Adams, Sadjadpour, and McKenzie Discuss Iran Policy and Military Affairs on Face the Nation

Seventy percent of Americans say they support childhood vaccines, but a comparable majority say they do not trust the nation's prospective top doctor. That paradox, spelled out Sunday by former Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, arrived alongside an equally stark verdict from overseas: Iran policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour, watching mediators gather in Islamabad without Tehran at the table, told Face the Nation that U.S.-Iran normalization has no path as long as the Islamic Republic holds power.

The episode joined Adams, Sadjadpour, and retired Gen. Frank McKenzie in its second half, connecting a domestic crisis of institutional credibility with a military conflict that has put at least 12 U.S. service members in hospital beds at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, up from the 10 initially reported by multiple outlets.

Adams, appearing from Indianapolis, went straight at the Casey Means confirmation fight. "The most important thing for your viewers to understand is that America's most pressing health threat today isn't opioids or obesity, it's mistrust," he said. He cited polling showing 70 percent of Americans support childhood vaccines and school mandates, while a similar majority say they do not trust health information from Robert Kennedy or Means, Trump's surgeon general nominee. "Childhood vaccines like measles, mumps, rubella, are safe, they're effective, and they're the most important public health achievement of our lifetimes," Adams said, warning that retreating on vaccines would not make the country healthier. Republican pollster Fabrizio Ward's data, he added, suggests the eroding credibility will carry electoral consequences in November.

The conversation then turned to Tehran. Sadjadpour, joining from Islamabad where Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt had convened as self-appointed mediators, noted that Iran had not responded to the 15 points the Trump administration put forward, and that Secretary Rubio had acknowledged uncertainty about who the U.S. would even be negotiating with. Sadjadpour's ceiling for any deal was a modest one: "I think we could see a potential cease fire that opens the Strait of Hormuz, which would shift this back from a hot war back to a cold war. But there's no possibility, in my view, so long as this regime is in power, of a U.S.-Iran normalization."

McKenzie, calling in from Tampa, framed the Strait as a military lever rather than a diplomatic finish line. "We certainly have thought of the Strait of Hormuz out of Kharg Island," he said, pointing to the Iranian-held islands along the southern littoral as pressure points the U.S. military has considered. His posture tracked with the position he staked out in a March 1 Face the Nation appearance, when he said it was too soon to be "thinking about an off-ramp" in the Iran mission.

The two analysts diverged most sharply on who could represent Iran if talks ever materialized. Host Margaret Brennan noted that Israeli strikes had killed several of the pragmatist figures the administration once hoped to engage. The name now surfacing is parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Baqer Ghalibaf. Sadjadpour offered a cold read: Ghalibaf is "a former senior Revolutionary Guard Commander and a close advisor to Mojtaba Khamenei," someone who "aspires to be Iran's modern strongman leader."

The Houthis sharpened the regional picture further. The Yemen-based group fired a missile at Israel on Saturday, which the Israeli Defense Forces intercepted, and separately issued three red lines warning the U.S., Israel, and Gulf partners against widening the conflict. With Sadjadpour seeing only a cold-war reset as a best case and McKenzie identifying no basis yet for an exit, the episode's throughline was a country simultaneously managing a public health system losing the trust of its own citizens and a military engagement with no defined end in sight.