Former Lieutenant Governor of New York and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths Betsy McCaughey joined "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss the measles outbreak, hospital-acquired infections, and advice she has for new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now
00:07is Betsy McCoy, former Lieutenant Governor of New York and founder of the Committee to
00:11Reduce Infection Deaths. Lieutenant Governor, thank you so much for joining me.
00:17I'm so glad you're here to talk about hospital, oh yes, about hospital infections that kill,
00:22and this is an undercut, Brittany, 99,000 people in the U.S. each year. That's more
00:27than all the cases of breast cancer and auto accidents combined. Imagine that, more fatalities
00:33from something you get after you go into the hospital. And as I said, it's an undercut
00:38because so often the hospital does not put infection on the death certificate, even though
00:43it is the immediate cause of death.
00:46That's a really scary statistic. Let's start with why some people are going into the hospital
00:51around the country. In 2000, the CDC declared measles eliminated. Twenty-five years later,
00:58we are seeing outbreaks of measles crop up all throughout the country, with Texas having
01:02the largest one. So when you hear this, when you're seeing a couple hundred measles cases
01:07pop up around the country, what are you thinking?
01:11Well, first of all, 94 percent of these cases are among unvaccinated people. The vaccine
01:20is highly effective. It's called the MMR vaccine. If you got it before 1968, you're a baby boomer
01:27like you, like me, you might consider getting a booster, but otherwise it's good for life.
01:33In 1968, they developed a version that's good for life. So in the case of the Texas outbreak,
01:40the largest, that was among a group of people with a special religion, a viewpoint that
01:47advises them spiritually not to take a vaccine. That's a special case, really. In Chicago,
01:54where there was a large outbreak at a migrant shelter, in New York, in Brooklyn, where there
02:00was a migrant shelter, and among several other cases in Maryland and New Jersey, the CDC
02:06labels this travel-related measles. Sometimes it's a case of someone who went to a foreign
02:12country where vaccination is less universal than in the U.S., but other times it's a case
02:18of people coming across the southern border with children, they're not vaccinated or they
02:23have a lower grade vaccine. And so that's why we've seen outbreaks in migrant shelters
02:30as well. There has been very little emphasis in the press on the relationship between people
02:36coming from other countries and measles. But in general, although there's been a slight
02:42dip in the number of Americans who get their children vaccinated, in general, Americans
02:47are still getting the MMR vaccine, and that's a good thing.
02:52Do you think, though, that the Trump administration, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., need
02:59to do more to sell the efficacy of this vaccine? Because as you said, and according to the
03:03CDC's website, before the measles vaccine was made available in 1963, in the 50s, almost
03:09all kids had the measles in the United States by the time they were 15. Three to four million
03:14people a year had the virus. It was eliminated fully in the United States in 2000. So do
03:20you think that they should say straight out, this vaccine is safe, it's effective, it has
03:25been around for more than a decade?
03:27Yes, we do. And most localities actually require children to get this vaccine, although
03:34there is a religious exemption, such as in Texas. The federal government cannot. In 1905,
03:41in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court ruled that vaccine mandates are a state
03:48and local issue, not a federal issue. But as I said, many school districts do require it.
03:55I'm curious. I know that you were a lawmaker. If you were advising RFK, Jr., if you were
04:03advising the Trump administration, what would you be saying to them? Because measles seemed
04:08like a thing of the past. Now it's popping up, but it's becoming more and more of an
04:13issue.
04:14Let's put it in perspective. The media love to exploit this because RFK, Jr. has been
04:21a very controversial figure. It's something to talk about. But the number of cases we're
04:26talking about here is so minuscule compared with the number of cases of hospital infections,
04:32and you don't hear anything from the CDC about that. That's killing 99,000 people a year.
04:37Admittedly, many of them are older people rather than children, but they're still living
04:43people who want to continue to live, and they're going into the hospital to get better, and
04:48instead they're getting very sick with a hospital infection. If you go up on the CDC
04:54website, you will see real-time data on measles, right? Last week, the week before, the week
05:00before. When you go on and look at data for hospital infections, it's a year old. What
05:07are we going to do with that? It's a year old.
05:11Let's talk about that then, because what do you think then is missing or changing in the
05:16national conversation surrounding public health? Because obviously you and I can agree, a measles
05:22infection, that's important. It's an important conversation. But you're saying, hey, while
05:26that's an important conversation, there's other conversations that need to be had, and
05:31there's tens of thousands of people dying and being infected in the hospital a year.
05:35So why do you think that's missing?
05:38Oh, I'll tell you why. Because I've worked with the CDC, been to their events for many
05:44years. The CDC doesn't want to offend the hospitals, or as one executive at the hospital,
05:52Denise Cardos, I mean, the CDC said to me once, we don't want to ask the hospitals to
05:56do too much. Well, they're doing too little. They're doing too little. They're not keeping
06:01the rooms clean. As you and I were discussing before this program began, if I asked you,
06:08what is the number one cause of hospital infections? What is the number one factor determining
06:13which patients get an infection? It's not their age. It's not the disease that brought
06:18them into the hospital. It's the room they're assigned to or the bed they're placed in.
06:24If they're assigned to a room or placed in a bed and a previous occupant of that room
06:29or bed had an infection, they are going to get it. According to the Columbia School of
06:34Nursing, the risk goes up 583% because that previous patient was discharged, but their
06:41germs were left behind on the bed rail, on the call button, on the TV controls, on the
06:46privacy curtain, left behind to infect the next patient.
06:51I mean, I know personally people that have gone into the hospital for one thing, been
06:56infected while they were in the hospital. I'm sure based on your stat, there are plenty
07:00of people with a similar story. Then what would you advise the Trump administration?
07:05What would you advise HHS Secretary RFK Jr., who has been put in, has been lauded as a
07:11changemaker here, controversial, but still a changemaker. What do you think, what would
07:16you want him to do?
07:18I would urge him to insist on transparency, first of all. When I founded RID 20 years
07:23ago, not one state required hospitals to disclose their infection rates. Now we're up to 38
07:29and we're hoping to get to 50, but we're pressing there for state legislation. The CDC could
07:34do a lot. When they put out their reports on an, quote, outbreak of a special pathogen
07:41like MRSA, for example, in a hospital, they never use the name of the hospital. They call
07:47it Hospital A or Hospital B, so nobody will know. Well, if you were going into the hospital
07:54to have a baby and there was an outbreak of MRSA in the neonatal intensive care unit,
07:59wouldn't you want to know? Of course you would. The public deserves to know which hospitals
08:06are struggling with these pathogens. And there's one out there now called Candida auris. It
08:12came to this country in 2016. It's an unusual infection. It's a fungal infection. It has
08:19a 50% mortality rate. The number of infections is still small, but increasing very rapidly.
08:26It started in just a few hospitals in Brooklyn and northern New Jersey, but the CDC didn't
08:32say to those hospitals, be sure to tell everybody you're struggling with this and flag a patient's
08:37chart so when they go to another hospital, the other hospital will be aware, right? No.
08:43Instead silencing, silence pervaded the whole project. Now over half the states in the U.S.
08:49are struggling with this. Their hospitals are now infected with this fungal pathogen, right?
08:59It's a real threat to patient safety, and it's because they chose secrecy instead of transparency.
09:07They chose to keep it a secret where this infection was for the short-term benefit,
09:13business benefit of a hospital instead of being transparent. My organization actually
09:19sued the state of New York with a FOIA suit in 2019 to get that information, and USA Today,
09:25a newspaper, did it again more recently so that New Yorkers could see a list of which hospitals
09:31and nursing homes were struggling with this highly lethal pathogen. So I would say to the
09:37Trump administration, tell the CDC to quote, come clean on hospital infections.
09:45Do you think that, I mean because you're a Republican, you worked in a Republican
09:50administration, this is clearly a non-partisan issue because you're saying it doesn't matter,
09:57an infection isn't going to care what political party you are, it depends on what room you're
10:02in in the hospital, that's what you're saying. So do you think that, why do you think public
10:08health writ large has been politicized, and what do you think can be done to wipe that away?
10:16Well I certainly don't want to see it politicized, that's why I shifted from measles,
10:20which between you and me I think is being politicized. There are a number of cases,
10:25we should show concern, we should maximize the number of families that get their children
10:30vaccinated to protect them. It doesn't have to be a front page issue because the numbers are so small.
10:38But do you think it is, I do want to interrupt you just a second, do you think it is a front
10:42page issue because it was eliminated and we're seeing a couple hundred cases pop up and we know
10:47how highly contagious it is, one person's sick, you can get nine or ten people sick,
10:53that doesn't crop up for four days sometimes. So do you think that that's why the alarm's
10:58being raised? That's true, you're making a very good point there, but nevertheless,
11:06and I'm totally behind these vaccinations, I would just like to see the CDC broadly
11:13pay more attention to the biggest health care issues. Let's talk about another one that's
11:20getting big, H5N1. Yeah, what would you like this, yeah, talk about what you would like to see down
11:26there. Right, well first of all, I think we need much more broad surveillance of the dairy cow
11:33industry. We now have this H5N1 in 980 dairy herds in 17 states. As far as I'm aware, only
11:42one state, Massachusetts, is actually surveying all the dairy herds, right, testing to see what's
11:48happening. We should be doing that everywhere because this is spreading quickly. I don't want
11:53to raise the alarm and say it could be a pandemic, but more and more scientists are expressing alarm
11:58that we've seen it jump from one mammal to the next mammal to the next mammal, and non-mammals
12:05as well, of course, but we've got sea lions, cows, we've got birds, we've got rats, and you know,
12:11as it spreads, and of course we've had 70 infected humans, and when it gets into humans, if they have
12:18another virus at the same time, it can more often create a more deadly pathogen. So we do have to
12:24worry, we do have to pay more attention to it, and there I think that what I would advise the
12:30CDC's Department of Agriculture, they have a brand new head of the Department of Agriculture, Brooke
12:38Rollins, very smart woman, I would urge them to use more technology. For example, there is highly
12:44effective technology, proven effective, to be used in enclosed barns, swine barns it's been
12:51used in, but we could move to cows, right? In the north, the dairy herds are in enclosed barns, not
12:58open-sided, and once you have an enclosed barn, you can treat that air with dry hydrogen peroxide or
13:05other newer technologies, and literally destroy that virus before it infects the cows. Destroy it
13:13as it's moving around in the air, destroy it before it lays on the feed. We don't know exactly how
13:19it's spreading from cow to cow, whether it's in the milking machines, in the feed, or directly animal
13:26to animal, but this kind of enclosed barn technology, which is already proven for other diseases,
13:35could be highly effective, and I actually have a letter all set to go to Brooke Rollins to say,
13:40please take a look at this, because our dairy industry is very important in my state.
13:47Upstate New York is a big dairy area, Massachusetts, but also all across the country.
13:53I think this begs the larger question of, what do you think Congress can do? What would you
13:59like to see there? Because this whole theme of this conversation is, you want more transparency
14:06when it comes to the CDC, when it comes to public health in this country,
14:10what do you think can be done legally?
14:15Well, actually, I'm not, I'm not big on creating more and more regulations, but what I would like
14:21to see is the CDC focus much more on American issues. I'll give you an example. Under the
14:29Obama administration, we spent a huge amount of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions,
14:35establishing health surveillance systems in sub-Saharan Africa because of Ebola and other
14:41pathogens spreading throughout that subcontinent. We need those surveillance systems right here in
14:48the U.S. We could have caught COVID on the East Coast, where it was before it hit the West Coast,
14:55if we had had those surveillance systems, and that would have saved so many lives.
15:00What, what do you think are some lessons we could have learned? Because if you can believe it,
15:05it's 2025 now, five years ago, at this time, we were on the cusp of a pandemic that, I mean,
15:11frankly, no one would have guessed what the next couple of years would hold. If you told me that
15:16five years ago, I would have no idea what would have happened then. What lessons do you think we
15:21could learn then? Because you did say pandemic, you said, I don't want to raise the alarm,
15:26this might not be a pandemic, but you did, you did say the P word.
15:29Number one, don't censor the scientists. Many of the scientists who said, don't lock down these
15:35stores and businesses, protect the elderly, focus on the most vulnerable population.
15:41They were right, but they were censored, brutally, brutally, career-ending censorship,
15:46right? So that's number one. Let the truth out. Let us debate every issue. Some people may say,
15:52I'm wrong about hospital infections. We shouldn't pay so much attention to them, right? I've heard
15:57doctors say, well, a lot of the people dying are elderly anyway. Don't censor the scientists.
16:02No matter what the issue is, let's have a robust, data-driven debate.
16:07Lieutenant Governor, I certainly appreciate the conversation today.
16:11Thank you so much for joining me.
16:14Thank you, and please come to hospitalinfection.org. Lots of information about
16:19all of these pathogens, right?