I’m Managing Editor Jack O’Brien and this is the MM+M Podcast. 

Sunday is 4/20, a date synonymous with marijuana and stoner culture. 

Marijuana is the most commonly consumed illegal drug in America, with 15% of people having smoked marijuana at least once in the past year, according to polling from Gallup. 

Nearly half of states have legalized recreational marijuana and another seven have decriminalized possession of the substance. 

Meanwhile, 47 states have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes like treating glaucoma, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and a host of other conditions.

Despite significant progress made liberalizing these laws on a state-by-state basis, research into the medicinal properties of cannabis and regulatory approval of cannabis-derived treatments remain hampered by roadblocks at the federal level. 

On today’s episode, we’re joined by Duane Boise, CEO of MMJ International Holdings, to discuss growing pharmaceutical cannabis, the state of the legal cannabis market and what medical marketers need to know about access to the drug as it faces further scrutiny from the second Trump administration’s DEA.

And for our Trends segment, we’re talking about two recent developments in the GLP-1 landscape related to Pfizer and Noom, as well as HHS Secretary Kennedy’s claim that the department will determine the cause of autism by September.

Dwayne, I appreciate you being on the show here, especially for our 420 episode. For those in our audience who may be unfamiliar with you and your company, you want to give the elevator pitch of what MMJ is. We started an MMJ back in 2016. There’s three companies, MMJ International Holdings, which concentrates on the clinical trial aspects and the filings with the Food and Drug Administration.

MMJ Biopharma cultivation, which is the cultivation of specific cultivars that we used in the development of our API and MMJ Biopharma Labs that does all the analytical work to get to that API. I appreciate you detailing what the kind of subsets are for MMJ. What is the mission of the organization? I was doing a little bit of research and it seems like you’re really focused on bringing those FDA-approved cannabis medicines to market, but you know what what goes into that? What entails that mission?

Well, when we started this back in 16, there was a clear definitive federal legal pathway to proceed in what we were doing, setting aside what the states did and the Schedule 1 substance and everything. The mission of the DEA is twofold.

One, to secure the drug supply chain from diversion and to make sure that there’s adequate drugs available to the American population that are in need of and not to inhibit in the development of a pharmaceutical.

Now, just the fact that we’re using marijuana bought a whole host of problems to it, even though that we all know that there’s efficacy in marijuana, but the problem from a scientific standpoint was to be able to get a consistent reproducible product that was efficacious and apply that to a clinical trial where we knew that the efficacy would show symptomatic relief for those patients.

So, having said that, we filed two INDs with the Food and Drug Administration in 18 and 19. One in multiple sclerosis and the other one in Huntington’s disease. And then mass where we know that it stops the spasticity and in Huntington’s disease, it stops what they call Corea, which in Latin means jerk-like symptoms.

And the patients currently don’t have any real drugs on the market to help them and most of them prefer for to smoke marijuana, whether they get it illegally or from a state operator. So, but that doesn’t entail consistent reproducible, and that’s what our whole mission has been since we started this. We’ve spent a long time in the lab.

We chose two particular cultivars, one high THC content, the other one high CBD content, and then went into the lab for years of work to be able to define the active pharmaceutical ingredients, and to be able to develop the protocols on how we extracted it and developed and manufactured a soft gelatin capsule. A lot of a long time of work. Yeah, for sure. There’s a lot to unpack there. I want to get into that.

There’s a number of questions I have, you know, given the fact that this stretches back almost a decade and there’s been so many changes on the regulatory front. That’s one of them. But can you kind of break down for those in our audience? Because I’m sure and I’m sure you get this too is when you say like, oh, I’m I’m in the marijuana business. There’s people who come in with their own preconceptions and stigma about marijuana. But you’re talking about it from a very clinical scientific perspective.

Can you talk a little little bit about how that differs from maybe people’s expectations where it’s like, oh, people want medicinal marijuana, they think it’s like, oh, they just want to smoke it or take an edible or something, and it’s it’s symptom relief or it’s at least alleviating in temporary basis. And you’re talking talking about some very severe conditions here, Huntington’s disease MS, where this can have it can have a real affectatious effect. Talk a little bit about the science there because I think that’s where our audience might get a little tripped up.

Okay, so in the what you have here is the states jumping out ahead of the federal government and making it legal in the state. It’s still a Schedule 1 substance. It’s federally illegal and it’s controlled under the Control Substance Act. The government just hasn’t elected to enforce the federal law on the states.

The problem for the consumer is that when you go into a dispensary in, let’s say, Florida and you get product A and it works and you go back to get product A three months after, product A chemically is not product A.

So it’s hunt and peck and it may work, it may not work and there’s no real science behind maybe a formulation process that they do, but we’ve taken some of the stuff into the lab and analyzed it and there’s it doesn’t meet the definition of a drug which is consistent uh reproducible product.

It was funny because I was in at out of the country at a FDA approved soft gelatin capsule manufacturer and I kept using reproducible and the CEO of the company looked at me and he says, “Why do you say that?” He says, “Everything we do here is consistently reproducible.” That’s not the case with the state businesses. So there’s a big difference between medicinal marijuana and pharmaceutical marijuana and the manufacturing of a drug. So talk to me a little bit about the change we’ve seen.

Like like you said, there obviously hasn’t been the federal enforcement of the Schedule 1 aspect certainly since Colorado and Oregon first approved legalized recreational marijuana in 2013. Number of other states including New York where I’m doing this recording have come on board over the years. What is it meant though from dealing with the FDA when you first found the company that was during the last year of the Obama administration. Now we’re in the first year of the second Trump administration.

How has the regulatory environment changed over the course of all these different presidencies and different approaches to marijuana at large, but also for what you’re talking about from a scientific perspective? You know, the problem has not We spent a long time to get an orphan designation for the Huntington’s study. I don’t know if you know what orphan is, I could explain it.

So it’s a designation that gives us a fast track through the FDA gives us some money to offset the cost of the clinical trials and it gives us a de facto patent for 7 years on the approved drug. When we go to the FDA, they’ve been very receptive, both in the MS filings and we’re getting really down to the nitty-gritty now with them in Huntington’s and they’re asking very technical questions on how we went about to manufacture the drug. Let me just leave it at that.

The real problem has been the Drug Enforcement Administration. Uh, it’s just a nightmare. And I think representative Buddy Carter said it the best when he had Matt Straight in the review and he said the DEA is the epitome of ineptitude that you could have 38 states with an approved and the DEA can’t get this right.

And the DEA has been putting their own bias in front of roadblocks and it’s really a very sad thing. I mean the border lines on corrupt Uh, some of the things that we’ve come across in our litigation, I got depositions where Ann Milligram, the administrator, is calling an attorney up telling him to do certain things before going in front of an administrative law judge. I mean, the whole thing is just flawed and corrupt.

You can’t have the DEA being the administrator of these policies when they’re influencing with their bureaucratic bias, and that that’s what’s going on, which is a subject matter of the cultivation lawsuits that we’re still working our way through. Ultimately, we’ll prevail.

In the long run, this is a personal thing with me now because my dad was in law enforcement for 40 years and when you have a DEA who’s the top cop on the block and Congress writes the laws, they’re supposed to enact the laws. The problem is they don’t enact it, they insert their bureaucratic bias in it and then change the roles of the game as they see fit just to block the development.

If you look at the federal landscape, there’s been I don’t know six or seven registrations All of those companies are either closed or they’ve gone bankrupt. There’s two left standing with the University of Mississippi still being the primary one. And at the end of the day, nobody’s growing any pharmaceutical marijuana. So the agency has failed the mandate of Congress.

They failed the mandate of the marijuana research act, which President Biden did and President Trump with the right to try and they blocked all of this. At some point, somebody’s going to get up and take a look at it, and there’s going to be severe ramifications, and people need to lose their jobs. I mean, everybody’s got a boss, I always say, right? And I know who these people are, and I’m calling them out publicly now because it’s just shame Why would the DEA stand in front of the development of a pharmaceutical to help patients?

Mind-boggling. And I want to ask you too because I I think you raised an interesting point. I remember there was a lot of discussion. I remember in 2023 and even extended into 2024 of whether the Biden administration was going to reclassify or they were going to have the DEA reclassify. Marijuana didn’t no longer be a Schedule I drug. And obviously that’s kind of gone into flux now with President Trump returning to office.

What are you what is your sense in terms of where the landscape is now and going forward because it’s not something that Trump necessarily campaigned on, but obviously like you said, he did advocate and signed to law the right to try. There was a lot of momentum uh with the Biden administration. Don’t know if that necessarily carries over. Like what is where do things stand here in April of ’25? Well, um I don’t think it stands anywhere and I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Whether they reschedule to one to a three is no matter to us because we’re following the guidelines to schedule one and we prepare for that. If it goes to three, fine. If it doesn’t, fine. It’s not going to influence it. And for that matter, it’s not going to influence many people at all because you’re still under the DEA and the Controlled Substance Act. So it’s a lot of big to do over nothing essentially.

When we get our drug approved by the FDA that will force a rescheduling of our drug from a one to a three or maybe a four. I’m curious from your perspective because it’s something I brought up earlier in this conversation, like you’re operating in a business that is marked by by a significant amount of stigma and and just outright propaganda.

I think about what refer madness came out about a hundred years ago and it’s still definitely impacts the way that people view marijuana and the idea that it’s a gateway drug as opposed to what you said, there is a real clinical efficacy that needs to be explored with other sorts of diseases and conditions. How from a our audience, we have marketers in our audience, how can communicators and stuff do better in terms of being able to talk on that subject because it has been, you know, decades, nearly a century of just either misinformation or misunderstandings about the drug.

Good question, but it’s it’s a complex question, right? How do you market something that’s not a real drug, right? You know, it’s Huntington Pack. If you’re the patient, you’re going into a dispensary. How do you market that product when you can’t reproduce it the same way each time, every time? So at the end of the day, you’re not going to get the same effect from it. I think that’s very difficult, which is one of the main reasons we stayed in the pharmaceutical link for the past years.

And is it one One of those things too that like you’ve probably had opportunities to say like, hey, we have this whole operation. You could probably just as easily like try and position over into recreational or something else like that, but you seem very committed to like, no, this this can work in the pharmaceutical space. We just need to get through the the barriers ahead of us. Right. Well, the DEA came out early on when they wrote the was it 2020 ruling and it said if you’re if taking it up in a state that’s federally illegal, you haven’t demonstrated responsibility to have a federal license.

So So, there’s a lot of rulings like that. So, this is why we never wanted to cross over the line. Now, when you look at it from a 1,000 foot, the DEA is driving an American business offshore because I really don’t need their license. I could do everything I’m doing elsewhere and indeed we are. You know, all our workers been put into the protocols to develop that medicine. We know how to do it, we can do it and if we got to do it somewhere else, we’ll do it too. The DEA is not going to stop me.

And if I got to bring final dose form medicine back into the country do clinical trials with the FDA, so be it. But you know, this is all very damaging and doesn’t look good for the DEA and the reputation of the diversion side. So, these people are going to be held accountable for what they’re doing. This is why I think with the likes of these personnel bureaucrats that are in there, you don’t have a chance with rescheduling. I’m curious from your perspective too, like what sort of communications have you had with patients?

Again, you’re talking about like Huntington’s disease is one of just the most severe here and excruciating conditions that’s out there. And I can imagine there’s a certain frustration that they’ve probably articulated to you saying, “Oh my gosh, like we want to be able to at least try.” And again, that goes back to the right to try act. We at least want to be able to say, “Hey, can this help us at all?” And then it gets caught up in all of this bureaucratic red tape that you talk about. What has been the interactions that you and your organization have had with these patients?” The patients are just dumbfounded.

And to see somebody, I go to a restaurant downtown St. Beersburg. And there’s just one gentleman that’s suffering from Huntington’s disease. And he’s like on the crutches type of thing and he’s just terrible excruciating. Sit there and watch this gentleman walk down the street and then deal with on a daily basis these knuckleheads at the Drug Enforcement Administration blocking this is it’s incomprehensible.

I mean, are they totally uncompassionate to people’s needs? I don’t understand it. Boggles my mind. I mean, at some point, they’re going to answer to a higher power, but it’s the patients are frustrated, the lack of the fact that we’ve not been able to get this out quicker and that they’ve been throwing multiple impediments in front of us. Just biogloes are in mind.

And this is probably a question I should have asked earlier, but why Huntington’s disease and MS, like I think when people think about like where marijuana can have a impact from a distal perspective, they think about anxiety, stress, glaucoma. Why why those two disease states? Part of it was to facilitate the studies, right? We know it works. We know it works for multiple chronic diseases. I mean, it could be glaucoma, could be neurological disorders, and so forth. Could be cancer, right?

So When we have these meetings with the scientists and the regulatory people, the decisions were based on how could we get it through the system, the quickest to prove efficacy in something. If you look at the the model of GW Pharmaceuticals with that did the Epilepsy X, right? They got an orphan designation like us for gastro linear disease. There’s only 30,000 patients that have gastro linear disease in the United States.

The first quarter out of the gate when their pill got approved, they did 100 $80 million dollars in that quarter. The next quarter, they did 130 million and then ultimately sold to Jazz Pharmaceutical for just shy of $8 billion. Where do you get that kind of uptake from only 30,000 patients? Those doctors were writing off-label prescriptions for anything that they thought that their particular patient would benefit from that synthetic CBD.

And that’s the only way you can get that type of revenue stream. We follow that same trajectory. We know that it provides symptomatic relief by watching these patients. I mean, I have physically sat there and saw a patient take a joint, smoke it, and all the symptoms just stopped. Both with the spasticity of MS and with the Korea and Huntington’s amazing. So, for us to be able to bring the science to that and figure out the mechanisms that trigger that was the key to it. And that’s what we’ve done.

We’ve been at it for years. And is the end goal you talk about that company selling to jazz pharmaceuticals. Is the end goal, as you see it, like potentially aligning yourself with a pharma or biotech out there? Is it to go it alone? Like what does that look like on your end? I reached out early for several pharmaceutical companies only to find that because it was marijuana, they didn’t want to touch it because of the stigma and and the head wins from the government. Uh so we’re like an early stage company that’s doing all the heavy lifting.

I mean, at some point, I’m sure we’ll get bought out. I got a couple more steps to go once we we get into our Phase 2 with the Hunttingtons, then we’ll be a prime candidate for that. Excellent. Dwayne, I really appreciate you being on the show and obviously being able to have an industry voice here in uh recognition of 420. Is there any parting message you want to send to our audience who again they’re leaders in the farm and biotech space, but also communicators on the on the uh marketing side. Anything you want to impart to them? The DEA really needs reform.

I mean the political power should uh take notice to this and call these people Allow internal to diversion in the administration that are using their own bias to block development of a pharmaceutical. I’m sure there’s other pharmaceutical companies out there. I know several for fact that the DEA’s got involved with them and just raised havoc for no good reason. So it’s like a rogue agency and they’re out of control.

So and now you have really a problem because you have President Trump saying he wants to bring pharmaceuticals back into the United States to take control over the supply chain. But he really really doesn’t understand what the big problem is. It’s not taxes. It’s the DEA and the burdensome regulations. So that really has to be looked at as a resolution to the problem.

No, and I appreciate you bringing up, you know, a very timely aspect in terms of policy change that’s there and and how that complicates it for certainly the drug makers in our audience. So again, Dwayne, really appreciate you being on the show. Hope to keep in touch with you as you progress along through these challenges and these clinical trials and hopefully we can we can reconnect on the line. Thanks, Jeff. Look forward to it. Have a great day.

Let’s dive into the top healthcare headlines. We had a few that missed the cut this week. Commerce Secretary Lutnick has teased out Pharma Terrace in the next month or two. There’s the continued growth of the measles outbreak in the Southwest and SNL had a parody of Pharma ad drops with John Ham. But we’re going to start today with an update on the GLP-1 landscape with a couple of important updates. Here, I’m going to throw it over to you because Pfizer has been working working on their oral GLP-1. Obviously, that has not come to pass. What was the latest that happened on Monday?

Yeah, uh thanks, Jack. On Monday, Pfizer announced that it will be abandoning the development of its GLP-1 drug called danuloglipron, which was being investigated for chronic weight management. Um the drug maker specifically said that it was going to discontinue the development of the molecule after it discovered that a patient in a dose optimization study that they were conducting experienced potential drug-induced liver injury.

And the patient actually recovered after they got off the drug as well. And um This is not the first time that there were kind of complications with studies revolving around the drug a couple years ago. Pfizer also stopped investigating the drug because it’s a one-to-day kind of daily drug. They also had a version which was a twice-a-day daily version which they then abandoned as well.

And so they’re now kind of just getting out of the GLP-1 market. The drug maker did say that they’re going to be focusing their efforts on the GLPR market, which is still in the weight management category as well and that molecule is also being investigated by a lot of different other companies. It’s also something that Eli Lilly’s unbound and Monjiro do target in weight loss.

But when it comes to GLP-1 specifically, Pfizer is officially out of the game in the running. because they did have that announcement back in December of 23 that they were going to abandon the twice daily model. It does show how difficult it is to try and go from the injection the injectable versions of GLP-1 to these obesity pills, which I know everybody is after.

The only ones we have on the market now are RebTelis from NovoNordisk and obviously like you said Chris Boshaff, the CSO at Pfizer said they will continue to develop another oral obesity drug. So the effort continues on that front, but they’re obviously running into a lot of headwinds there with the science and if anything, it’s a reminder that when things go wrong for pharma companies, they’re not going to continue with things. When a patient has a severe liver injury and luckily they’ve recovered once they got off the drug, they’re not going to continue to do that.

So obviously something to monitor was interesting to see the Novo and Lilly stocks go up. Pfizer was, you know, about where they’ve been, they didn’t sync necessarily off of that news. So a lot more to come on the Pfizer front. Let you know, there was also you know outside of the necessarily pharma focused game has jumped into the market too with a little advertising. What was the latest on that? Yeah, well, if if anyone thought that the compounded GLP-1 debate was over, it’s not quite over yet.

Weight Loss Platform Nu launched a full-page print ad in The Wall Street Journal last week, calling calling on policy makers to create new guidance around high-priced drugs. Um, compounded GLP-1s are set to be taken off the market by the end of May if a lot of them haven’t been already. And Nu was basically advocating for compounded GLP-1s to stay on the market. Um the ad takes aim at the Food and Drug Administration’s guidelines around the use of compounded drugs.

Currently, the agency only allows them when there is a drug shortage or in specific cases when certain patients aren’t able to use FDA-approved drugs. If, you know, just as a quick reminder of of the long debate over them, TuspetIDE and Sumanotide were for a long time on the FDA’s shortage list. patients were struggling to access brand versions of the medications.

So compounded GLP-1s were available for a long time and a lot of patients ended up relying on them because they are significantly cheaper than the brand name drugs. Since the shortage was over, however, the compounded GLP-1s are no longer able to be prescribed. And Nums proposed high-priced drug list via this ad would basically allow for compounded GLP-1s to will be prescribed even if there’s not a drug shortage.

So they’re basically advocating for the FDA to have a high-priced drug list that would allow specific very expensive drugs to be compounded if they happen to be have a very, very high list price. And this comes at a time when the the debate over GLP-1 has remained very intense. Um Eli Lilly and Nova Nordisk have launched lawsuits against riders of compounded drugs.

They’ve launched their own ads against the issue saying that compounded drugs are unsafe and they are not effective. But some compounded drug advocates like NUM aren’t giving up the fight and we might see more compounded drug advocates speak about this as as time goes on and as the drug pricing debate continues.

And I want to ask you your thoughts on that because obviously we talked a lot in and around the Super Bowl when HIMSS and hers came out with that ad and it obviously got a a rial out of a lot of folks in our industry. This kind of seems a little bit more diplomatic, I guess you can say, but you know, what was your take in terms of like, okay, we’re going with a print ad in a respected publication taking a more kind of nuanced tone. What was your read on it? Yeah, it’s definitely had a different tone than Hims & Hers ad.

The Hims & Hers ad like specifically called out drug makers like Eli Lilly and Nova Nordisk um for pricing their dual P ones too high, whereas the Nu ad took came at high drug costs in general and kind of called for the need for legislation and, you know, policy changes. So definitely taking more of like a political approach.

Um, and you know, I think that’s that’s kind of interesting because I spoke to NUM CEO, Jeff Cook about it and he said that he’s going to continue advocating for some kind of legislative change. Ideally under the Trump administration because Trump has historically claimed he wants to lower drug costs. So Cook and the others at NUM are hoping that they can help advocate for some of that and maybe a high-priced drug list on the FDA guidelines.

could could help and that’s kind of the avenue they’re taking. So definitely different from the Hims and Hers ad but kind of getting at the same issue. And I wonder how much of that too is just seeing that there is an opportunity there like you know we had the news come out last week that the Trump administration is going to walk back the Medicare coverage of obesity drugs which is something that the Biden administration rolled out last year and it’s interesting to kind of see like okay so there is this opportunity there’s a lot of talk about you know whether most favorite nation is going to come back into play. There’s kind of everything is up in the air as it relates to prescription drug pricing.

kind of chaotic because, you know, then there’s the tariff booming tariffs. Trump has said he wants to, you know, lower the cost of drugs, but then all of his actions are kind of all over the place like you’re saying they they said that they don’t want Medicare and Medicaid to cover GLP-1s and, you know, it’s it’s a very chaotic situation. So it’s unclear exactly what the administration will do on on that front.

But it’s a good opportunity too for somebody like Newsom to say like, “Okay, we’re not going to go out there and poke the bear unnecessarily like we did with him and hers.” But there’s an opportunity here to kind of make inroads on the topic. Here is anything you want to add to the conversation too? Yeah, I think just kind of like talking a little bit about, you know, these looming tariffs and what that kind of means.

I think Jack, like earlier today you shared an analysis on the fact that some, you know, some analysts think that actually having tariffs could bring more domestic generic drug manufacturing into the US since more than 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients that are used in generic drugs come from overseas markets.

And this analyst specifically was talking about how that and raising studies that have showed that that can be quite unsafe for patients in higher rates and all of that. And so something like this in terms of a tariff could really bring the domestic generic drug making market. It can really boost it, but that would also take a lot of time for that to develop.

And so there is obviously going to be, you know, a period if that happens where people are not going to be able to get those drugs in the way that they currently can. And if obesity drugs are now off the Medicare list as well, that’s going to create even more of a gap.

So it’s just trying to determine, you know, what is going to happen in the future, but also how long is that gap going to be in terms of lack of access to both, you know, generic versions of these drugs, but also the market version of the drugs. Yeah, it’s interesting that you bring up that point because we spent a better part of 23 and 24 obviously detailing these drug shortages, seeing Novo and Lilly going out and trying to boost their manufacturing capabilities.

In some cases bringing in uh partners to be able to boost those uh services and we finally got to the level where it’s like okay they’re off of the FDA shortage list and now we have that looming threat of terrorists bringing things domestically which you know could to that analyst point could be something in the end that is a benefit, but it could be an expensive drawn out issue that ultimately impacts access to care for patients.

So it’s going to be one that certainly again over the next month or two until we actually get what those tariff numbers are going to look like for pharmaceuticals could be something to watch out for for our audience.

The second topic I wanted to dive into is something that I think was looming for a long time and now we actually have it was RFK Jr., the HHS Secretary saying that there is going to be a the September deadline for finding a link between autism and vaccines that HHS is going to investigate that was laid out at a cabinet meeting last week. Lesha, I want to throw it over to you first because we’ve had countless conversations about this being obviously something that is a hobby horse for RFK Junior.

What was your reaction to kind of seeing it finally put out there, I guess you can say and and put out there in black and white?

Yeah, you know, I mean it’s he’s already walking back on his claims and promises during his confirmation hearings, when he claimed that he wasn’t going to do anything that, you know, threatens access to vaccines or you know, discourages people from getting vaccines, but he’s already walking back on all of that and actively trying to solidify that debunked link between vaccines and autism.

Um, it’s concerning from a scientific perspective, you know, the link between vaccines and autism, you know, originally were was traced back to a 1998 study that was retracted and later debunked. And countless scientific studies since then have debunked the link while there has been a rise in autism over the years.

It’s unclear exactly what factors are going into that, but one of them is that, you know, there is an increased awareness around the disease and also how it’s diagnosed.

So, um, I was reading an AP article about it and, um, you know, for for many years the diagnosis was only given to children who had severe problems communicating or socializing, but around 30 years ago or so It also began to include much more mild conditions on a spectrum called autism spectrum disorder. So milder cases are now diagnosed as autism was before they weren’t.

There’s just been a significant increase in awareness and diagnosis in in recent decades. And for me personally, I think that’s part of the the reason why there has been an increase in in autism. Obviously, it’s not vaccines. So it is concerning that RFK Jr. is is going all out on this.

Jr. has also hired David Geier, who is a long time vaccine skeptic and a person who was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license in Maryland as someone to kind of head the federal study on vaccines and autism. It’s unclear where this goes from here. We don’t know how Kennedy is going to run this study, but it is turning from a health communication standpoint.

And it’s one of those things too and here I want to bring you in for your thoughts, but like for this whole focus supposedly the Trump administration has laid out there across all different sectors of the economy and even relates to health, is this idea of going for efficiency, is cutting costs, making government more nimble and focus.

This seems like something that again to your point is based off a now at this point 27-year-old debunked theory that has grown into this widespread information movement seems far a field from where we should be focusing, especially when we have a measles outbreak when there’s concerns about being ready for what could be the next pandemic, infectious disease research, advancing the Maha movement.

Like there’s just so many things at play and this idea that we’re somehow going to have this slap dash investigation done by September that will either be inefficient in terms of being able to do it in a cost-effective way or comprehensive in scope.

It has to be troubling and it’s it’s been interesting to see that, you know, the vaccine maker stocks have not been impacted that much, but I think there could be a lot of fallout there if suddenly there’s if there’s going to be some retribution from the federal level. But here, I want to bring you into the conversation.

Yeah, I think whatever was mentioned in terms of what RFK is currently doing in opening up this case once again is quite troubling in terms of, you know, especially when it comes to resource management, like we previously discussed, in terms of the fact that there are so many cuts that have happened at HHS as well as the FDA, around 3,500 officials have been let go as well. And one of the top vaccine folks, uh Dr.

Peter Marks, recently resigned on April 5th citing that, you know, there are clashes in terms of vaccine policy and discussion with RFK Junior moving forward. And that can also be quite troubling. It can be quite dangerous as well.

And to bring up the whole topic about autism again, even though it has been debunked is also it can also really undermine a lot of these national federal public health institutions that have put out research time and time again debunking the link between autism and vaccines. I know that Dr.

Peter Marks, he gave an interview recently talking about Kennedy’s assertion on investigating autism rates by September and noted that it is really highly unlikely that um any administration or scientists will be able to determine the cause of autism by September 2025.

He also refuted the claim that Kennedy made on Fox News that autism rates or increased autism rates were product of an environmental toxin. One of the things that he underscored the most though was the fact that you know the FDA has had countless studies on the link between investigating the link between autism and vaccines and they have debunked it.

And so this kind of emphasis on this issue again could also really take away from current public health crisis, like what’s going on with measles and just focus like just reshift the focus on something that has already been investigated time and time again.

And so it’ll be interesting to see what, you know, how drug makes also respond to this or whether they will say something about this moving forward, uh just because it could also impact the way that they develop vaccines or drugs. And yeah, it’s just interesting to see how there’s just been a complete shift and RFK Jenner hasn’t even been in his position for over a hundred days. So yeah, it’s it’s pretty quick.

No, and I think I think you’re underscoring an interesting point there too, which is that, you know, for all of the work that we cover in our publication, a lot of it is awareness work for different diseases and conditions. And the idea that we talk about again and again with creatives, with strategic folks is this idea of being able to break stigmas.

And it seems like something like this is just restigmatizing the issue of autism and you think about all the different autism, you know, autism speaks and all the different awareness organizations like that work is just I won’t even say slowly, it’s quickly becoming undone when you have this sort of push back at the federal level in this assertion that vaccines somehow cause autism and looking at autism as a bad thing. When again, it’s 1 in 36 people, it’s it’s fairly common at that point. So it’s it’s interesting to kind of see it there.

I’m I’m not here to make the hypocrisy argument because I don’t think that ever really sticks, but it is interesting to hear this argument of, “Oh yeah, we’re going to be able to figure out this link by September.” Which does seem like an arbitrary artificial timeline when there were plenty of criticisms about the COVID vaccine that it was rushed through, that it was, “Oh, we got this, you know, the outbreak started in March and we had shots and arms by December.” Like there is a kind of hypocrisy there that I don’t think uh opposing forces is necessarily taken to consideration.

But I did want to finish off with two points on my own side which is that you know, with this level of uncertainty, and we saw it last week with the back and forth on the tariffs and what that meant for the entire stock market, drug makers included, is that uncertainty can ultimately have a business impact for these companies. And I’m curious how this is going to ultimately impact vaccine makers, I think to your point here, right?

They’re going to have to come out and say something, you know, whether that’s ahead of whatever this announcement is on on the link or if it’s after the fact, like there has to be some sort of communication to the public saying like, no, these are safe, you should the vaccine against polio, measles, whatever. There there has to be some push back on the private sector to be able to make that happen. But I also want to finish with one quote from Peter Marx who came up earlier in the conversation, the recently ousted vaccines chief from the FDA.

He told Face the Nation on Sunday quote, “People who don’t know science, people who don’t know how science works, people who want to control other people by pseudo science, they talk in absolute terms. But the way you detect a true scientist from a pseudo scientist is because it’s very very rare for a scientist to talk in absolutes. And I think that’s kind of a an all-encompassing point about this topic.

It won’t be the last time that we talk about it, but now it’s out there on the record, it’s up to the companies that are going to be impacted by a decision like this and their marketers, agencies by proxy to be able to communicate with the general public about the safety of vaccines. So something we will have on our radar, something you will be able to see more coverage of on this podcast and on the website and in the magazine going forward. Thanks for joining us on this week’s episode of the MM&M podcast. Be sure to listen to next week’s episode.

We’ll be joined by Fractal Health CEO, Harith Rajgopaul. Take care everyone. That’s it for this week. Our theme music is by Suzy M. Sun. Great review and follow every episode wherever you listen to podcast. New episodes are out every week. And be sure to check out our website mm-online.com for the top news stories on the pharmaceutical industry and medical marketing agencies.