But still get it, because shingles is worse.

ANGIE: And you know what? I would get a shingles shot if I was eligible to get one, because I had chicken pox when I was 17. It sucked.

ANITA: Chicken pox party.

ANGIE: Yeah. No, I’m screwed. Because those are the only ones that would allow myself to scratch.

ANITA: Oh, no, I — yeah, it was not fun. And I was taken to a chicken pox party. And now I’m like, great, I’m going to get that. I’m going to get Shingrix the second I can. So, okay, we should go. We’re way over.

ANGIE: Thanks so much, everybody. Listen, subscribe to Anita’s Substack. Anita, please tell everybody where they can find you.

ANITA: Yeah, I am — my Substack is called the State of Pediatrics, but you can search it by my name. It’s very easy: Anita K. Patel, MD. And I am most active now on Substack and Instagram. And I am here to educate you on all of these policy changes and how they affect kids. And as Angela mentioned, I’m doing a lot of work with the children in the Dilley Detention Center. So we all have to do our part. And, you know, we found ours. And I hope that everyone who’s watching also finds their tiny part of this, because I personally believe it’s the only way we’re going to get through this.

ANGIE: I couldn’t agree more. And that’s why, in fact, we are here. You can find me at rasmussenretorts.substack.com, like the horrible anti-vax Republican polling firm, except retorts, not reports, because I talk back to people. I thought I was really clever when I was in 2020. And then I just like never did a Substack. And then I was like, oh, okay, I guess I’ll fire it back up. And so that’s it. Rasmussen Retorts.

I’m also still on the hell site, a.k.a. X.

ANITA: Well, yeah, you have over a half million followers there. That’s hard to leave. They need to —

ANGIE: I’ve gotten a lot more since all of this started, but that’s where all of my enemies live. So it’s not so much that I have a lot of followers. It’s that that’s where the people I’m trying to destroy are.

ANITA: Yeah, you have a thicker skin. I had to. I mean, I’m technically on it, but I had to leave. Oh, it’s terrible. Too much. It was too much.

ANGIE: But it’s useful sometimes. Like I said, it helps me keep my foot on the necks of the people that I’m trying to remove from federal service.

ANITA: There you go.

ANGIE: And it’s also where they do most of their communicating. So I get the latest from them there. I’m also on Instagram at Dr. Angie Rasmussen.

And both of us can be found through the Save America Movement. So please follow and subscribe to the Save America Movement, because we are doing all kinds of stuff in your community — not just about infectious diseases and health. We are doing stuff related to ICE, to justice, to politics — not partisan politics, but politics in the sense of restoring American democracy. And we are here to fight for you.

It’s not about what’s left or right. It’s about what’s wrong or right. That is the SAM slogan, I think.

ANITA: I love that.

ANGIE: I love it too, because I’ve had to do a lot of explaining to people, actually, that SAM is not a political organization in the sense that — I mean, it is a political organization in the sense that it has to do with our current political situation, but it is not a political organization in the sense that it is a partisan one that is interested in promoting the Democrats or the Republicans or whatever. It is interested in removing the fascist scourge that is causing all of the problems that we’re talking about today, and restoring our democratic form of government, as I think true patriots really want, like both of us.

ANITA: There you go.

ANGIE: That is why I’m part of Save America Movement. I think it’s really important now more than ever to stand as Americans for our values and our belief systems. And one of those, in my view, is democracy, and trying to make people have as healthy and happy and free of lives as they possibly can.

So follow Save America Movement for that. You can find us both there. You can find us both at our socials. And thanks again for joining us today. Continue hitting us with your questions. Take care, everybody. Bye, everyone. My dog says goodbye, too.

ANITA: I know, I heard him. I don’t know where my dog is.

ANGIE: Bonnie, she’s a vaccine enthusiast. That’s why she’s never going to die of rabies.

ANITA: Oh, I love it. Yeah, mine too. Maddie won’t either. Okay, bye.

The executive order

• Trump’s Vaccine Executive Order Proves Donald Trump Hates You and Wants You Sick or Dead (Angie’s take)

• What This New Executive Order Further Limiting Vaccines for Our Children Really Means at the Bedside (Anita’s take)

The executive order

• Executive Order 14420, “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans,” 91 FR 53173 (Aug. 14, 2026)

• Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School: What Does the Executive Order on Childhood Vaccines Say?

ACIP and the court order

• AAP v. Kennedy, No. 1:25-cv-11916 (D. Mass. Mar. 16, 2026), ECF 291 — the §705 stay opinion

• CDC: Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

• CDC: Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program

RSV

• CDC: RSV

• CDC: RSV immunizations — nirsevimab and the maternal vaccine

Measles and MMR

• CDC: Measles vaccination — clinical overview (95% community coverage, 97% two-dose effectiveness)

• CDC: Measles cases and outbreaks

Influenza

• STAT: FDA approves Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, the first to use the technology (Aug. 5, 2026)

• BioPharma Dive: FDA approves Moderna’s mFLUSIVA

• STAT: Welcome to the winter of subclade K

• Interim 2025/26 influenza vaccine effectiveness estimates and A(H3N2) subclade K, Canada, January 2026 (Eurosurveillance)

• CIDRAP: With an absent CDC and mismatched ‘subclade K’ flu strain, experts face upcoming season with uncertainty

• CDC: Flu vaccination timing

Vinay Prasad

• STAT: FDA’s Vinay Prasad, controversial CBER chief, to depart (Mar. 6, 2026)

• Knudsen B, Prasad V. “COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis in young males: A systematic review.” Eur J Clin Invest 2023;53(4):e13947

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act and rural hospitals

• KFF Health News: ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ would batter rural hospital finances, researchers say

• RAND: State-level impacts of key Medicaid provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

The AAP schedule

• AAP: Recommended Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, United States, 2026 (policy statement)

• HealthyChildren.org: AAP releases recommended immunization schedule for 2026

Detained children

• Texas Tribune: Texas detention center holding kids beyond court-ordered limit (Aug. 12, 2026)

• AAP News: AAP requests urgent access to immigrant detention center amid growing reports of dangers to children

Thank you Jessica Malaty Rivera, MS (hi from all of us ❤️❤️❤️), PJ Schuster, Honey Badger, Teralex, CH, and many others for tuning into SAM Live with The Save America Movement! Join us next time (there will be a next time).