Can RFK Jr. Fix Our Dysfunctional Public Health Agencies?
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Atlanta and suburban Maryland. Why? Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health are headquartered in those places. As HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would be able to shape the priorities of these agencies.
In fact, the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH have long needed drastic reform. But is putting RFK Jr. in charge of HHS the right way to fix these dysfunctional public health agencies?
First, let’s take a quick look at what’s wrong with each agency. The timid bureaucrats at the FDA stifle medical innovation to the detriment of patient health. These regulatory shortcomings have prompted calls for abolishing the agency and adopting competitive systems for assuring the safety and efficacy of medical treatments and diagnostics.
The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and public health research with a budget of $47 billion, most of which is used to support research at universities and academic medical centers. The agency has long been criticized for being way too risk-averse when it comes to choosing which research projects to fund. “The NIH’s extramural research is systematically biased in favor of conservative research,” concluded a 2022 Emergent Ventures analysis of the agency’s research grant process. “The NIH may be hamstringing bioscience progress, despite the huge amount of funds it distributes, because its sheer hegemony steers the entire industry by setting standards for scientific work and priorities.”
The CDC, as the federal agency whose main charge is to detect and manage public health responses to infectious diseases, utterly failed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Distracted by fighting “epidemics” of obesity, smoking, and violence, it massively botched its response to an actual epidemic when it struck.
So what does RFK Jr. plan to do with each agency? Like all politicians, RFK Jr. tailors his remarks to his audiences, but here are some of his statements with respect to how he plans to handle these three agencies.
Back in 2017, RFK Jr. talked with then-President Trump about setting up a vaccine safety review commission. During a Science interview about the prospective commission, he declared that the CDC “is the locus of most of the most serious problems with the vaccine program, the two divisions at CDC: the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the Immunization Safety Office, which is where the scientists are.”
During an NBC News interview, RFK Jr. asserted:Â “I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccines. If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have [a] choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information.”
Being informed by the best information is certainly the right goal. But RFK Jr.’s long history of anti-vaccination agitation suggests he is not a source of the best information for the safety and efficacy of modern vaccines. This includes false assertions that vaccines cause autism; they are not tested using placebo-controlled trials; and contradicting the previous claim, COVID-19 vaccines killed more people than did placebo.
Again, the CDC needs fixing, but RFK Jr.’s skepticism about the safety and efficacy of modern vaccines would further undermine what should be the CDC’s main focus: the prevention of the spread of dangerous infectious diseases.
“FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma,” he posted on X Â in October. “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”
First, there is nothing on the list that a libertarian would prohibit, but you take them at your own risk. However, the FDA in August refused to approve using the psychedelic MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. The FDA also does have a role in de
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