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As a general rule, American health secretaries manipulate their resumes to frictionless points. Sometimes you can attract scandals while you’re in your tenure. See Tom Price’s reported preferences Charter Jet. But it is hard to find anything that could be disqualified from that position, before the Senate, anyone who has won enough cachets to be nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. It tends to arrive at.
Today, Donald Trump’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s choice of confirmed today as America’s newest health secretary was specifically intended to break that mold. Kennedy positioned himself as a teller of truth, determined to uproot “corporate capture” and “tyrannical insensible bureaucrats.” Still, how unimaginable is that online reactionaries are given high-level status in the Department of Justice, and the teenager known as “” is in “a political moment other than today.” It’s surprising whether there wasn’t.Big ball” advises the State Department. Kennedy holds a broad and fascinating view on fighting corruption and helping Americans overcome chronic illnesses. But he is also to a near-comic degree and not perfectly qualified. He has been involved in vaccines, AIDS, charcoal thr, assassination of President John F. Kennedy, COVID-19, sunlight, gender discomfort, and 5g, with vaccines, AIDS, charcoal thr bacteria, countless dangerous conspiracy theories. I bought and sold it. He has a possibility Conflict of financial interest. He spoke about a Worm eating part of his brain About Discard the dead bear in Central Park. He is He was accused of sexual assault. (At his confirmation hearing, Kennedy denied the allegations, stating it was “debated.”)
Ultimately, it wasn’t important. Senate Democrats unanimously opposed Kennedy’s confirmation, but he sailed through the Senate vote this morning after losing only one Republican vote. However, Kennedy won the support of Senator Bill Cassidy. Sen. Bill Cassidy appears to be a Republican lawmaker until last week, and is most concerned about the potential damage that will lift anti-vaxin conspiracy theorists to the best perch in public health. Kennedy’s confirmation is a victory for Trump, and the clear message that Senate Republicans are willing to embrace pseudo-science in their unwavering respect for him. American health is in Kennedy’s hands.
So, what will happen next? Kennedy’s spokesperson did not respond to my request to speak to him about his agenda. Nevertheless, the first weeks of Kennedy’s appointment have been busy, adding to the confusion of Trump’s non-stop executive orders and Elon Musk’s crackdown on many federal agencies. As head of HHS, Kennedy oversees 13 different institutions, including the CDC, the FDA and the National Institutes of Health. Before being appointed, Kennedy said he believed that 600 employees needed to be fired from the NIH and that he needed to replace them with employees who fit Trump’s opinions more closely. (The NIH employs around 20,000 people, so at least such a cut is minor compared to the more drastic moves of the government’s Ministry of Efficiency.) He also said that no one in the FDA’s food centre It implies that you can pass a pink slip. More generally, he has said, “removing the financial conflict of interest in our institutions,” but he believes that people are so conflicted that they have to quit their jobs. It’s not explained exactly.
In particular, at the NIH, the sudden movements by Kennedy exacerbate the changes that are already unfolding under Doge’s auspices. Mask crews have sought to dramatically reduce the amount of administrative funds that are typically administered to universities by institutions to support scientific research. So did these planned meetings on funds It was suddenly cancelled last month. (Fund cuts have been temporarily suspended by federal judges, and fundraising meetings appear to have resumed.) It’s easy to assume that Kennedy supports these efforts, considering firing federal officials. is. But Doge’s efforts may actually undermine his bigger goals and set potential tensions between Kennedy and Musk. Research funding is essential for Kennedy’s pursuit of unraveling the causes of America’s chronic disorder crisis. He has Proposed We will devote more of our NIH resources to investigate “prevention, alternative, and holistic approaches to health.”
Policy-wise, chronic diseases may be the most attention for Kennedy, both for the time being and for the long term. He calls the issue an existential threat to the United States, and that is the clearest part of Kennedy’s agenda, with bipartisan support. But what he can do with this issue is uncertain. Many of the policies he advocated actually fell to another agency, the US Department of Agriculture, such as removing junk food from school lunches. The only food-related policy he regularly touts as having the power to enact regularly is to prohibit certain chemical additives in the food supply. Still, banning food additives is usually a hard and slow legal process.
His official statement provides other vague hints on issues that he is likely to contest during his term. Regarding abortion, he said he would direct the FDA and NIH to closely examine the safety of abortion pyrumifepristone. (Trump previously suggested that his administration would protect access to abortion drugs, but the president’s position is At best ambiguous. ) Regarding drug prices, Kennedy says he wants to crack down on intermediaries negotiating for the insurance company. But generally, Kennedy has little to say about how he tackles complex regulatory issues that are traditionally the focus of the Health Secretary. He may simply not have much to say. Kennedy implies he is far less concerned with these topics than diet and chronic illness. During the confirmation hearing, he told the senators that focusing on issues such as insurance payments without lowering the rate of chronic illness is similar to “moving the Titanic deck chair.” .
The biggest and most consequential question mark is how Kennedy approaches the vaccine. Even if he is ready to reduce access to American shots or simply receive them, he will degrade the protection of the country from a series of illnesses, and ultimately the people’s. It could cause death. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine defense was the subject of some of the most intense scrutiny during his confirmation hearing. “If it comes out clearly, the vaccine is safe. It won’t cause autism, “It will have an incredible effect. That’s your power. So what will it be? Is that so?” Cassidy asked. Kennedy has pledged to not strip or delay approvals for new vaccines and not plagued the government’s standards for vaccine approval. Throughout the process, he tried to distance himself from past vaccine locations. Assertion That federal officials who support the US childhood and vaccine programs resemble Catholic leaders who hide pedophiles among priests. However, his answer to his past statements and the senator’s questions about whether the vaccine causes autism has been consistently evasive. And some of his plans are in the hands of the anti-vaccine camp. He has pledged to promote the release of government-funded research, for example, in full raw data. Federal agencies in recent years for specific vaccine data.
Last week, after Cassidy cast a decisive committee vote that allowed Kennedy to go ahead with full Senate considerations, he told him in a speech on the Senator’s floor that he made Kennedy a public health He said he had pressure tested to the point of confidence that he was sure he could rebuild his trust. (Cassidy did not mention that he was also politically interested in moving Kennedy forward. Cassidy’s spokesman declined my request for an interview.) Kennedy endorses him. They hold almost biblical status amongst those, and most of them have distrust of the federal health agency. Cassidy’s public belief in Kennedy’s leadership offers a soothing vision. Imagine Americans whose views on public health design are deeply eroded over time.
However, consider the logic here. By voting to confirm Kennedy, the US Senate bets the future of our public health system on prayers that conspiracy theorists can build an institution that he and his supporters have broken for years. It’s there. A more realistic outcome is that Kennedy is leaving public health more broken than ever. Many Americans are skeptical of government scientific institutions, but polls show that relatively few people have a ingrained light empty against public health institutions that Kennedy supported. It has been shown that there are relatively few. By softening just a small part of voters, Kennedy risks a much larger marginalized Americans who may not agree with everything the CDC has done in recent years, but the agency’s vaccine programme I don’t think it’s comparable to the Nazi death camp. As Kennedy argued.
If Kennedy goes to the point where he denied the relationship between autism and the vaccine, that could lead to trouble in itself. Jennifer Reich, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver who studied vaccine skepticism, said that the issue of autism is a larger and far more widespread set of concerns that parents vaccinate their children. He said it’s only a part of it. In order for RFK to deny all the antagonism of his vaccine, he would have to essentially more generally abandon his prima facie skepticism about science. Alison Buttenheim, a vaccine skeptic expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said such an apology would do more to point some of his most enthusiastic supporters towards him than to change his opinion. It must be. “People make amazing leaps and cartwheels to avoid having their own beliefs or actions in conflict,” she told me.
If Kennedy wanted to truly restore his faith in public health, he beat his fellow conspiracyists while maintaining the trust of many people who thought the agency was already doing a great job before his arrival. It must. He’s probably going to give it a try. But it’s not the best way to get started by declaring that “the FDA war with public health is about to end,” as we did in October.
