Katy Talento: 'Confessions of a Public Health Priestess in the White House'

Original Substack article (English): Confessions of a White House Public Health Priestess

I have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. banned from the West Wing.
I hereby apologize to him.

Katy Talento ND ScM

1 mei 2026

Het was 2017. We hadden de CEO's van een aantal farmaceutische bedrijven naar het Oval Office gesleept, zodat president Trump hen de les kon lezen over hun medicijnprijzen. (Altijd een leuk moment.)

Somehow the word “vaccine” came up. When that happens in front of the president, then, now, last month and probably next week, he, like clockwork, always starts telling the same story. A woman who used to work for him at the Trump Organization. Her two-year-old son, who was “perfect, beautiful, magnificent, flawless.” Then he got a shot and he was "just gone. Gone. Never the same again. Beautiful boy. Then, just gone."

De CEO's deinsden allemaal terug en lieten de reactie op dit verhaal over aan hun collega Ken Frazier, de toenmalige CEO van Merck, een vooraanstaande vaccinproducent. Ik weet niet meer wat hij zei. Ik weet zeker dat het de gebruikelijke bezwering was over veilig en effectief.

The president had an instinct. I had the references. What I didn't have was an answer.

But it took me back to 2002.

The mothers of children with autism, like other groups of mothers did every day, urged me to do something to help their children. I served on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees the CDC. My job, when it came to public health, was to recommend which bills should be drafted, which should be pursued, which should be rejected, which issues should be overseen, and which agencies should be subpoenaed.

Each mother told the same story about a vaccination and the subsequent decline of their children with symptoms of autism. They wanted the CDC to thoroughly investigate the safety of vaccines and assess the relationship between vaccination and the subsequent diagnosis of autism.

I was in two minds.

I was a Harvard-trained infectious disease epidemiologist. I firmly believed that vaccines were the gold standard for public health interventions.

Not because I had seen the evidence for its effectiveness and safety in public health school by studying the groundbreaking clinical trials that showed it (I had not). But because I was trained in the orthodoxy of public health, where it was assumed that someone had researched this and figured it out a was demonstrated at some point – so we could all now focus on more pressing matters, like how to get vaccines to more children around the world. I had spent the early part of my career traveling abroad, fighting infectious diseases from guinea worm in South Sudan to HIV/AIDS in Russian drug users and prostitutes in downtown Washington, D.C. I was the heroine in the story I was telling myself.

But I am also a woman. And I deeply respect the intuition and wisdom of mothers. And it was not in my nature, when a group of mothers told me about a perceived pattern in their children's lives, to disbelieve or dismiss them.

So I did what any young, naive employee would do in her first job on Capitol Hill: I called the CDC.

Ze gaven me wat flauwe prietpraat over ontkrachte studies en hoe “correlatie niet hetzelfde is als causaliteit” en wat al niet meer. Ik bleef achter met een vreemd gevoel van onrust en wist niet goed wat ik moest doen. Maar ik wist dat mijn baas, de hoogste Republikein in de commissie, er niet op zou zitten om zich in zo'n wespennest te storten. Om nog maar te zwijgen van het feit dat de voorzitter van de commissie, (ironisch genoeg) Ted Kennedy – wiens partij de Senaat controleerde – ons bij elke gelegenheid zou proberen te dwarsbomen – en we hadden al genoeg strijd met hem.

In addition, Rep. Dan Burton and Rep. Dave Weldon, MD, already hearings on the House side – if anything came of that, I might interest my boss. So I moved on to the next meeting and the next question from the next group of mothers of children with the following condition.

Fifteen years later and several other Senate jobs later. It was 2017 and I was now President Trump's chief health adviser on the Domestic Policy Council, and we were all still looking for the White House bathrooms.

I was now a much more experienced and smarter staffer, and had no trust in federal agencies at all - mainly the CDC. But I still believed wholeheartedly that vaccines were life-saving, much-needed measures to protect children, and that they worked best when vaccination rates and resulting herd immunity were high.

I was told that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an acquaintance of candidate Trump, had persuaded him to commit to creating a Commission on Vaccine Safety once he was in office. Mr. Kennedy now called and wanted to get the promised commission going.

My job was to solve this problem.

I went all the way.

We couldn't have a meeting, event, or committee that showed the world that vaccines were anything less than the greatest public health victory we all thought they were (I get a “amen?”). So I called the leaders of the NIH, Francis Collins and Tony Fauci, and asked them to keep the meeting going, but somewhere off campus, far from the White House and out of public view.

That meeting, which took place on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, has become somewhat infamous in MAHA history.

Mr. Kennedy, as well Del Bigtree and Aaron Siri from the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), had a meeting with the authorities about the science. They all spoke publicly about that meeting, where Dr. Fauci assured them of the mountains of research showing the safety of vaccines. Reportedly, when asked to show them, he shuffled through his papers as if they were within reach layers. When he couldn't find them, he promised to deliver the studies later. That never happened. ICAN filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain them.

HHS settled the lawsuit with a stunning admission – on the record – that such studies did not exist.

But I didn't know anything about that. All I knew was that I had done my job and saved children.

In the years that followed, I worked on all kinds of policy measures that I was really proud of (ending secret healthcare prices, lowering drug prices, combating opioid addiction) and others that did not go so well (the doomed failed adventure to repeal and replace Obamacare). The demands of work in the White House are relentless. While many of my colleagues had become like family to me, my... real My family hardly recognizes me in a line-up anymore.

By mid-2019, my stress levels had reached a peak. For many reasons, it was time to move on. My younger sister, a 39-year-old mother of two, was dying of colon cancer, and... I spent the next five months caring for her, while thinking deeply about the limits and hubris of medicine.

When COVID reached our shores a few months later, there was definitely FOMO.

There's a respiratory disease breaking out worldwide, and I just left the White House?

In March of that year I published one op-ed, in which I expressed my relief that my friend and former colleague, Deborah Birx, had just been appointed to lead the White House COVID response. In the summer and fall of 2020, I helped Trump's re-election campaign by defending the administration's COVID efforts in media interviews.

Ik zette een vrolijk gezicht op voor de camera's, maar naarmate het jaar vorderde, veroorzaakten de onwetenschappelijke eisen van de autoriteiten cognitieve dissonantie.

From mania around wearing face masks made no sense given the size of a virus particle. Face masks worn loosely, reused, touched all day with unsterile hands and forced on children were a crime against epidemiology. And yet authorities like Birx and Fauci, of whom I... knew that they would know better, still pretend.

Lockdowns were implemented in ridiculous and scientifically unjustified ways. Churches – no. Small family restaurants – no. Gyms – no. Walmart – yes. There seemed to be no attempt to explain the totalitarian divide imposed from above.

I had moved to Loudoun County, Virginia, shortly after my sister's death to be close to her two young sons. We wanted to make friends in our new community, and the only people who dared to gather were the patriots and dissidents involved in the Loudoun County Parents' Resistance™, which fought against school closures and other policy abuses. That's how I came into contact with the motley crew of nontraditional allies that the COVID era had united: Catholic homeschoolers and hippie self-sufficientists. Medical freedom activists and election integrity watchdogs.

We enjoyed meeting these fearless people, including a mother of a vaccine-harmed child who led our state's medical freedom group.

She persuaded me to do the documentary Vaxxed .

The film told the story of the CDC's research into vaccines and autism in the early 2000s – the kind of research those autism moms had been asking for, not knowing that the CDC had already done it but was hiding the results.

The film documented the hearings in the US House of Representatives by Representatives Weldon and Burton, who sought to expose the truth, and the later whistleblower, William Thompson, who confirmed the worst fears of all mothers. It was a damning indictment of my own paralysis during these events decades ago.

Here's the text I sent that same friend as the credits rolled, along with the tears streaming down my face:

Still, because I was an epidemiologist, people in my circle came to me for answers about The Science, including possible prevention and treatment of COVID.

I became the Underground Railroad in our community for hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, nebulized steroids and other countermeasures frowned upon by The Authorities. Whenever someone in our social circle became seriously ill, I helped them get medicine through the semi-secret network of doctors who courageously offered these lifelines via telemedicine across the country.

Wanting more knowledge and qualifications to help people, I enrolled in training to become a naturopathic doctor.

I watched in disgust and confusion as the new administration ramped up crazy policies even further, while so many in the federal and state governments seemed to be throwing out the basic rules of microbiology and epidemiology.

And then something happened in the late summer of 2021 – a series of legal backlashes between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA that started to make everything painfully clear.

I was familiar with a public health law called the PREP Act, which was passed while I was working in the Senate. This law provided liability protection for manufacturers, physicians, and even employers during a declared public health emergency, provided certain criteria were met. One of those criteria, when it came to medicines or other emergency measures, was that legal immunity only applied to products with an FDA license or an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

The government had a number of issues arising from aspects of the PREP Act and the law establishing the EUA process:

Problem #1: To get an EUA for a product, there must be no other “approved, adequate and available” therapies. And there seemed to be quite a few: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, for starters. Since it would take a while to get an FDA authorization for the product administered in all those groups under the EUA, the EUA had to be protected.

That would only be possible if cheap, generic, widely used, safe, and FDA-approved hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (or something else) were deliberately not were recognized as effective therapies for COVID.

These therapies had to be suppressed and delegitimized by authorities as ineffective or dangerous as treatments for COVID, otherwise the coming vaccines – new, experimental products with limited safety studies conducted at “warp speed” – would be subject to crippling lawsuits if they harm anyone. Since they probably a lot were distributed to the entire population, it was statistically certain that someone would be harmed.

This posed a huge problem for manufacturers. And that meant it was a huge problem for the authorities, because Pfizer threatened not to sell their product in countries that did not immunize them.

This EUA problem would disappear once the vaccine was approved by the FDA. But the required clinical trials had not yet been completed. Moreover, the results were not so great: of the 29 deaths in the clinical trial that led to the approval, 15 were in the vaccinated group, one lake than in the unvaccinated group.

Problem #2: Only FDA-approved products can be mandated or added to the childhood vaccination schedule, not products with an EUA. (And the Biden administration was making plans for nationwide commitments, because of course that was to be expected.)

Problem #3: FDA approval for the Pfizer vaccine would not apply to the entire population because the clinical trials that would form the basis for that approval do not include important subgroups such as pregnant women and children under 16. So the EUA would still be needed to protect Pfizer from lawsuits resulting from injuries to those groups until the FDA-approved product could be added to the childhood vaccination schedule (which would require more data from children) – after which no one could ever sue Pfizer over the vaccine again.

What happened in August 2021 was a diabolical solution to both problem 2 and 3:

• The FDA approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine – a legally artificial construction because this product label was not actually used in the US.
• At the same time, the FDA extended the EUA for Pfizer partner BioNTech's vaccine, which well was the vaccine label that was widely used.

This solved both problems.

The EUA for the product used (including for children ages 12-15) remained protected by the liability protections of the PREP Act. And the identical product label, used by no one anywhere in the US, received FDA approval so it could be made mandatory by the federal government for all employers across the country.

No news media reported what had happened.

They all announced that the vaccine that everyone got into their arms had received FDA approval, which was not true. Two weeks later, national obligations were announced.

That's it. It was clear that there were dark, powerful forces at work behind the public health industry and I wanted nothing more to do with them.

I had started listening to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s podcast. Having thwarted his efforts in the White House years earlier, I was now ironically fascinated by how rational he (suddenly) seemed.

When Mr. Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, was published in the fall of 2021, I devoured it.

Kennedy's zorgvuldig gedocumenteerde beschrijving van hoe de autoriteiten al een paar maanden voordat het daadwerkelijk gebeurde plannen hadden gemaakt voor een wereldwijde coronapandemie, was huiveringwekkend.

Maar nog dichter bij huis was het gedetailleerde verslag van Fauci's financiering van gruwelijke, ingrijpende en slopende HIV/AIDS-experimenten op vaak zeer zieke pleegkinderen in het hele land. Ik had een groot deel van mijn carrière gewijd aan de bestrijding van HIV/AIDS, zowel in eigen land als in het buitenland, en het boek onthulde hoe die carrière was verweven met de monsters die hulpeloze onschuldigen martelden om de eerste AIDS-medicijnen van de farmaceutische industrie op de markt te brengen. Ik had mijn sporen verdiend in de Senaat door van de federale overheid te eisen dat zij prioriteit zou geven aan de levering van medicijnen (en niet alleen condooms) aan aids-slachtoffers over de hele wereld.

I had cried tears of joy and satisfaction when that agenda was realized in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he unveiled his commitment to funding billions of dollars for antiretroviral treatments.

Now I saw evidence that these treatments were developed on the broken bodies of forgotten children, powerless against the unholy alliance of Big Pharma and Big Science.

If they weren't true, the claims in Kennedy's book were so completely defamatory that they should have provoked a series of lawsuits. To my knowledge, no such lawsuits have ever been filed.

This series of eye-opening events ultimately forced me to confront a painful reality: my 2017 opinion of Mr. Kennedy and his Vaccine Safety Commission had been a colossal mistake.

What if a Vaccine Safety Commission had already existed during Operation Warp Speed? During the Biden team's consideration of federal mandates? When adding COVID vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule? What if Mr. Kennedy had had regular access to President Trump during the first term?

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that a committee – any committee – would have had an immediate or obvious influence on vaccination policy. I know better than anyone how slowly the government works. And undoubtedly, Team Biden would have immediately dissolved the committee or replaced the committee members with staunch supporters of the consensus.

Still, as I listened to Mr. Kennedy talk about his experiences with the first Trump administration, I understood that the conversation about vaccine safety, that Today becomes mainstream least could have gotten a big lead.

So in January 2022, I wrote Mr. Kennedy a contrite email confessing my sins, probably in hopes of some kind of absolution. He was gracious and called in his colleague Lyn Redwood from Children's Health Defense. When we spoke shortly afterwards, she slyly asked me what I planned to do to atone for my sins – how I would contribute to the movement. I had no answers at that moment. I was still completely disoriented.

The minister is always gracious and forgiving – even yesterday when he posted in support of this story.

The national COVID vaccination order announced in the fall came into effect in January (although fortunately it was partially halted by a number of lawsuits). Either way, I wouldn't stick to it. I never wore a mask again. No one in my family would get a vaccine again. And I would never again blindly trust a white coat (or many of the products they promote). They're not malicious (at least most of them are), but their training was just as lacking as mine.

Once I became “radicalized,” I began to question many of the dogmas of public health. I discovered the Weston A. Price Foundation and Wise Traditions' nutritional principles, which prioritize all bad things such as saturated fat and raw milk. I embraced the long-suppressed medical frameworks of homeopathy and German New Medicine.

I started helping women have home births, outside the medical system.

It was all quite heretical.

Most importantly, I realized that no one from Washington and no white coat is coming to save my health or anyone else's.

I became my own doctor. You can do that too.

I'm still working to make healthcare less predatory and corrupt. I help employers fire insurance companies and make healthcare plans for their employees more humane again. I give all kinds “friendly” advice to Congress and the current Trump team, even (especially?) when they don't ask for it. And now that I work for no one and answer to no one, I am uncensored and fearless, writing here in my own voice about it all.

So thank you to the mothers of children with autism who got under my skin decades ago, even though I didn't quite know what to do with them.

Thanks to Reps. Burton and Weldon and their staff (who researched the CDC autism data).

Thanks to Andy Wakefield (the much-maligned author of the “debunked” study) and William Thompson (the CDC whistleblower).

Thanks to the friend who encouraged me to Vaxxed to watch, and to Del Bigtree, who made the film.

And above all, thanks to Secretary Kennedy.

When he ran for president, I was nervous. If the Democrats nominated him, I was afraid that President Trump might lose to him.

So it was a great relief when the Democrats lost their chance at victory by expelling him from their party. And when those fireworks went off on the Turning Point USA stage, with Kennedy and Trump and the birth of MAHA on screen, I knew we had a generational opportunity in front of us.

And yet, even now, I can't quite shake the image that set it all in motion.

A line of mothers, sitting across from me in a Senate office in 2002, asked for something very simple: Please look. Please investigate. Please don't discount what we see in our children.

Instead, I trusted The Authorities. I told myself that there would be time for it later, that someone else would take care of it, that Science had already figured it out.

It's strange to realize that my biggest failures weren't the battles I lost – but the ones I didn't start. And that in some of the stories I told myself about my career, I was the villain and not the hero.

So this is where I stand now: I no longer outsource my judgment. I don't confuse authority with truth. And I don't ignore mothers, even when the consensus has lost all curiosity.

If that makes me a heretic – consider this my excommunication from the public health cult.