His attacks have grown more sweeping, with Kennedy suggesting he will clear out “entire departments” at FDA, including the agency’s food and nutrition center. The program is responsible for preventing foodborne illness, promoting health and wellness, reducing diet-related chronic disease and ensuring chemicals in food are safe.
If confirmed, Kennedy in principle could overturn almost any FDA decision. There have been rare cases of such decisions in previous administrations. Under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, HHS overruled FDA approval decisions on the availability of emergency contraceptives.
Unwinding FDA regulations or revoking approval of longstanding vaccines and drugs would likely be more challenging. FDA has lengthy requirements for removing medicines from the market, which are based on federal laws passed by Congress. If the process is not followed, drugmakers could bring lawsuits that would need to work their way through the courts.
Kennedy, who has said “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” would be in charge of appointments to the committee of influential panel experts who help set vaccine recommendations to doctors and the general public. Those include polio and measles given to infants and toddlers to protect against debilitating diseases to inoculations given to older adults to protect against threats like shingles and bacterial pneumonia as well as shots against more exotic dangers for international travelers or laboratory workers.
— “We need to act fast,” Kennedy was reported to have said during an a Scottsdale, Arizona event over the weekend. “So that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave.” […] Kennedy wants half of the NIH budget to go toward “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in September. “In the current system, researchers don’t have enough incentive to study generic drugs and root-cause therapies that look at things like diet.”
Kennedy has not focused as much on the agency that spends more than $1.5 trillion yearly to provide health care coverage for more than half of the country through Medicaid, Medicare or the Affordable Care Act. […] Instead, he’s been an outspoken opponent of Medicare or Medicaid covering expensive weight-loss drugs, like Ozempic or Zepbound. Those drugs are not widely covered by either program, but there’s some bipartisan support in Congress to change that.
Honestly? Why should states that actually can get it together to take active measures to try to take care of their constituents have to be limited by what the most ignorant and backward parts of the country decide on? How many times do we have to see some court in Texas shoot down a measure that would help people before we land on no longer caring what Texas thinks about anything?
I get that there are people in these states who don’t want this stuff and they can’t all easily relocate, but we don’t want it either and we actually manage to organize and vote in accordance with that. Why should every state in the US be held back by every state in the US that just went out and voted to tear apart all the collective good that we have?
Maybe we’d be better off separating power down to the state level or just straight up breaking up the US. Funneling money into red payee states so they can have things like roads and health care clearly isn’t helping to drag them any further to the left, but maybe if they didn’t actually have access to those funds it might incentivize policies that don’t just hand everything to the worst people they can find. Or at the very least, maybe they couldn’t afford to fuck things up so badly.
They voted for this. We didn’t.