In his first term, President Donald Trump touted the “medical miracle” of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine that he helped deliver to market through the unprecedented public-private partnership known as Operation Warp Speed.

In its second term, the Trump administration is dismantling the signature health achievement of his first term by sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccine. The president is taking steps to make the vaccine more difficult for the public to receive and for pharmaceutical companies to bring new mRNA vaccines to market.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a critic and skeptic of vaccines for years, linking them to autism and other disorders without scientific evidence.

Now, Kennedy is canceling grants to develop more mRNA vaccines, which are also being explored for treating the flu, HIV, and cancer.

He fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 immunization workgroup, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), and replaced them with vaccine skeptics. He removed Covid-19 vaccines from the list of shots recommended for healthy pregnant women and children, which means insurance companies will likely no longer pay for them. The Daily Beast reports that the Trump administration is planning to pull the vaccine from shelves “within months,” citing a close associate of Kennedy’s.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke with Katherine Wu, staff writer for The Atlantic, about what this means for Americans’ ability to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., doing right now with mRNA vaccines?

Probably the latest and biggest news is that he canceled half a billion dollars’ worth of grants to develop more mRNA vaccines. The public is probably most familiar with mRNA vaccines in the context of Covid vaccines. That’s the first place we had successful mRNA vaccines, and that is still where mRNA vaccines dominate the market, but they’ve been in development for tons of other diseases, not just infectious ones, for a very long time. So this is a pretty huge deal.

Remind me who was president when the Covid mRNA vaccine was developed?

Also Trump, just during his first term, not this one.

Oh, weird. How has President Trump advanced his campaign to inoculate and protect Americans with mRNA vaccines in his second term so far?

He hasn’t. During the first term, Trump was the one who helped push forward Operation Warp Speed, that big partnership between government and pharma that got us all of these amazing Covid vaccines in record time, and helped us beat back this pandemic that killed so many people. And so far, this shining beacon from Trump’s first term is being systematically ripped apart. We’ve already talked about how Trump’s administration has pulled funding for development of more mRNA vaccines. You would think that we want to build on that success. Not so much. But they’ve also started to strip away Americans’ access to Covid vaccines. They have removed or altered recommendations to get Covid vaccines in certain groups. They’ve made it harder for vaccine makers to get new Covid vaccines to market, and a lot of the new hires and advisors to the Department of Health and Human Services are taking aim at other Covid vaccine recommendations that could restrict access even further. I think it’s very realistic that within a year or two, very few people will be able to get Covid vaccines, even when they want and need them.

We were all there when the Covid vaccines came out, and the president, I believe, was among the first to get them. They were touted as a miracle of medical science. How is that narrative being rewritten right now?

Yeah, it’s fascinating, right? Trump himself used that phrase, medical miracle. And there’s no scientific reason that he should have stopped believing that. The data on these vaccines has not changed. They’re very safe, very effective. They went through all the normal channels of vetting that get us safe, effective vaccines. But right now in his second term, Trump is leading an administration that is mostly pushing out information that these vaccines are dubious. They don’t work. And largely, this whole system is corrupt. All the people that recommended these vaccines have conflicts of interest and they’re in the pocket of industry, and basically the government is working to restrict access to these vaccines so they don’t hurt as many Americans as they could. He said they don’t work against respiratory viruses, which is not true.

Studies have shown that they saved millions of lives during the pandemic, and they continue to protect people for everyone who was receiving them. He said that they were the deadliest vaccine ever made. There’s no evidence to support that. They have done quite the opposite. And he’s cast doubt on the idea that they were studied thoroughly and carefully vetted by expert scientists who knew exactly what safety signals to look for. None of that is backed up by the evidence, but it’s basically what the federal government is saying right now.

These vaccines were famously brought to market very quickly. I mean, that was part of the miracle we’re referring to here that seemed to spur a lot of these conspiracy theories about their efficacy. Was there any validity to the argument that they were produced too quickly, that there wasn’t enough testing?

I think the way you phrase your question is important, right? Because “too quickly” is about, did they arrive so quickly that there wasn’t adequate time to study them, make sure that they worked well to protect against Covid and they did so in a way that wasn’t posing undue risk to the people who receive them? And I think the answer is very soundly no. It’s important to acknowledge that all this was done on the shoulders of all the vaccine science that came before it. Scientists knew what to look for. They knew how to run these trials. They knew how to scale up their technology. And yeah, they did it in ways that were unprecedented, but not unprecedented in ways that they were shooting in the dark.

So what happens now? You were saying that you can see a future in which even people who want and need these vaccines won’t be able to get them. How far away is that?

I think there are still enough people at federal health agencies that would fight back against that, that it could be a very dragged-out fight. Stripping access to those vaccines instantaneously would also probably come under legal challenge quickly, but I think it’s something that a lot of sectors of the administration are starting to move toward.

Operation Warp Speed obviously played a huge role in developing these vaccines, but it wasn’t just an American effort by any means. If the US is falling off right now and denying the medical miracle that was, what’s the rest of the world doing? And does that mean that you could fly to Canada to get your Covid vaccine, or even get it delivered?

Man, black market international vaccines. What a world. Yeah, it’s a great question, and I think there’s a couple things to touch on here. One is that cutting off funding for mRNA vaccine development here cuts off resources for the rest of the world. The US is extremely powerful in terms of scientific firepower, money, and also, up until very recently, foreign aid. If we stop developing vaccines here, that means there are fewer resources for other countries. There’s also a chilling effect that is very likely to happen if the US says: These vaccines are crap, they’re not worth investing in, they’re not worth recommending, they’re not good enough for our people. Other countries have traditionally taken cues from the US, especially around vaccines. Other countries might look at what we’re doing and pause and be like, well, we don’t want to look weird. We don’t want to be the outliers when the US is doing this.

But are we the outliers right now? It feels like we’re the outliers.

We totally are, and I would hope that other countries look at us and then look at the UK, and be like, Okay, maybe we start following the UK. But it’s tricky, because in a landscape where these vaccines get more scarce and more expensive because the US isn’t pouring resources into developing them, those vaccines simply won’t exist or might be worse than if the US were pouring those resources in. And the US is simultaneously saying “These aren’t good enough.” It becomes an economical and almost political decision for other countries to pause a little bit more.

President Trump has taken to wearing a hat that says “Trump was right about everything.” This is a man who loves a win, and he got a huge one in 2020 with the mRNA vaccine for Covid-19. Why do you think he won’t take the win?

I suspect some of this goes back to what happened at the end of his term and what happened in the ensuing presidential term. The end of Trump’s first term was marred by the start of the pandemic. He was widely criticized for letting things get as bad as they did in the US in those early days. Even though he helped push vaccines along, that was a triumph that didn’t completely overshadow all of the other policy hiccups that made 2020 and much of 2021 horrific in this country. The pandemic could have gone much better here if there had been a much better coordinated public health response and better communication. I think a lot of Trump’s base felt angered by that, and they felt angered by a lot of early pandemic policies. They felt betrayed by the government, and I think that has soured Trump’s base on all things Covid, including vaccines.

President Donald Trump’s administration is scrutinizing higher education. Last week, the White House issued a memorandum requiring all universities receiving federal funds to submit admissions data on all applicants to the Department of Education. The goal is to enforce the 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action.

Days before the memo was released, Columbia and Brown agreed to share their admissions data with the administration, broken down by race, grade point average, and standardized test scores. The administration suspects that universities are using “racial proxies” to get around the ban on race-based admissions. The Department of Education is expected to build a database of the admissions data and make it available to parents and students.

Amid this increased federal scrutiny, an alternative idea from Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project for the Progressive Policy Institute, is gaining attention. Kahlenberg, who testified in the Supreme Court cases against Harvard and UNC, advocates for class-based affirmative action instead of race-based admissions. He argues that this approach will yield more economically and racially equitable results.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Kahlenberg about how he contends with the consequences of helping gut race-based affirmative action, why he believes class-based affirmative action is the path forward, and if his own argument may come in the crosshairs of a Trump administration eager to stamp out all forms of affirmative action.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’re the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. I would take it to mean that you are a progressive.

It’s complicated these days. I’m left of center. I think of myself more as liberal than progressive.

I ask because you testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. This is the case that essentially gutted race-based affirmative action. It doesn’t sound like a progressive, or even a left-of-center, position. What was going on? Explain what you were thinking.

I’ve long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges. I think that’s enormously important, but I’ve been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated, but economically segregated.

I think there’s a better way of creating racial diversity — a more liberal way, if you will — which is to give low-income and economically disadvantaged students of all races a leg up in the admissions process in order to create both racial and economic diversity.

What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that? Were primarily wealthy Black and Hispanic students benefiting from affirmative action?

There’d been a number of studies over the years that had come to that conclusion, including from supporters of race-based affirmative action. Then, in the litigation, further evidence came out. At Harvard, 71 percent of the Black and Hispanic students came from the most socioeconomically privileged 20 percent of the Black and Hispanic population nationally.

Now, to be clear, the white and Asian students were even richer. But for the most part, this was not a program that was benefiting working-class and low-income students.

Alright, so the Supreme Court in 2023 hands down this decision that says, essentially, we’re done with race-based affirmative action. Was there a difference in how progressives and conservatives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling?

Most mainstream conservatives have always said they were opposed to racial preferences, but of course, they were for economic affirmative action. But now we have some on the extreme, including the Trump administration, saying that economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity.

What do you make of that? That was your team once upon a time, right?

Well, I think it’s troubling when people shift the goalposts. In a number of the Supreme Court concurring opinions in the case, conservatives said that economic affirmative action made a lot of sense. Justice [Neil] Gorsuch, for example, said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and instead gave economic affirmative action, that would be perfectly legal. And now some extremists are shifting their position and saying they’re opposed to any kind of affirmative action.

Are you surprised by that shift?

I’m not surprised. I’m confident, however, that a majority of the US Supreme Court won’t go that far. The Supreme Court, to some degree, looks to public opinion. Racial preferences were always unpopular. But economic affirmative action is broadly supported by the public.

The Supreme Court has had two cases come before it, subsequent to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision. One involved a challenge to class-based affirmative action at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia, and the other involved an attack on a similar class-based affirmative action program at the Boston exam schools, like Boston Latin. In both cases, the Supreme Court said we’re not gonna hear those cases over the vehement dissent of a couple of extremely conservative justices. So I’m fairly confident that the Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic-based preferences.

What do you make of this move by the Trump administration to ask colleges for data?

I’m of two minds about it. I do think transparency is good in higher education. These institutions are receiving lots of taxpayer money. We want to make sure they’re following the Supreme Court ruling, which said you can’t use race.

Having said that, I’m quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data, because if a college discloses the average SAT scores and grades by race of applicants, of those admitted, and then those enrolled, one of two things can be going on. One is that the university’s cheating and they’re using racial preferences, and that would be a violation of the law.

The other possibility is that they did shift to economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal.

And because Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately low income and working class, they will disproportionately benefit from a class-based affirmative action program. And so the average SAT score is going to look somewhat lower. I’m worried that the Trump administration will go after both race-based and class-based affirmative action.

Because class-based affirmative action still might mean a college is admitting more Black and Hispanic students. And what the Trump administration seems to have the issue with is that fact.

Yes. Increasingly, that’s what it looks like. As long as the Trump administration was focused on counting race and deciding who gets ahead, they had the American public on their side. But Americans also support the idea of racially integrated student bodies, they just don’t like racial preferences as the means for getting there. So, if Trump says, no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I’m just opposed to racial diversity, he’ll have lost the public. And I don’t think he will be consistent with the legal framework under Students for Fair Admissions, either.

Well, I think he ought to care if he cares about the future of his political party. Because under class-based affirmative action, it is true that Black and Hispanic students will disproportionately benefit, but it will also benefit white working-class students. And those are the students who are coming from families that form the base of the Republican Party. So I think it would be a big mistake if the Trump administration were to really push hard on that angle.

The Trump administration has offered little consolation to American businesses worried about losing undocumented workers to deportations.

US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins did offer them one solution last week: to replace immigrant farmworkers with Americans who are now required to work in order to access Medicaid benefits, under the recently signed Republican spending bill.

“When you think about it, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program,” she said Tuesday in a news conference. “So, no amnesty under any circumstances, mass deportations continue, but in a strategic and intentional way, as we move our workforce towards more automation and towards a 100 percent American workforce.”

Unfortunately for the industries targeted in escalating immigration raids — at farms, construction sites, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses — that is not a serious proposal.

Agricultural and hospitality industry leaders are pushing back and raising concerns about how deportations could lead to labor shortages. Though President Donald Trump has appeared publicly sympathetic to those concerns, it’s become clear that business interests aren’t driving his policy.

Rather, it’s immigration hardliners, led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who are. Republicans have handed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement an additional $75 billion, and the agency is more well-resourced than ever as the administration aims for 3,000 immigration arrests per day and 1 million deportations in a single year.

“I have complete faith that Secretary Noem and Stephen Miller and everyone else in the administration is 100 percent committed to this agenda,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

The conflict between those hardliners and the affected industries reveals a key fiction at the center of Trump’s immigration policy: that masses of immigrant workers are taking away jobs from Americans who are willing and able to fill them. They aren’t. But that hasn’t stopped the administration from ramping up ICE raids that don’t just endanger immigrants and the businesses that rely on them. They’re also imperiling job opportunities and the affordability of goods and services available to all Americans.

Trump’s mixed messages about deportations

Following the ICE raids in Los Angeles that spurred mass protests in early June, some business leaders started becoming more vocal about their fears that worksite immigration raids could upend their companies.

That prompted Trump, at the urging of Rollins, to publicly pledge to work with farming and hospitality businesses to protect their workers and to pause workplace raids for a few days.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in June.

On July 4, he said he would put farmers “in charge” of immigration enforcement when it came to their own businesses, but warned that if they did not do a “good job, we’ll throw [undocumented workers] out of the country.”

In practice, however, it’s not clear that the Trump administration has retreated on immigration raids since then.

ICE carried out a major raid at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles on July 7 and on two California cannabis farms on July 10. At one called Glass House, farmworker Jaime Alanis fell from the top of a greenhouse during the operation and died from his injuries. The New York Times also reported that no business is exempt from worksite immigration enforcement under current ICE policy.

Bier said that he has not put any stock into Trump’s overtures to industry leaders on deportations.

“I said when he first made a statement to this effect that he was not going to change anything about ICE’s operations,” he said.

The fundamental misunderstanding behind Trump’s immigration raids

Immigration hardliners in the Trump administration are operating under the assumption that businesses affected by raids can just hire Americans instead of undocumented immigrants.

In reality, many of those immigrants work jobs that no Americans want — even during times of high unemployment and especially when it comes to low-paid, back-breaking positions in agriculture.

“The idea that there are millions of people waiting around who are willing and able to do this type of farm labor is misguided,” said Tara Watson, director of the Center of Economic Security and Opportunity and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Bier said some of the best evidence of that is a study of the North Carolina agricultural industry in 2011.

Researchers found that, of the nearly half a million unemployed North Carolinians at the time, only 268 native-born Americans applied for 6,500 farm job openings despite the fact that employers were required to publicly advertise the positions. Over 90 percent of those applicants were hired, but most did not show up for their first day of work or quit within a month. Only seven completed the entire growing season.

Medicaid recipients in particular are even less likely to fill agricultural job openings than Americans overall, despite Rollins’s suggestion to the contrary.

For one, there aren’t actually many Medicaid recipients who don’t already have a job and are able to work at all, let alone able to work a physically demanding job in agriculture. A Brookings study found that out of the roughly 71.3 million recipients of Medicaid, only 300,000 people did not qualify for exemptions to the new work requirements and were not working because they didn’t want to.

“There’s a reason why they’re on Medicaid, and that’s because they’re kids, they’re elderly, or they’re disabled, or they already have a job that just doesn’t provide them with the kind of health insurance that they need,” said Ben Zipperer, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Medicaid recipients are also predominantly located in urban areas and aren’t likely to relocate for a low-paid job in agriculture. They are very unlikely to swoop in and save farms hard-hit by immigration raids. The fact that the administration is pushing that fantasy shows that its theory of how its immigration policies will affect businesses and the broader economy is misguided.

The economic cost of immigration raids

Mass deportations of farm workers alone could deal the US a significant blow. It would likely slash domestic agricultural production, driving up food prices for most Americans.

Watson said that farms would find it almost impossible to hire people to do labor that cannot be automated, forcing some to move their production abroad. The US might have to start importing certain crops at a higher price depending on the outcome of Trump’s tariff negotiations. He has already slapped a 17 percent tariff on Mexican tomatoes.

“If the labor supply for farms is greatly restricted, then farms will produce less, and that will be passed on to consumers as higher prices,” Bier, of the Cato Institute, said.

Beyond agriculture, Trump’s immigration raids could actually cause the overall job supply to shrink, rather than creating openings that Americans would readily fill.

A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that, if Trump meets his goal of deporting 1 million immigrants every year of his second term, it would eliminate the jobs of 3.3 million immigrants and 2.6 million US-born workers by the time he leaves office. The job supply in construction would be particularly hard-hit, falling almost 19 percent overall.

That’s because immigrants typically have jobs that complement those worked by Americans, filling job openings that the latter will not, and because immigrants also create jobs as business owners and consumers of American goods and services.

For that reason, deporting immigrant workers who have no criminal record as part of Trump’s “America First” agenda is “just building on a myth that immigrants in the US are ‘taking American jobs,’” Watson said.

“There’s been a huge amount of economics literature suggesting that that’s not the case, and that, in fact, immigrants end up generating more jobs for US-born people,” she said.