I have been careful about vaccines - not because I don’t have thoughts.

I have a lot of thoughts.

I’ve watched hundreds of hours of ACIP meetings. I’ve read the studies. I practiced emergency medicine through Covid. I’ve sat across from mothers telling me what happened to their child at a well-visit and then watched myself say the words “the CDC says vaccines are safe and effective” because that was what I was trained to say, and I didn’t have much better to offer.

I have been careful because the cost of not being careful in this particular conversation (even simply admitting that we don’t know what we don’t know), has historically cost your career, your credibility, and your inbox.

I wrote about it once, carefully, and the response was instructive.

Then President Trump walked up to a podium with Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Oz, and Dorothy Fink and said what many of us have been thinking for years. That there seem to be some things we don’t fully know. That the effects of one vaccine are likely different from the effects of six vaccines given all at once. That medications taken during pregnancy or given to infants could have unintended biological effects. That perhaps there are treatments that could provide real symptom improvement in autistic kids that are yet to be discovered or recommended.

Not a wellness influencer or some fringe blogger - the freaking President of the United States. With the FDA Commissioner, the CMS Administrator and the NIH Director standing behind him.

That press conference happened less than 24 hours before I sat down with Ray Kober for this episode of Broken Healthcare. So when he asked me what I thought — I told him.

My daughter had a seizure the day of her well-visit. An series of MRIs showed progressive demyelination - the result of some inflammatory or autoimmune process I was told.

“We don’t know if she’ll develop normally. We don’t know what caused this to happen, and we know you asked about her vaccinations that morning, but we know it wasn’t related those. Vaccines don’t cause this.”

I was a young mom with no medical training and I believed them.

It took me years - and a medical degree, and years of hearing that same story come out of other mothers’ mouths while I stood on the other side of the exam table — to understand what had actually happened in that conversation.

The actual truth was, they didn’t know. They just weren’t willing to say so.

And that’s the part that makes me the angriest. Not the uncertainty, because uncertainty is honest. But the certainty performed in the presence of uncertainty that has cost us everything - including trust in public health.

Forty to seventy percent of mothers of autistic children believe a vaccine appointment preceded the change in their child. You can argue about the science on causation all you want. You cannot argue that we know anything definitively or that those women deserved to be dismissed.

Ray and I also got into what the actual ACIP data looks like up close — small sample sizes, safety follow-up windows of four to five days, the hepatitis B birth dose debate that the American Academy of Pediatrics was so opposed to they refused to show up and make their case. We talked about what public health was actually supposed to do versus what it did during COVID.

And we talked about why the people screaming loudest to stop asking questions are the ones with the most to lose if anyone finds an answer.

Here’s the link to the White House briefing. The full conversation is below. Ray Kober is a great interviewer — he pushes, he follows up, he doesn’t let things slide. This one went places.

If this is the first time you’re reading Signal & Noise — this is what we do here. Not telling you what to think. Giving you the information the other outlets won’t touch and letting you decide. Subscribe if you want more of it.

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And if you’re curious about what happened with my daughter. That’s here below.

Men die 6.5 years earlier than women. They have higher mortality in 9 of the 10 leading causes of death. They use healthcare resources 69% less than women.

And yet, we’ve spent approximately zero political capital addressing any of this — despite the economic burden of ignoring it approaching $500 billion a year.

That’s changing.

The FDA just held its first-ever men’s health panel — and has finally started the conversation.

I sat down with Carrie Abbott last week to talk through what I heard in that room.

We discuss the testosterone data that’s been buried under decades of a myth born from a study so small and so old it has no business still driving clinical decisions in 2025. And newer research from the VA which tracked over 80,000 men with low testosterone and found that the men who restored their levels to normal had a 56% lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to those who didn’t.

Testosterone isn’t just about sex drive.

It’s about the diabetic whose foot won’t heal, the 68-year-old who breaks a hip and never walks independently again, the man who tells his doctor he just “doesn’t feel like himself anymore” — and gets told that’s normal for his age.

Supplementation isn’t for everyone and comes with risks to fertility, but ignoring testosterone altogether is a costly alternative—in dollars and in lives.

It’s worth learning as much as you can.

Listen here

At 21, a doctor told me I had PCOS and pre-diabetes and then handed me a Metformin prescription.

“This is just what you’ll have to live with,” she said.

So I did. Until I didn’t.

(Turns out eating real food and moving your body is a treatment plan. Who knew?)

But that was the first time a strange thought crossed my mind. Maybe the people who say they know how this works… don’t actually know anything about how this works.

Hmm.

Years later — after the NFL, foreign medical school, PA school, the ER, and COVID — I read The Price We Pay by Dr. Marty Makary and suddenly understood things I hadn’t been able to articulate before.

• Why I’d been handed a pill instead of a lifestyle prescription.

• Why my employment contract said I wasn’t allowed to tell patients that a cash-pay clinic existed across the street.

• And 1000 other horrific, uncomfortably true things about medicine, and the system we call ‘health care’.

(I’m still looking for a word to describe it that doesn’t start with an F-, but haven’t found one yet)

Somewhere along the way, a realization crystallized.

I could keep saving people one-by-one in the ER, but if I did, I could never fix what was actually breaking them. So I left.

And that’s the real story behind this episode.

In this conversation, Troy Reichert and Dr. Jonathan Bushman gave me the space to tell the full, messy, nonlinear version — the NFL years, the diagnosis that reversed itself, the ER shifts where the incentives finally became impossible to ignore, and the moment I realized something most clinicians eventually confront:

• We can hold someone’s hand.

• We can stabilize them.

• Sometimes we can even save them.

But we can’t repair a system that was never designed for patients to win.

And that raises a much bigger question…Why are patients losing in the first place?

Watch the full conversation below.

If you’re new here, this episode is a good place to start.

It’s the origin story behind everything I’m working on now — helping people understand the system they’re navigating (and paying for), and helping clinicians speak honestly about the one they’re working inside.

Because once you understand how the incentives actually work…the entire healthcare landscape suddenly makes a lot more sense.

And don’t we deserve to know?

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I never wanted to be a health writer.

I just wanted to be useful — which for a long time meant practicing in an ER, telling scared patients the truth about what was happening to their bodies.

What I didn’t expect is that leaving clinical medicine and transitioning to communications would put me closer to the root of the problem than I ever was inside the hospital - but that’s exactly what happened.

The MAHA movement is doing amazing, historic work — on the food system, on hormone therapy, on FDA evidentiary standards.

But most Americans have no idea it’s happening. Not because the policy is failing. Because the story isn’t being told.

And we’re letting it happen.

That’s what this conversation (and the article below) are about.

Let me know what you think.