Trump choices Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya will disrupt our health agencies to save lives By Betsy McCaughey
The public health establishment and left-wing media are rushing to discredit President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to lead health agencies. The New York Times smears them as “outside the medical mainstream.”
Circling the wagons, Dr. Paul Offit, an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, lamely observes, “What they’re saying when they make these appointments is that we don’t trust the people who are there.”
You bet.
Trump and the public have every reason to distrust the current agency heads, after the repeated blunders, deceptions and cover-ups during COVID-19. Trump is appointing disruptors with the courage to challenge the status quo.
Like Dr. Marty Makary, nominated to head the Food and Drug Administration.
Makary’s credentials will make it impossible for the Senate to reject him. A Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of public health, Makary was voted into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, a Hall of Fame for doctors.
More importantly, if you’re in the hospital, you want Makary on your side.
Two decades ago, he declared war against the epidemic of medical errors killing as many as 100,000 patients a year. Errors like patients being given the wrong dose of a medication, or a surgeon operating on the wrong body part, or a lethal germ invading the patient’s body to cause an infection.
The medical establishment was hush-hush about them. But not Makary.
He argued for surgeons always taking a “time out” in the OR to look for errors. He pioneered doctors using checklists like pilots do to ensure protocols are followed.
My organization, the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, considers Makary a hero.
In 2017, Makary went to bat for patients saddled with unfair medical debt. Even nonprofit hospitals were suing patients, garnishing wages and taking their homes.
In many cases, hospitals charged patients several times more than what insurance companies charged for the same procedures. Makary called for an end to it.
When COVID struck, Makary had the guts to speak out about mistakes he saw the federal health agencies making, like wasting scarce vaccine doses on people who already had natural immunity, while other patients died waiting for a shot.
The federal health officials doubled down, ignoring actual evidence that disproved their insistence that natural immunity was not as good as a shot. In fact, it’s many times more effective.
The Biden administration pushed its social media lackeys to block his research from public view.
Makary told Congress that “public health politicos” were to blame for numerous COVID deaths. He called for “using scientific evidence and not political badges and censorship in debating public health policy.”
But the left is still attacking scientists based on politics.
Left-wing Washington Post health reporter Lena Sun falsely claims Trump’s team “is largely untested, possesses scant infectious-disease expertise” and would leave the nation in dire straits “when the next pandemic strikes.” Ridiculous.
Truth is, the public health elite marched in lockstep, muzzling critics even as the mistakes accumulated and a million Americans died of COVID. The US per-capita death rate far exceeded what other developed countries suffered.
To prepare for the next pandemic, the Trump administration must clean house and bring in bold scientists who challenge group-think and demand evidence — unlike the federal officials who recommended masking, lockdowns and distancing during COVID with no evidence.
On Tuesday, Trump named Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — a scientist who demands evidence — to head the National Institutes of Health.
During COVID, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, urging the country to halt lockdowns of healthy people who could survive the virus, and instead rush resources to the elderly or otherwise medically vulnerable.
For this Bhattacharya was censored, blacklisted, and dismissed as “fringe” by then-NIH Director Francis Collins.
Yes — the same Francis Collins who colluded with Anthony Fauci to hide evidence that NIH grant money ultimately paid the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make viruses more contagious and lethal to humans. Causing 7 million deaths.
Uncowed, Bhattacharya stuck by his evidence and even sued his censors.
Last week, the American Academy of Science and Letters awarded Bhattacharya a medal for his intellectual courage.
But the real winner is America. With scientists like Makary and Bhattacharya in charge, this nation will make evidence-based decisions when the next germ threat strikes.
Betsy McCaughey is chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former lieutenant governor of New York.
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