Jeffrey H. Anderson Shake Up HHS The department, exposed during the pandemic for its incompetence and groupthink, is in desperate need of reform—which Robert Kennedy Jr., whatever his flaws, will pursue.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/shake-up-hhs
President Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services has the press corps in the D.C.–New York corridor flummoxed. The Washington Post reports that “Public health experts” call the pick “alarming and unprecedented.” The Wall Street Journal labels it a “strange choice.” And New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci opines that “among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks,” his selection of Kennedy “stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause.”
No federal department needs a major institutional shakeup more desperately than the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency’s “expert” authority was the basis on which President Biden and the vast majority of governors issued a variety of mask, vaccine, and lockdown mandates that undermined Americans’ basic freedoms, while achieving next to nothing in return.
Kennedy took the poster boy of the mask-and-lockdown regime to task in his bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci. But that book, a compelling and generally well-researched indictment of the public-health establishment, also makes clear that the agency’s problems extend well beyond one unscrupulous, attention-hogging bureaucrat. As former Trump advisor Scott Atlas reports in his own book, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and National Institutes of Health—all HHS agencies—appear to be infested with groupthink. During the pandemic, Atlas notes, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Deborah Birx, then-CDC director Robert Redfield, and Fauci “shared thought processes and views to an uncanny level,” and “virtually always agreed” with each other.
Whatever his flaws, RFK Jr. does not share in such groupthink. And while Kennedy’s critics focus primarily on his being a “vaccine denier,” those accusations don’t undermine his broader case: that Big Pharma has taken too much credit for the improvements in Americans’ health over the past century-plus.
In his book, Kennedy cites an article titled “Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: Trends In the Health of Americans During the 20th Century,” which examines the tremendous decline in non-infant child mortality during the 1900s. The authors, which include the director of HHS’s National Center for Health Statistics and the director of NCHS’s Division of Vital Statistics, found that “nearly 85%” of the decline in non-infant child mortality during the twentieth century occurred “before World War II, when few antibodies or modern vaccines and medications were available.” For non-infant child mortality from infectious diseases, “nearly 90%” of the decline happened before 1940. The report doesn’t say what caused these favorable declines; Kennedy attributes them to improved nutrition and sanitation.
Nutrition in recent years, however, doesn’t seem to have improved—a failure for which Kennedy takes the public-health establishment to task. While the standards for measuring obesity have apparently been the same since 1995, the results have changed dramatically. No state had an adult obesity rate over 20 percent in 1995, but every state had an adult obesity rate over 20 percent in 2023. Indeed, most—40 of the 50—states’ adult obesity rates vaulted from less than 20 percent in 1995 to over 30 percent in 2023. Colorado’s adult obesity rate of 24.9 percent made it the least-obese state in 2023, but that same rate would have made it the most obese state in 1995. Overall, in just over a quarter of a century, the U.S. obesity rate among adults rose from 15 percent to 40 percent.
The obese, of course, were at much greater risk of dying from Covid. Yet public-health officials and politicians avoided discussing that fact and failed to encourage people to stay in shape. Instead, they promoted lockdowns that closed public parks, hiking trails, tennis courts, and the like, which seemed almost designed to ensure that Americans would gain weight—in the face of a virus that clearly preyed upon overweight people.
Kennedy’s detractors also criticize his having “falsely touted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as effective covid treatments,” in the words of the Washington Post, as well as his skepticism about Big Pharma remedies like Gilead’s remdesivir. The public-health establishment emphatically asserts the opposite: that remdesivir is highly effective against Covid and that claims that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (and homespun remedies) work constitute dangerous “misinformation.” But what does the medical evidence say?
Let’s look at the Cochrane reviews, an independent British entity that publishes the most respected evaluations of medical research. Cochrane finds that, for hospitalized patients, there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine works, while remdesivir “probably makes little or no difference to deaths after 28 days . . . 60 days, or . . . 150 days.” For patients outside of hospitals, Cochrane finds, “We are uncertain whether hydroxychloroquine affected the number of people whose symptoms improved after 28 days,”how many people “developed COVID-19,” or “how many people were admitted to [a] hospital with COVID-19, compared with those receiving a placebo treatment.” Meantime, Cochrane writes, “We are uncertain whether remdesivir increases or decreases the chance of symptom alleviation by day 14”— it could make things better, or worse.
There’s not a lot of daylight between Cochrane’s reviews of these two drugs. But there’s a massive canyon between their respective prices. Remdesivir, which the federal government spent $162 million by the end of 2020 to help develop, cost $3,120 “for a typical treatment course” for those with private health insurance by mid-2020. Hydroxychloroquine, in comparison, generally costs less than $1 per tablet.
With this in mind, consider how HHS handled hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic. On March 28, 2020, the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization for hydroxychloroquine’s use, declaring that “it is reasonable to believe that . . . hydroxychloroquine sulfate may be effective in treating COVID-19,” while stating that the “potential benefits . . . outweigh . . . potential risks.” Seven weeks later, on May 18, Trump told the press that he’d been taking hydroxychloroquine. Less than a month after that, on June 15, the FDA revoked the EUA, basically saying—while offering no compelling rationale—that it had changed its mind.
The FDA’s handling of ivermectin was even worse. Despite the fact that the drug has been widely used by people across the globe for decades and that Cochrane says it “has few unwanted effects,” the FDA not only opposed its use in fighting Covid but instituted a propaganda campaign designed to convince Americans that only a veterinarian would prescribe it. The FDA campaign amazingly used the slogan, “You are not a horse!”
The case for ivermectin is certainly more ambiguous than the FDA claimed. Cochrane says that the evidence of its effectiveness in treating Covid-19 is “conflicting” and that there’s “a complete gap in the evidence investigating ivermectin for preventing a SARS‐CoV‐2 infection after high‐risk exposure.” Among hospitalized patients, Cochrane didn’t find statistically significant evidence for ivermectin’s effectiveness, but did observe a 40 percent reduction in all-cause mortality—in other words, 40 percent fewer people died in the ivermectin group than in the control group. Other U.K. researchers, who published their findings in the American Journal of Therapeutics, found a similar percentage reduction in deaths (38 percent), which was statistically significant in their meta-analysis. “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin” and that “[u]sing ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease,” they wrote.
Yet the FDA wouldn’t even grant that ivermectin was suitable for humans, let alone that it could help fight Covid-19. Channeling its inner Snowball from Animal Farm, the FDA effectively insisted that when it comes to ivermectin, “Four legs good, two legs bad!” The mainstream media then dutifully bleated out the same.
That wasn’t the end of the public-health establishment’s Covid-era depredations. Bureaucrats and officials denied natural immunity, defiantly insisted that masks work, refused to admit that masks undermine human social interaction and cause other harmful effects, and groundlessly asserted that rapidly developed, experimental mRNA vaccines were almost entirely safe and effective in stopping the spread of Covid-19. None of these claims was true.
These examples illustrate that our public-health establishment needs to be shaken up, whether by RFK Jr. or someone else. It is high time for the CDC’s, FDA’s, and NIH’s arrogant rule by “experts” to come to an end.
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