Ask AI
Back Back
Watching Vaccine Access Collapse in Real Time
Activity Information Ask a Question

Activity

Progress
1
Course Completed
Activity Information

Released: September 17, 2025

John Marshall
John Marshall, MD
Catch Up On All Episodes of Oncology Unscripted

Watch Now

Watching Vaccine Access Collapse In Real Time

 

John Marshall, MD: John Marshall Oncology Unscripted. First piece of advice: don’t read the newspaper. Second piece of advice: don’t watch C-SPAN, for sure. Just yesterday on C-SPAN was the big congressional hearings. I did read the summary of it in The Washington Post, where RFK Jr. was interviewed—cross-examined for three hours by both sides of the aisle—about what he has been doing with the CDC. And I think we all, as medical professionals, need to take a big step back and a pause and sort of ask: what the hell is going on?

 

You know, the specifics first. He fired everybody at the CDC. He has hired new people at the CDC. They have not come forward with any formal vaccine recommendations. This is all about vaccines and the like.

 

Yesterday in clinic, a patient of mine—who would be a candidate for both flu and COVID vaccines, who could have, a month ago, walked into CVS and gotten both of those injections—now, in the state of Virginia (and I think there are about 14 other states where this is true), has to have a prescription. This came out from CVS and Walgreens—that you have to write a prescription. Physicians have to write a prescription so that patients can take it to the CVS and Walgreens to get their vaccines. Some states are not providing them at all. Some states have gone the other way, where they’ve formed collaborations—and this is those cool West Coast states: Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, California. They’ve formed a consortium to say, “We are gonna set our own policy,” because the government’s policy right now is up in the air about whether you can get access to them, whether we should be providing them. How do you get access to them? And so we’re all up in the air about what's going to happen.

 

And then, of course, our brilliant RFK Jr.—who, by the way, doesn’t live very far from where I’m sitting right now. There was one day I was walking through Georgetown and crossed paths with him. I was like, “Ugh.” But anyway, he doesn’t live very far from here. But he’s saying that we should kind of get rid of vaccines in general—not just COVID vaccines, but vaccines in general.

 

And so there is, coming out from the ACIP, a set of recommendations. And a lot of states—and I live in one, Virginia, which is over that direction—had agreed from the beginning (and I think there are seven—I don’t know, a bunch of states) that they will follow whatever the law is, they will follow whatever the ACIP says. But that was before we got this new group of people who’ve stepped in to oversee this. And so it may be that it undoes things, and we’re gonna need to put new laws in place.

 

We just can’t have this discussion about CDC and vaccines without saying the word “Florida.” So, Florida has a Surgeon General named Joseph Ladapo. And Joseph Ladapo is a physician—MD, PhD, incredibly well-trained. He is a professor at the University of Florida. He trained at Harvard and other really good places, and he is all about public health. That’s his thing—more on the cardiovascular side of things. But during the pandemic, he was an anti-vaxxer then. And now, of course, you all know that Florida is trying to put forward where children no longer have a vaccine requirement to go to school, etc.—that they can undo that. And these are recommendations and laws that have been in place for over 100 years. And he says, “Nope, we’re not gonna do it anymore.”

 

You know, my mother had polio, for goodness’ sakes. Do we want to go back to that sort of world where children are going to be getting these infections that we had solved—pretty much solved—in the past? And so, you know, we’re joking about, you know, who’s gonna want to go to Disney World. Take your children to Disney World if everybody there is unvaccinated. Maybe it’s the alternative. Maybe that’s the place to go get exposed—like you remember when we were kids? We used to be told to go over and play with the kid who has chickenpox so that we would all get chickenpox. Well, maybe we’ll all just go to Florida so we all get measles, mumps, rubella, and polio—and other things like that.

 

So, who knows how this well-trained person has got it in his mind that this RFK Jr. sort of “vaccines are evil” is part of his mantra, and he’s applying this across the state of Florida.

 

So, I am so anxious about this because I think the next step is access to medical care in general. Right? We know that there are major cuts to Medicaid about to happen—influencing the shutting down of hospitals. Even in the state of Virginia, if we apply the current Medicaid cut recommendations that the new big bill signed, seven rural hospitals will have to close. Those people will not have access to hospitals in their area. Right? Also talking about reducing Medicare support. So, okay, fine—we're gonna reduce the amount of healthcare that’s available to people out there.

 

But what about medicines? What’s lifesaving, and what is a hoax that causes autism? Right now, the CDC and RFK think that vaccines are a hoax that cause autism. Okay, what about immunotherapy for MSI-high patients, right? Is that a hoax, or is that amazing, life-saving therapy? And so we’re splicing and dicing all of these things to the point where we’re not gonna have access to things that we know help broad populations avoid bad infections and death.

 

When is that gonna start to trickle down to other healthcare access, and who’s going to be making those decisions?

 

I think about the HPV vaccine. Right? This is available to both boys and girls. We think—we’re pretty sure—that if everybody were to get this, cervical cancer, head and neck cancers, and others would diminish dramatically because so many of them are caused by HPV infections. Are we gonna do away with those? That’s, in essence, a cancer vaccine—a prevention-of-cancer vaccine. Is that next on the chopping block? So that now our incredible discoveries of the linkage between HPV and cancer are undone—because we can’t prevent it anymore?

 

So, I am very unsettled. The people around us in healthcare are very unsettled. Pharmaceutical industry is very unsettled. Healthcare providers—small hospitals, rural hospitals—are very unsettled. Yet we are being led by people who do not represent the population, who do not represent the 80–90% majority of parents that want their children to have vaccines. What these people are representing are the 5–10% of people who are convinced that vaccines don’t do anything and are crazy to give.

 

And so we need to figure out how to push back, how to represent the majority against these people—to stand up against these people. Both sides of the aisle are uncomfortable about this. And my fingers are crossed that if enough of us get out and scream, if enough of us go up and hold a sign over a bridge or out on a walk somewhere, that enough people will hear—and we will rise up and take back our healthcare, take back our successes so that we can at least not step backwards. More people dying. More people suffering—when we’d already figured out how to prevent it.

 

I am hopeful, hopeful, hopeful that the months ahead will be better than the last eight months.

 

John Marshall for Oncology Unscripted.

 

Running Into Risk: Colon Cancer and Marathon Runners

 

John Marshall, MD: We have been preaching on Oncology Unscripted about the very cool new data showing that if you had a personal trainer, you had an improvement in survival in colon cancer compared to if you were just told to go exercise. Right? What an amazing abstract that was presented at ASCO this year. And so we're all wondering whether Blue Cross Blue Shield should go out there and start covering personal trainers. And maybe the answer is yes.

 

But follow-up data on that says—and these are things we all knew before—is that too much of a good thing can be bad. A very good friend of mine and colleague of ours, Tim Cannon, here in the Northern Virginia area, actually has been doing a study that made the big time—New York Times published work that they had been doing—showing that marathoners and ultramarathoners actually had an increased risk of colon cancer. So yeah—personal trainer a few times a week, improving your cure rate. Whereas if you go too much, you strain the body. Maybe it’s an alteration in diet, maybe it’s microbiome—we’ll talk about it. You actually can make things worse.

 

So, I want you to listen in to our interview together. Dr. Tim Cannon and I discuss this way cool science, with an idea of trying to figure out what the heck’s going on.

 

Join us for Oncology Unscripted.

 

This transcript has been edited for clarity.