This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services, under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced it would be cutting nearly $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine development.

And it’s not only mRNA vaccines.

Archived news clip: The Trump budget proposal cuts more than $33 billion from Health and Human Services.

Archived news clip: Trump’s proposed budget for the next year includes cutting nearly 40 percent — I’m going to say that again — 40 percent — of federal funding allocated to the National Cancer Institute.

His cuts to scientific funding and grants and institutions broadly have thrown a huge amount of possibly lifesaving research into chaos.

Is any of this really going to make America healthy again? Obviously, I doubt it.

But what it does do is reveal what Make America Healthy Again is really about. I feel about that movement the way I felt about the Department of Government Efficiency: I’m fundamentally sympathetic to what it is promising to do. A department of government efficiency, an effort to make America healthy again — these are good ideas. Somebody should actually try them.

But MAHA, like DOGE, isn’t even attempting to do what is promised in the name. So what is it attempting to do? What are its actual ideas?

How did a pandemic that was largely ended by vaccines lead to this policy regime? How did the president who presided over Operation Warp Speed — Donald Trump’s great success — become the president who appointed R.F.K. Jr. to lead our most important health institution? How is it possible that, five years after the Covid pandemic, experts now say that we are less prepared for the next pandemic than we were for the last one?