(dramatic music) - Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour & Company.

Here's what's coming up.

The consequences of Trump going fossils first.

I speak to science writer David Wallace-Wells about official climate denialism.

Then.

- It's incredibly exciting and it's obviously something I've never done before, so it's a huge adventure.

- Actress Kristen Scott Thomas joins me on her directorial debut, My Mother's Wedding.

Based loosely on her own life.

Plus.

- The concern has been very widespread and it has been non-partisan.

This is a serious concern for public health experts, scientists, doctors who study vaccination.

- The plot against vaccines.

Reporter Anna Merlin talks with Hari Sreenivasan about RFK Jr.'s personal views becoming US government policy.

(dramatic music) - Amanpour & Company is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Atwood and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, the Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poita Programming Endowment to Fight Anti-Semitism, the Family Foundation of Layla and Mickey Strauss, Mark J. Bleschner, the Philemon M. D'Agostino Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, the Peter G. Peterson and Joan Gantz Cooney Fund, Charles Rosenblum, Ku and Patricia Ewen, Committed to Bridging Cultural Differences in Our Communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to the program everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

In Europe this week, a wildfire the size of Paris ripped across Southern France, temperatures soared in Spain, and in Geneva an extraordinary UN meeting aimed at reining in the global production and pollution of plastic.

But across the ocean in the United States, Trump's MAGA movement is rolling back plans to mitigate climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to repeal the so-called endangerment finding, which says that fossil fuel emissions endanger human health and government can do something about it, calling it possibly the largest deregulatory action in US history.

And as we all know, what happens in America does not stay in America.

As the world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, its actions impact everybody on the planet.

David Wallace-Wells is an expert who wrote the book "The Uninhabitable Earth" and I spoke to him about this latest rollback from New York.

David Wallace-Wells, welcome to the program.

- Really good to be here.

- So let's talk about something that's actually happening and in your most recent writing.

So there is a UN plastic pollution kind of conference, anyway, talks underway in Geneva.

And you recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about this problem.

And honestly, one of the most vivid and probably terrifying sentences is, "There might be inside your skull the equivalent of a full plastic spoon."

Obviously plastics are made of fossil fuels.

Tell me how you came up with that and what actually that means.

- Well, you know, plastic concern has been rising for years now.

And so really since I've been writing about climate, I've been seeing news and alarm about microplastics in particular, although there are also nanoplastics, macroplastics.

You hear about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

You know, we talk about plastics in the ocean.

And when you follow the science, it's almost like every week there's a new alarming finding.

Everywhere they look, there are plastics.

So there are plastics in the depths of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean.

When a human submersible got there a few years ago, deeper than anyone had ever reached in the ocean before, plastic pollution was already there.

When they look up into the atmosphere and the stratosphere, there's plastics there in rain clouds circling Mount Fuji, in raindrops falling in the Amazon, in freshly sprayed ocean water coming off the beaches, crashing against sand, there's plastics there.

Everywhere they look on the planet, we find some evidence of this kind of pollution.

And increasingly, we're seeing it inside us too.

It's not just something that we can escape environmentally, it has already penetrated our own bodies.

So there are plastics in our kidneys and our hearts, and there's an association with that buildup with increased risk of heart disease and stroke.

There's plastics in placentas discharged by new mothers.

There's microplastics in the breast milk being fed to new babies.

And yeah, perhaps most alarmingly, in the brain, so much so that not just does it add up to the equivalent of a plastic spoon in the brain, but actually that's about one fifth by weight as much as brainstem.

- Oh my God.

Okay, you fully terrorize me, and I'm sure you can go on and on about where plastics are.

So they're clearly dangerous to us.

So what do you think, any talks in Geneva or elsewhere, I mean, if this is so pervasive and it's everywhere and you cannot escape it and it's in us and in our food chain, how does that get reversed or does it?

- Well, you know, I come to this from climate change and it's a quite similar problem.

It's basically a collective action problem, which we often tell ourselves can be solved through individual action in the case of climate by reducing our carbon footprint.

In the case of plastics, by throwing out the wrong kind of spatula or making sure that we're drinking less, you know, single use plastic bottles, which by the way, a single bottle of water can contain as much as 250,000 microplastics in it.

But in fact, you know, this is a silly way of thinking about the problem when pollution is already everywhere, including inside of us.

What we need to do is try to stop the, you know, stop the flow at the source.

And that means producing less plastic than we are now, probably not zero plastic anytime soon, but dramatically reducing the amount that we're producing.

And that's an uphill battle as it is with carbon and climate because, you know, we've produced as much plastic since about 2005, 2006, as in the entire history of plastic production before then.

We're now at something like 400 times as much plastic being produced every year as was produced in the years after World War II.

And so this is a huge booming global business, which does need to be really reformed.

And for about 30 years now, the companies that produce plastics, petrochemical companies and the fossil fuel companies have sort of sold us this story that we could actually solve this problem or at least address it through recycling because they want to distract us from how, you know, from the real problem, which is reducing the production in the first place.

And that's ultimately where we need to go.

- Okay, so again, doubly depressing because certainly all of us who've been busy recycling think that we're doing a decent job for us and for our future, but clearly not enough.

Now you said that's in the sea, but then you have carbon and all the rest of it in the air, which obviously also affects the seas.

So the latest in the new MAGA fossil first, you know, climate policy is this proposal by the EPA last week to repeal what's called the endangerment finding.

That was issued by the Supreme Court apparently in 2009.

Now look, I don't know, and I've never heard about it.

Do people know what it is?

What is it and why is it important?

And what would repealing it do?

- Basically, it was a finding that allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases without direct action by Congress.

And that seems increasingly important because it doesn't seem all that likely that in the US Congress will be taking action to reduce carbon emissions or greenhouse gases more generally anytime in the future.

Certainly in the next few years under Trump, but I think, you know, given the way that the IRA has played out politically in the US, it's unlikely that even a democratic administration overseeing a democratic Senate the next cycle would take meaningful action to reduce carbon emissions in a way that the Biden administration does.

And when we think about the scale of importance there, you know, one way of calculating that is through something called the social cost of carbon, which is a measure that economists come up with to tally in dollar terms just how much damage all of the carbon that's being put into the atmosphere is doing, and they do it by measuring mortality and economic productivity and a huge range of other sort of ephemeral effects of warming.

The Biden EPA found that number to be somewhere around $200 a ton.

And that may sound abstract, but what it means is that the US production of carbon every year, the Biden EPA calculated, this is not an activist group, it's not a climate lobbying group, it is the Biden EPA calculated that the damage being done by carbon emissions produced by the US every single year was north of $1 trillion.

Now, that was a major update to the Obama estimate, which was about 40 or $50, and a really large increase from the estimate made by the first Trump term, which still had it at $7.

But what the endangerment finding, you know, what this action on the endangerment finding means is that we're going all the way from about $200 a ton to functionally treating it as zero, as though there is no cost from carbon emissions at all, and the government should do nothing at all to address our carbon problem.

- So, as you know, there was a report that they came up with, the current EPA's justification, a Department of Energy report, apparently 141 pages long.

The Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, said climate change is a challenge, not a catastrophe.

Another climate scientist who's very famous, Michael Mann, said, "If you took a chat bot and you train it "on top of 10 fossil fuel industry-funded "climate denier websites, that's what it would look like."

Another says, "They cherry pick data points "that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority "of the scientific literature that does not."

So, digest all of that, and hopefully our audiences too, and now listen to the current EPA director, Lee Zeldin.

- To reach the 2009 endangerment finding, they relied on the most pessimistic views of the science.

The great news is that a lot of the pessimistic views of the science in 2009 that was being assumed ended up not panning out.

Hey, that's great, we can rely on 2025 facts as opposed to 2009 bad assumptions.

- So, he's obviously casting total doubt on the 2009 finding.

What would you say about that?

Because clearly, and then also, why do you think they're doing this?

Is it just a purely an anti-regulatory regime, who think that they're spending too much money?

They could save money by doing all this climate mitigation?

- Well, on the first point, it is true that some climate science has gotten more optimistic over the last few years.

We don't think that emissions are gonna be as high in the year 2100 as many scientists were projecting back in 2009, or for that matter, in 2015 or 2020.

A lot of that has to do with the world abandoning coal in a large-scale way, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're rolling out renewables much faster than we thought.

Beyond that, though, when we look at the science of actual climate impacts, we're seeing things happening faster and more intensely than we anticipated.

So while the emissions future looks slightly rosier than we worried would be the case a few years ago, the actual climate story is, if anything, scarier.

And there are a number of scientists, I wouldn't quite say the majority, who also think that we're learning things about the climate system, which suggests that it's more sensitive to the perturbations of emissions than we expected a few years ago, which means even if we're gonna be doing better in terms of carbon output, it may well be the case that the temperature effect will net out to be as bad or worse than we feared a few years ago.

So I would say in general, the science is not on the side of this argument with the EPA.

And I think they're showing their hand by eliminating the rule entirely.

As I said earlier, the first Trump administration set a social cost of carbon of $7.

In theory, the EPA could have gone back to that.

It would have been a dramatic undercounting, by my estimate, but it would have at least allowed for an acknowledgement that there are real-world consequences to global warming.

As you quoted the administrator saying earlier, perhaps he thinks it's not a catastrophe, just a challenge, but their move here is not to treat climate as a challenge at all.

It's to treat it as no issue for anyone that the US government has to deal with in any way.

As for why they're doing that, I think, yes, fundamentally, it's a culture war issue.

They're wanting to fight with the American left and the Democratic Party.

And I think what's really perverse and ironic there is that if you look at the way that the Trump-Hook coalition has evolved since 2015, 2016, and even 2020, one of the major developments has been the arrival of the tech right in that coalition.

These are people who are really obsessed with AI and engineering an AI future, and what they need to make that happen is much more abundant, much cheaper electricity.

Now, if the Trump administration took that imperative seriously and indeed took their campaign promise to promote energy abundance seriously, they may be doing much more to promote fossil fuel production than the Biden administration did, but they'd also be trying to promote solar and wind and geothermal and other clean sources, particularly because those are now cheaper and faster to build out than any of the fossil fuel infrastructure that the Trump admin is now pushing.

Of course, they're not doing that.

In fact, they're doing the opposite.

They're trying to drown any of that green energy development for the sake of promoting fossil fuel development, and that just shows you how unserious they are about energy abundance, how unserious they are about making America an electrostate competitive with China, how unserious they are about artificial intelligence beyond all of the climate implications, which for me are larger, but even taking their own stated goals at face value, they are failing their own test here.

- So we know, because you've told us, what an impact in general it'll have on the world, but also what an impact it'll have on not just the health of Americans, but the health of people around the world.

So I guess, obviously it was 1965, Lyndon Johnson's government that started talking about the effects of climate on people's health and to try to mitigate it.

Then it was in the '70s, it was a Republican President Nixon who created the EPA.

So it really has had a bipartisan kind of history.

What is the impact on individual health, do you think, if this is allowed to continue with this current Republican maggot president, given what you've just said is underway?

- Well, I think the biggest impact on human health from this problem is not directly the result of climate change, but the result of what we do to make climate warm, which is to say burn fossil fuels, that produces air pollution that kills globally perhaps 5 million, perhaps 10 million people every single year.

And in the US estimates run as high as 350,000 people a year, which is to say as many Americans may have died in 2020 from the effects of air pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels as died from COVID in that first pandemic year.

And that is not an exceptional year.

The statistics, the modeling suggests that we are doing that in an ongoing way, which means the direct health consequences of leaning into a fossil fuel near-term future are quite grim and devastating.

There are other effects too.

There are effects on heat mortality, there are effects on infectious disease.

You can go down the line.

I think unfortunately, you know, we've trained ourselves to look away from these consequences and think of the system that we have today built around fossil fuels as a kind of a neutral status quo, but it isn't.

It's killing many Americans every year.

And if we were in a greener, cleaner future, we would be killing many fewer of them.

That's true, not just in the US, it's true around the world, but in the US I think it's particularly grotesque given that we are such a rich country.

We are so well-endowed with public land.

We don't need to worry about land use issues.

We have an opportunity here, and indeed the Biden administration was trying to engineer a kind of a revolution in energy production that would have brought us at least into league with our great geopolitical rival, China.

And in fact, the Trump administration is just, you know, shooting ourselves in the foot, cutting off that project at the start.

And I think ultimately, when we pull back from the question of human health to the flourishing of human societies, we should be really ashamed to see the great lead that China has taken over the last few years.

10 years ago, climate diplomats would have said China was a climate problem, and now it's US, the petro state that is really the global climate problem.

And of course, China, as you say, is making a massive headways in this, particularly with EVs, the, you know, replacement of dirty emitters.

You know, you wrote that book, "The Uninhabitable Earth," and I interviewed you in 2019 when you published it, and your first line is obviously poignant today.

It is worse, much worse than you think.

You acknowledge that you might have come off as alarmist then.

You write, "Fair enough, because I am alarmed."

So six years later, what is the scale of uninhabitable and alarm?

- Well, I think a lot of that answer for me has to do with my own personal journey and, you know, bouncing around through new science and getting quite alarmed, and then kind of readjusting and taking a new assessment of the landscape.

I would say, personally, I'm less scared of the future that we're heading into, but more depressed, because I think that we are doing not nearly enough to limit warming and maybe more conspicuously not doing nearly enough to adapt to the future that we know is coming.

I think you see the impact there when you think about the Texas floods, the tragic Texas floods, and maybe most dramatically when you think about the horrible fires that swept through Los Angeles, Palisades, and Altadena just six months ago, destroying whole neighborhoods in some of the richest, most well-connected parts of the world, and yet these are stories that we have already moved on from and are treating as background noise and wallpaper.

I think we're seeing that pattern play out more and more in the future.

We are not just not mitigating climate change sufficiently.

We are adapting to that new future primarily by normalizing a level of disaster that a few years ago we were horrified by, I was horrified by, but now seem like just like, you know, more daily news that we can move on past and ignore.

- I know, and that is really the challenge, and it's unbelievable to think, because just a few years ago with the Greta Thunberg movement, there was such awareness.

Just quickly, why are you less scared if you're more depressed?

- I've started to see this as more continuous with a pattern of human history where there's more suffering than needs to be, more suffering than we should conscience as people of good conscience, and yet a world in which we will navigate thinking that it's relatively normal.

It's a kind of an indictment of our moral imagination that we can look around at something like the Texas floods and see it as no big deal, and yet the fact that we are seeing it as no big deal tells us something about how we will live in the future world, one pockmarked by more disaster and considerably more suffering than was necessary, and yet one in which most people will probably live their lives thinking, you know, looking around and thinking, everything's kind of fine.

That's the role of the alarm raiser is to say, let's not accept that.

Let's try to fight for a better future, but I do think that the evolving geopolitics show us an unfortunate next few decades in which we see many more disasters, and yet we put climate on the back burner rather than the front burner.

- Well, you keep raising the alarm and we'll keep talking to you.

David Wallace-Wells, thank you very much indeed.

- Thanks for having me.

- For decades, the actress, Kristen Scott Thomas, has been lighting up our screens from four weddings and a funeral to the English patient and most recently in Apple TV's "Slow Horses."

Now she's stepping behind the camera to direct for the first time with a deeply personal story based loosely on her own life.

Of course, she's acting in it too.

It's called "My Mother's Wedding" and it's star-packed.

Scarlett Johansson and Sienna Miller play two of the sisters.

Here's a clip.

- As the youngest, Elise, celebrated before your daughters, I'd like to propose a toast.

- Come on.

- Mummy, tonight is your last night as a Munson.

- What?

- You're not gonna change your name again?

- Mrs. Jeffrey Loveglove.

- Stop it.

- It's a beautiful name.

It's not his fault.

- It's Mummy Loveglove.

- You can take over from here, Sean.

Dangerous mission tomorrow.

I've got to get my mother down the aisle and deal with my sisters.

- Who is an usher?

- Where on earth can the bridesmaids be?

- Me, me!

- Oh, Katie.

- Jack, thank God you're here.

- Everyone wishes it was you two getting married tomorrow.

- Scott Thomas talked to me about this new adventure when she joined me right here in our London studio.

Chris and Scott Thomas, welcome to the program.

- Thank you very much.

- So how exciting is it to be, well, selling your first directorial debut?

- It's incredibly exciting and it's obviously something I've never done before.

So it's a huge adventure, a totally new world for me, and yeah, super exciting.

- How much of it is autobiography?

I know the details are slightly different, obviously.

- Well, it's inspired by my childhood events and how it has affected my life and how I imagine it affects other people's lives.

And because what happened to me as a child became a kind of, it was like the title of every, it was always mentioned in every magazine article I did or anything like that.

- That you lost two fathers, not one.

- I lost my father and my stepfather.

They were both pilots, they're both called Simon.

It was something kind of fascinating for people about that.

And so I just decided to kind of make it my story instead of just being a kind of footnote in somebody else's article.

- You play your mother.

You play the character Diana.

Was she as emblematic in your life as your departed fathers?

- Well, she was everything, really.

And she died about two years ago, just after we finished shooting.

But she was a very, she was an extraordinary person.

And you think that she brought up five children in these incredibly complicated circumstances where she kept getting kind of pushed back, pushed back by losing her partner and the father to her children.

So she was incredibly resilient.

And yeah, she was definitely a beacon to us all, definitely.

She was, but she was just trying to do her best.

She was totally unprepared for this.

When you think that she was, by the time she was 32, 33, she'd lost two husbands and had five children.

I mean, I can't even imagine that.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, I cannot even imagine that now.

- We've got a couple of tips.

I'm gonna play the first one, because again, this is obviously about, it's called "My Mother's Wedding."

So it's about your mother's third marriage.

And this is a hen party.

- I would like to propose, ding, ding, ding, a toast.

- Oh, come on.

- Toast for it, Georgie.

Right, as the youngest and the least celebrated of all your daughters.

- By far the prettiest.

- That's right.

- Definitely the drunkest.

Anyway, Mommy, tonight is your last night as a Munson.

- What?

- You're not gonna change your name again?

- Of course I'm gonna take Jeff's name.

Mrs. Jeffrey Loveglove.

- Sorry.

- Are you serious?

I mean, really?

- Yes, I am Mrs.

Frost, Mrs. Munson.

And now Mrs. Loveglove.

- Loveglove.

- It's a beautiful name.

It's not his fault.

- You made the name up?

- Well, I looked for names that I wanted a really good, crusty old name.

- It wasn't the real third father's name?

- No, no, no, no, no, none of that is real, rest assured.

And I found this name and I thought, God, what a brilliant name, Mr. Loveglove.

I mean, you'd fall in love with somebody called Percival Jeffrey Loveglove.

That is his full name.

- You're talking to the girls.

But they raise a point, don't they, that you've done all of this.

A, you've had their names, and now you're gonna give up that name.

And what does it mean for you as a woman?

I mean, there's so much in that scene.

- I think that's what we were sort of exploring in the film is what is in a name.

What it means to, and later one of the main sort of arguments in the film is around a name, taking a name.

And I think that that is very important to us.

I mean, I'm an actress, so I've taken on a million names.

Maybe not a million, but a good 100 different names.

And I adapt to different names very easily, but the name is who you are.

You know, it is, and that's what she says.

It's, that's it, that's your name.

And I think those are very important things to think about.

And often things that we don't really think about.

- What are you saying?

What is your message to the people who see this film with this film?

You've chosen various scenes.

It's very bucolic, it's very Pride and Prejudice-esque in terms of the look.

Very, very English, very English countryside experience.

- That's what I wanted to, I wanted to reproduce that sort of glorious summers that we don't seem to get anymore.

You either get a heat wave or a torrential rain.

But I wanted to take that idea of sort of perfect summers that we all have of our childhood.

We all think of the, remember the summers running around in the fields or whatever you did as a kid.

That's what I did as a kid.

And so that remembering that time as being completely perfect, and yet that time was stained by these terrible, catastrophic events.

And so I think a lot of it came from the fact that I was constantly being told that I had a tragic childhood.

Did I?

You know, yes, terrible things happened, but actually it was all very happy.

We managed to bumble along and we managed to find a way to be happy between the sisters, between me and my brothers and sisters, for example.

And I think in our film, you can tell by the way these three actresses portray these three sisters with so much love and fun and teasing and mockery and fighting and anger and all the things that sisters do.

- Were you the eldest in real life?

- I was the eldest.

- So you are the Scarlett Johansson character.

She plays Catherine.

- I think I'm a bit- - The eldest sister?

- Yes.

So Scarlett plays the eldest.

And then Sienna Miller plays her sister, who's an actress.

And then Emily Beecham plays the youngest sister, who's the sort of perf who's done everything right.

- She's a palliative care nurse.

- She's a palliative care nurse.

- But I'm really interested to read your author's statement because you talk about growing up.

And here you say, "As a sullen teenager growing up in Dorset, "I'd burn the midnight oil to watch French films "on our diminutive television screen.

"I've always been drawn to cinema "that celebrates the heroic, the tragic, "and the uproariously comical aspects "of our everyday existence."

You talk about the films that you loved, Hannah and Her Sisters, Little Miss Sunshine, Roma, Marriage Story, Little Women, et cetera.

I love the fact that you use the word sullen.

- I do, I love that fact.

You do have a certain shield around you in your acting and maybe even in your personal life that's quite hard.

Why were you sullen?

- I think when you have had repeatedly these events that change your life and whip the carpet from under your feet and make everything different.

When your father dies, my father died when I was almost six, and then my stepfather died when I was 11, like the character played by Scarlett.

You're kind of braced for the worst.

So you kind of, if you don't get too comfortable and you're always on the edge of, you're always sort of prepped for disaster.

And I think that's what I meant by sullen and trying to find pleasure in things that I could rely on, like films on a TV set, smallest TV set you can possibly imagine.

But I would watch late at night, I would watch these things that I shouldn't really have been watching, but my mother couldn't be everywhere, obviously.

- Your first film, I can't even believe this, but tell me, I can't remember the name, but it was directed by Prince.

- You cannot remember the name.

- No.

- It was called "Under the Cherry Moon."

- There you go, thank you very much.

It's written here, but I don't want to read it like this.

- I figured you'd tell me.

- How incredible is that?

- That was incredible.

That was really incredible.

I'd been doing a play in Burgundy in a field.

I get a call from a casting agent who says, "Will you come to Paris because Prince is doing a film "and they're looking for local actresses who speak English."

Well, at the time, Prince was at his peak, absolute peak.

And it was what, sort of '83 or something?

And I listened to his albums nonstop, nonstop, nonstop.

And of course, I sort of went straight up to Paris and did this interview.

And in fact, they were looking for somebody to play the lead, but they didn't want to sort of announce that.

And I got asked, "Would you be interested in playing the lead?"

"Yes."

And then that evening I had to go and meet him, which was, I mean, it was all totally, I could not, I had to keep pinching myself.

This is actually happening to me.

- Amazing.

And then obviously everybody knows you for "Weddings and a Funeral" and "The English Patient," all the amazing things you've done.

"Slow Horses," I mean, it's really brilliant.

What's it like working with Gary Oldman?

- I love working with Gary.

We worked together before.

We did a film called "The Darkest Hour," which was about Churchill.

And I played his wife, Clementine Churchill.

And no, so he's just, he's so, he's so brilliant and so sort of flexible and agile, and you never know what he's going to do next.

And that's what I like.

- I want to play another clip from my mother's wedding.

And this is where the girls, the sisters, are having an argy-bargy.

It's basically a fight.

Here we go.

- Every time I come here, I think that it's going to be better, but it never is.

I'm just going to leave this (beep) little country and take the Grand Formage and all of his money, and it's going to be your fault.

- There you go again, just running off to get another little man.

- Why, you're on your high horse.

Look at what you're doing to Jack.

- Get the (beep) off, Victoria.

- Or your son.

What would daddy have to say about that?

- Poor little boy.

- You see by the end how close they are.

I assume you were very close to your sisters and brothers.

And I got, one of the scenes that I really loved, I found it very smart and clever, and I assume your mother did this, you playing Diana, your mother, went to the graves, it was your annual, you go to the graves of the two fathers and put flowers.

And you told in the film, your girls to come with you.

And you explained to them that all their lives, they had hero worshipped these men, who they probably still think of as the young men who left there.

And she told them what to do.

Tell me about that, because I really found that very good.

- Well, I just felt that we needed, that scene in fact was written by my writing partner, John Mickleswade.

- Do you mean your husband?

- My current husband.

- And how happy are you as a digression?

This is my mother's wedding, but you got married again.

- I know, it's completely mad, isn't it?

They're all sort of, yeah.

- And working together.

- Yes, that was really, really fun.

- Yeah.

- That was great.

But anyway, so he came up with this idea, because I couldn't really articulate it.

I told him what I wanted to be said, but he didn't, you know, but I didn't know how to put it into a form.

And so this is his work.

And actually it's spot on, isn't it?

- Yeah, it really is actually.

- But it is, but I did find that myself.

I remember going to a cousin's wedding, and this, when I was about, I don't know, 30.

And this chap wanders over to me, and he's slightly portly, and he's bald, and he's, you know, 60 something.

And he says, "Hello, I was your father's best friend."

I said, "You can't possibly be my father's best, "my father was 30 years old, beautiful."

- Did you actually say that, or you thought it?

- No, but I was thinking, how can this be?

And I remember trying to keep my face from falling, and sort of denying it.

And there's another scene in the film as well, where they're reminded that actually, if their father were alive today, he would be as old as that man over there.

And I think that sort of hero-worshipping people who have left this earth is a very easy trap to fall into, especially when it hasn't been spoken about at all with the children when these events happen.

And so I suppose in a way that this is a way of me saying, you know, that she should have, should have, should have spoken more to her children at the time, rather than just getting on with it.

Which is, I think, is a pretty military type thing.

- Military, British, you know, generational, that generation just got on with it.

Especially a woman who's having to support a whole family on her own.

I was struck by the way you, the way you depicted that, those flashbacks, by the animation, and it's an Iranian animator.

I was really pleased to see that.

How did you come up with that device?

'Cause it was very effective.

- In fact, the idea of making little animated films was my first idea.

Because my brothers were both so small when their, well, actually one of my brothers was born after his father died.

And then my mother married again, and his father died, and his stepfather died when he was four, leaving also another little brother.

They don't have any memory, nothing to hang their hat on.

So I thought, because I was nearly six when my father died, and 12 when my stepfather died, I would try and make little short animated films of the memories I had with those men, and leave them something.

And then it just sort of grew from there.

But so the animated sequences are actually the root and the heart of the film.

- I'm glad I asked you then, 'cause it is amazing.

It's very effective.

Especially the amount of detail you put in, and the detail that's left out of their faces.

- And the emotion you get from the drawings is really quite powerful.

- I think so too.

It's the second or third time you've worked with Scarlett Johansson.

What's it like?

- I think it's, yes, one, two, three.

Third time I've played her mother, yeah.

- Oh, third time you've played her mother?

Okay then, what's it like being an older woman in this business?

- Well, I'm loving it, to be honest.

- You're doing great.

You're getting great roles, whether it's in "Slow Horses", you're directing.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think-- - So no complaints?

- Well, yes, I mean, some.

I mean, there's still no King Lear.

- Didn't Glenda Jackson do it?

- She did, yes, she did.

She did, she did.

- But now this is your audition.

You wanna do King Lear?

- Not, why not?

There you go.

Not right this minute.

- But after the film's out.

- Yeah, right.

- Okay, well, you heard it here first.

- Plenty of things to be getting on with.

- Including you're a grandmother.

- Including I'm a grandmother.

Yeah, that's busy.

- Enjoy.

- Thank you.

- Thank you so much, Kristen Scott Thomas, for being with us.

And the film is out this weekend in North America.

RFK Jr. is continuing to dramatically remake America's health system.

This week, he announced the United States will slash funding for mRNA vaccine development.

You'll remember that mRNA vaccines were vital in fighting COVID-19.

And they're seen as a key tool to control future pandemics because they can be manufactured quickly.

Even Trump's former Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams, said this move will cost lives.

Anna Merlin, reporter for Mother Jones, wrote about RFK's war on these immunizations.

And here she is with Hari Sreenivasan.

- Chris-John, thanks.

Anna Merlin, you recently wrote a piece in Mother Jones titled "The Plot Against Vaccines.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and His Allies Have Hit on a Way to Undermine Immunization."

First, I guess, let's just sort of break down the article bit by bit.

Is there an overarching plot or how far along are we in this?

- Right, my colleague, Kira Butler and I, who co-wrote the article with me, looked at sort of a series of steps that Mr. Kennedy and the people he's installed at HHS have taken to frankly endanger the vaccine supply.

And we looked at both things that could potentially hurt the people trying to get vaccinated, could deter companies from making vaccines.

And we also looked at the ways that he's trying to overhaul the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which works to compensate people who allege that they've been injured by vaccines.

So it's a pretty systematic approach and it is frankly moving very, very quickly.

A lot of public health experts we talk to are really, really concerned.

- Okay, let's start with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

I'm pretty safe in assuming that a majority of Americans don't even know what that is and how it works.

Explain what it is.

- So the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was established in the 1980s after a scare over DTP vaccines, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis.

Basically throughout the 1970s, there were a growing number of personal injury lawsuits alleging injuries from DTP vaccines and the amount of money being asked for from those lawsuits kept skyrocketing.

So by the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, drug manufacturers were increasingly reluctant to make those vaccines and indeed to make vaccines at all.

Despite the fact that most public health experts and scientists who looked at these lawsuits didn't necessarily think that the injuries that were being alleged came from these vaccines.

So there started to be a real nationwide concern over the vaccine supply, endangering the vaccine supply, which of course doesn't just hurt the US, it also hurts the rest of the world because a lot of major drug companies are housed here in the US.

So basically they came up with this system, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that went into effect a few years later that essentially created what is called a no fault system where people who allege that they or their children were injured by vaccines go into this specialized program that is set up to compensate them.

Most cases, about 60% of cases are heard without going into a courtroom, so to speak.

The system is actually designed to compensate people very quickly, even if the injuries aren't necessarily proved to be caused by vaccines, it's a pretty unique program.

And then the cases that are heard in a courtroom of sorts are heard by what are called special masters who are judicial appointees who are specially trained in vaccine law, vaccine cases, the science around vaccines, the sort of established system about how some vaccines can in very rare cases cause some injury to some people.

So it is a pretty revolutionary system and while people who work within it, like the attorneys who represent vaccine injured people would tell you that it is in need of some updates, by and large, it has been working pretty well since the 1980s.

- So this seems like a compromise.

On the one hand, the public health infrastructure says, listen, vaccines overall are important and at the same time, there might be injuries.

Is that right?

- Yeah, that's correct.

Broadly, we know and we have known for centuries at this point that vaccination is a good thing and it is good for public health.

However, like every medical product, it is not risk-free for absolutely everyone.

So this system basically concludes that it is our social responsibility to compensate those very few people who might be injured by vaccines and to do so quickly.

- So what are some of the examples of people who have been in front of this system who get paid out?

- So if you look at hrsa.gov, you can see that there are so-called table injuries.

There is a list of vaccines and the supposed injuries that can, in some rare cases, be caused by them, right?

And so you can see that there are things like encephalitis.

One of the most common injuries is actually not an allergic reaction.

It is what's called CERVA, which is a shoulder injury that can happen if the vaccine is administered too high or too low in the muscle.

So these so-called table injuries not only say which vaccine could, in rare cases, cause which injury, it also gives you a timeframe that is generally scientifically agreed upon for when these injuries could take place, which is, again, an important counter to what Secretary Kennedy and other people like him have claimed, which is pinning any number of childhood and adult syndromes to vaccines, even if there is no evidence that that is the case, and even if the vaccines were administered years ago.

-RFK Jr. seems to be incredibly critical of this court.

He recently tweeted out, "The VICP has devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption as government lawyers and the special masters who serve as vaccine court judges prioritize the solvency of the HHS Trust Fund over their duty to compensate victims."

Well, why is RFK so critical of this court, this process?

-Secretary Kennedy has been critical of it for years, going back to his time as the head of the anti-vaccine organization, Children's Health Defense.

While I don't know what Mr. Kennedy's personal ire about the program is linked to, a lot of personal injury attorneys in the anti-vaccine movement are critical of the program because they would like these cases to be heard in civil court.

And, indeed, Mr. Kennedy has been counsel in some of the few vaccine cases that are heard in civil court, a series of class-action lawsuits over the Gardasil vaccine.

So I would say that in listening to the comments that Mr. Kennedy has made recently about this program, it is pretty striking some of the basic facts that he misstates.

He claims that the system is designed not to compensate people.

He claims that it's a lot more adversarial than it actually is.

He doesn't mention that 60% of people are compensated without ever going before a special master.

It is -- Again, these are statistics that are easy to find if you work for the federal government or look at a government-run website.

So it's very surprising to me how many things he says about the program that most people would disagree with.

>> One of the lines of reasoning that Secretary Kennedy has used in the past is that courts like the one that deal with vaccines are set up in a way to protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies.

What's wrong with that thinking?

If they had to go to civil court, wouldn't there be the possibility that they would have to pay lots more to people who are suffering from vaccines?

>> So there's a couple things wrong here.

One is that as anybody who's paid the slightest attention to the American civil court system knows, it's adversarial.

It's expensive.

It takes a long time.

So we would be asking patients who may also already be dealing with serious injuries to go through a very long, very expensive court system where, for instance, their legal fees are not paid for, which in many cases, they are paid for in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

They also stand a chance of losing.

You know, this is something that is not often mentioned when Secretary Kennedy talks about this.

This is a process that does not have a guaranteed outcome.

This was set up, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was set up for patients.

It was set up to make sure that they have a better chance.

Civil court is a lot more unpredictable.

It involves people going up against juries who may or may not side with them.

And so overall, we need increased compensation in this program.

These people are not getting paid enough.

The caps are too low because they were established a long time ago.

There need to be more special masters hearing these cases so they go through more quickly.

If Secretary Kennedy and the people he appointed talked to lawyers for vaccine injured plaintiffs, they would have a lot of suggestions for how to overhaul the program.

It wouldn't involve weakening or dismantling it in the ways that he seems to be suggesting.

- Let's take a look at, you know, a different kind of line of his attack on immunizations or vaccines.

He has, as the secretary, the power to help appoint people in positions who decide what sort of vaccines we should be pursuing, which ones should be taken off the shelves, which should be suggested for use, et cetera.

Well, who has he filled those leadership positions with?

- Yeah, one really noteworthy thing that happened recently that you probably saw the headlines about is that Secretary Kennedy removed all 17 members of ACIP, which is an advisory body that helps CDC decide what should appear on the vaccine schedule and the sort of guidance we give to the American public about vaccines.

So Secretary Kennedy removed all 17 members of ACIP and replaced them with people who in several cases have very distinct and long-term ties to the anti-vaccine movement and to other forms of medical skepticism and sort of contested medical advice.

So he's done that.

That is ongoing.

He has suspended the US's funding to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which helps vaccinate children in some of the poorest places in the world in developing countries against diseases like polio, Ebola, meningitis.

He's installed a series of people throughout HHS.

There's been a number of actions and they're happening very fast.

- What's the response been from the existing medical community?

And does that break down along, I don't know, partisan lines?

Is it just Democrat doctors or Republican doctors that are either in support of this or in opposition to this?

- No, this is broadly unpopular with the medical community.

Another thing that HHS has done under Mr. Kennedy is kicked out long established medical associations from the CDC working groups that talk about vaccines.

Again, this is like the American Medical Association and another half dozen really big medical bodies.

The concern has been very widespread and it has been nonpartisan.

This is a serious concern for public health experts, scientists, doctors who study vaccination.

And the biggest concern overall is that it's gonna be confusing to the American public.

You're suddenly gonna have somebody in a position of extraordinary power making contested and extremely questionable claims about the safety of the vaccination system that we've worked so hard as sort of the US public health system has worked so hard to build trust in these programs.

- It's also interesting that we're already seeing a decrease in vaccinations and that's accelerated post COVID, right?

- Yeah, yeah, that's true.

COVID was a really profitable and fruitful time for anti-vaccine groups.

They were able to use people's fear and confusion about what was going on to drive first skepticism about COVID vaccines and mRNA technology and then vaccines more broadly.

As you're saying, we've seen a decrease in the number of children getting vaccinated for school.

And that has happened previously in other areas of history.

It's always a concern, but it's a special concern right now 'cause we're still dealing with a devastating measles outbreak across the country that again, HHS has not been speaking about as much as you might expect.

Measles is incredibly dangerous.

It's especially dangerous for children and infants.

And if those kids are not vaccinated against measles, it could be and have been for at least two children in Texas so far deadly.

- What's been the secretary's response to the measles outbreak?

- Secretary Kennedy suggested that at least one of the children who died of measles was malnourished, which is not true.

We do not have any evidence that that is the case.

And Secretary Kennedy's former organization, Children's Health Defense, has actually interviewed the parents of the children who died in Texas and is sort of attempting to bring them around to the anti-vaccination cause.

So I think it's fair to say that a lot of public health experts, myself and my colleague, Kira Butler, talked to really expressed a desire for HHS to do more, to reemphasize that people should get their children vaccinated against measles and to not muddy the waters and confuse people about what is safe and what isn't.

- You know, underlying this notion that there could be different environmental factors is sort of a challenge, if not outright denial of kind of germ theory and science that we've established for 150 or 200 years at least now.

And I wonder what is in place of that?

What is the secretary and the people that he works with who are part of this movement, what do they believe in if they don't think that measles spreads the way that it actually does?

- Yeah, my colleague Kira Butler has written about this in some detail.

Secretary Kennedy in one of his books suggested a belief in what is called miasma theory, which is basically as he describes it and the way that he describes it is not quite accurate to the historical belief.

But essentially the idea with miasma theory is that people get sick from things like dirty air and environmental factors, but they can be protected from illness by better nutrition and by building up their own immune systems.

And while that was probably a useful idea before we knew what germs were, several centuries ago, now that we know that germs and viruses get people sick, you have to take that into account when you're thinking about how to protect people from illness.

So we've asked several times if Secretary Kennedy still believes in and promotes miasma theory.

And I would love to know more about whether or not he still holds that to be true.

- From your piece, there's a comment from the department and from one of their spokespersons that Secretary Kennedy is committed to restoring scientific integrity, transparency, and public trust in federal health policy, especially with concerns vaccines.

Any suggestion that his goal is to make vaccines harder to access or discourage manufacturers is completely false.

How are the actions that he is taking now, how would they decrease the interest of manufacturers to make these medicines?

- Right, so we can look at exactly what happened in the 1980s with the DTP vaccine, which is that as these civil cases and these enormous jury awards started to rack up, drug manufacturers started to pull out of making vaccines.

This isn't something that they have to do.

And frankly, they often choose not to because vaccines, contrary to what a lot of folks in the anti-vaccine movement will tell you, don't make them a ton of money.

That is not a super profitable product for drug manufacturers or doctors.

So they could simply choose not to make them, not to market them due to concerns over getting sued.

And that is very much the place where the public health experts that Kira and I spoke to are worried that we will find ourselves if this type of anti-vaccine rhetoric from the federal government continues.

So it remains to be seen.

And I would say, as I have been saying when I've talked to folks about this, if you need to get up to date on any of your vaccines at all, talk to your doctor, like get that going as soon as you can.

- Just so we don't leave this conversation, any doubt here, where is the science on vaccines today?

- Vaccines are incredibly safe.

They're incredibly effective.

We started vaccinating people as a society around the same time that we learned that it's good to wash your hands.

This is a very old, very established science.

But if you have any concerns and say, if you're somebody who doesn't trust the American medical establishment, right?

Or somebody who just is really concerned about what you see as corruption in American medicine, you can look at studies from places like Denmark.

Denmark just released another landmark study tracking children over the last 24 years to specifically look at whether there's concern over aluminum adjuvants in vaccines.

Aluminum adjuvants have been used in vaccines for a long time to increase their efficacy.

And Secretary Kennedy and others have claimed that maybe that is unsafe.

So again, Denmark looked at this data for the past 24 years and determined that no, aluminum adjuvants are safe.

There is so much science, not just in the US, but across the world showing that vaccines are safe, that they're effective, and they are a good idea for most people.

And of course, if you have any doubts about this for yourself or your children, you should talk to your doctor.

But the concern now is that there is going to be a disconnect between what the American health system is saying, what people like the HHS Secretary are saying, and what you might hear from the medical professional in your life, which is confusing for people.

- Yeah, which might make some very difficult conversations that doctors have to have.

Hannah Harlan, Cedar reporter for Mother Jones.

Thanks so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- A vaccine skeptical USA is very worrisome for the whole world.

That is it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter at pbs.org/amanpour.

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