THE FEDERALIST – Some in the scientific community are shocked and dismayed.
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and other federal health agencies. Are their concerns warranted? Or, are they hypocritical?
Kennedy’s three stated goals for the federal health agencies are:
(i) evidence-based medicine,
(ii) clean up corruption and conflicts of interest, and
(iii) end the chronic disease epidemic, with special emphasis on our children and concrete results within two years. These are not only laudable goals, but urgent ones.
During the Covid pandemic, evidence-based medicine and the fundamental principles of public health were thrown out the window.
With the health agencies’ singular focus on Covid, school closures and other lockdown measures generated enormous collateral damage that is increasingly obvious. The exception was Sweden, which had the lowest excess mortality during the outbreak.
Federal agencies questioned and ignored 2,500 years of scientific knowledge about immunity when they enforced vaccine mandates on students and working-age adults with superior infection-acquired immunity while my 87-year-old neighbor and other older people around the world were still unvaccinated.
Covid vaccines saved the lives of many older people, but Covid vaccine mandates killed older people by directing vaccines to those not needing them. That was both unscientific and unethical.
It is noteworthy that many who abandoned evidence-based medicine during the pandemic are now criticizing Kennedy, who wants the CDC, NIH, and FDA to return to evidence-based medicine.
Scientists are tasked with both developing and evaluating drugs and vaccines, and it is important to separate these two important roles. Scientists evaluating drug and vaccine safety should not take money from pharmaceutical companies.
There is also a revolving door between federal health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, at both the higher and lower levels …
