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Ever since longtime antivaccine activist, supporter of “natural health” quackery, and fear mongered about food ingredients Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his quixotic Presidential campaign and bent the knee to Donald Trump in exchange for a high-ranking health-related position in the Trump administration, should Trump win, I’ve been trying to warn my readers what it would actually mean if RFK Jr. were to gain influence. Unfortunately for health policy and biomedical science in the US, Donald Trump did eek out a narrow popular vote victory (49.9% to 48.3% thus far, and counting), with an Electoral College victory that hinged on a small number of votes in the usual swing states. After the election was declared, speculation was rampant over what role RFK Jr. would hold in the second Trump administration and what he and Trump would do. By September, RFK Jr. had coined the term “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA), an obvious homage to Donald Trump’s longstanding slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), although in his MAHA manifesto he hid his antivax proclivities, which his antivax followers did notice and were dismayed. Eventually, Trump announced that he was going to nominate RFK Jr. for the most important health-related cabinet position, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), where, if confirmed by the Senate, RFK Jr. would oversee a sprawling and massive department with a $2.86 trillion budget, as well as key agencies that fall under HHS, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Ten days ago, I outlined how having an antivax crank like RFK Jr. in charge of HHS would be a catastrophe for public health and biomedical research.
At the time, however, we did not yet know whom Trump would appoint to lead key agencies like the CDC, FDA, CMS, and NIH, as well as whom he would appoint Surgeon General. We now know his nominees for four of these post—and strongly suspect that he will ultimately nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, COVID-19 minimizer and coauthor of the social Darwinist “let ‘er rip” COVID-19 “natural herd immunity” manifesto, the Great Barrington Declaration—all thanks to a flurry of announcements last week. These announcement included Trump’s naming America’s Quack, Dr. Mehmet Oz, as CMS Administrator. (Thanks yet again, Oprah, for foisting this quack upon America all those years ago!) I will admit to having been somewhat surprised at this nomination, as I hadn’t really thought much about Dr. Oz since his failed campaign to be the carpetbagger elected to the Senate for Pennsylvania two years ago, given that he mostly dropped out of the public eye after his defeat. As for the CDC, Trump’s pick is a real blast from the past for me, a man about whom I had almost forgotten after having written a couple of times a decade ago about his role as one of the go-to Representatives in Congress for the antivax movement. I’m referring to former Florida—of course!— Representative Dave Weldon, a clear signal that the CDC is about to be led by a die-hard antivaxxer with no relevant public health qualifications other than that he’s a physician. (Make no mistake, Dr. Weldon is an antivaxxer who was all-in on RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theory that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that was in several childhood vaccines until around 2001 had been the cause of an “autism epidemic.” More on that later in this post.) Next, to no one’s surprise, Trump nominated COVID-19 minimizer and frequent Fox News pundit, Johns Hopkins surgical oncologist Dr. Martin Makary, while, finally, to my surprise given that I don’t recall much about her, he chose Fox News contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for Surgeon General.
While I won’t comment on what Donald Trump might do outside of health and science policy, at least not here, make no mistake, by electing Donald Trump again, Americans have shot themselves in the foot with respect to medicine, public health, and biomedical research. Let’s start with the antivaxxer nominated to be CDC Director, and then work our way down. Let’s put it this way. Dr. Weldon for CDC makes Dr. Oz for CMS look like not so bad a choice, and that’s saying a lot. I will expend more verbiage describing him than any of the other picks by Trump because he’s probably the worst of the lot, but, even more importantly, likely the most obscure given that he’s been out of the public eye for a decade, ever since he left Congress.
Dr. Dave Weldon: An antivaxxer to run CDC
As I just said, I never expected Trump and RFK Jr. to pick Dr. Dave Weldon to run CDC, although I did expect them to pick someone who was at least antivax-sympathetic, if not outright antivax. It looks as though they went with outright antivax.
Many of you have probably never heard of Dr. Dave Weldon. I must admit that, when I first heard about his nomination, I had forgotten about him and actually had to remind myself who he was and what he did and said back in the day by looking up some posts on my not-so-super-secret other blog. In brief, back in the day when I was he, along with Florida Rep. Bill Posey and Indiana Rep. Dan Burton, were among the antivax movement’s go-to legislators in Congress. You might remember that back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rep. Burton, based on his belief that vaccines had rendered a grandchild of his autistic, used his powerful position chairing the House Oversight Committee to drag CDC Directors and scientists before him to be interrogated and harassed about what the CDC was doing to “study” the (nonexistent) link between vaccines and autism and abused his position to try to influence the Autism Omnibus hearings, among other antivax activism. Rep. Bill Posey, for his part, was intimately involved in promoting the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory of disgraced CDC scientist William Thompson that claimed that the CDC had covered up a finding that the MMR vaccine was associated with a four-fold increase in the incidence of autism in African-American boys in the Atlanta area. It was big nothingburger, but the conspiracy theory did end up playing a central role in the 2016 antivax propaganda film disguised as a documentary, VAXXED (directed by the godfather of the 21st century antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, and produced by antivax propagandist who’s currently working with RFK Jr., Del Bigtree), whose second sequel, VAXXED III: Authorized to Kill, has been promoted heavily by—you guessed it!—RFK Jr.
But what about Dave Weldon? First of all, he is utterly unqualified for the position of CDC Director. Yes, he is a physician, but he has no relevant experience in public health, epidemiology, infectious disease, vaccination, or any other science that might qualify him to run an organization like the CDC. And, of course, he is antivaccine. Per this news report on his nomination:
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped former Florida Rep. Dave Weldon, a physician and vaccine safety skeptic, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While in Congress, Weldon introduced legislation to move oversight of vaccine safety from the CDC to an independent agency within HHS. He has also repeatedly voiced serious reservations about the independence of the federal government’s vaccine safety review process, and previously suggested that a mercury-based preservative once commonly used in vaccines, thimerosal, is linked to a rise in autism.
“Federal agencies charged with overseeing vaccine safety research have failed. They have failed to provide sufficient resources for vaccine safety research. They have failed to adequately fund extramural research. And, they have failed to free themselves from conflicts of interest that serve to undermine public confidence in the safety of vaccines,” Weldon said in a statement at the time.
Weldon, who served in Congress for nearly two decades, has also raised concerns about the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and Gardasil, the vaccine that girds against the papillomavirus virus, which can lead to cervical cancer.
“Vaccine safety skeptic.” May I once again ask your indulgence as I rant yet again about clueless reporters and editors insisting on calling antivaxxers “vaccine skeptics” or “vaccine safety skeptics.” They are none of these, as skepticism implies critical thinking, knowledge, and careful reasoning about a topic, none of which Weldon (or his boss-to-be RFK Jr.) has ever displayed. Similarly sanewashing Weldon is this headline at STAT News, whose editors should know better, Trump selects Dave Weldon, former congressman with ties to vaccine critics, to lead CDC. Of course, that’s why RFK Jr. likes Weldon and no doubt why he was chosen by Trump! In any event, given that Weldon was primarily a “thimerosal” antivaxxer, the two did have a lot of contact back in the day:
Starting in the early 2000s, Weldon had a prominent part in a debate about whether there was a relationship between a vaccine preservative called thimerosal and autism. He was a founding member of the Congressional Autism Caucus and tried to ban thimerosal from all vaccines. Kennedy, then a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, believed there was a tie between thimerosal and autism and also charged that the government hid documents showing the danger.
“Debate.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Try: Conspiracy theory. That’s a more accurate description of the belief on RFK Jr. and Weldon’s part that the CDC had “covered up” a link between vaccines and autism.
From an interview with RFK Jr. published on the website of his antivax organization Children’s Health Defense:
The CDC is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. The agency owns more than 20 vaccine patents and purchases and sells $4.1 billion in vaccines annually. Congressman Dave Weldon has pointed out that the primary metric for success across the CDC is how many vaccines the agency sells and how successfully the agency expands its vaccine program—regardless of any negative effects on human health. Weldon exposed how the Immunization Safety Office, which is supposed to ensure vaccine efficacy and safety, has become subsumed in that metric. The scientists in that part of the agency should no longer be considered part of the public safety sector. Their function is to promote vaccines. As Dr. Thompson has attested, they are routinely ordered to destroy, manipulate and conceal evidence of adverse vaccine reactions in order to protect that ultimate metric. The CDC shouldnot be the agency that we are relying on for oversight of the vaccine program. It’s the hen guarding the wolf house. It’s not just the CDC. Virtually all the institutions that are supposed to stand between a rapacious industry and vulnerable children have been compromised.
First off, that reference to Dr. Thompson is yet another reference to the CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory. More importantly, though, the CDC does not authorize or license vaccines. That is the FDA’s responsibility under its powers to regulate drugs, medical devices, and biologics. It is true that the CDC, based on recommendations of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), does contract the recommended vaccine schedule for children and adults. The committee holds three public meetings every year, to allow public input regarding its deliberations about proposed additions and changes to the recommended vaccine schedule. But what do Weldon and RFK Jr. mean when they say that the CDC purchases and sells $4.1 billion in vaccines annually? Most likely, they are referring to Vaccines for Children, a program that has provided free vaccinations to uninsured and underinsured children for three decades:
The VFC program was established by Congress in 1994 in response to measles outbreaks in 1989–1991. The program provides all recommended vaccinations against 19 different diseases at no cost to eligible children and helps ensure all U.S. children are protected from life-threatening diseases. Anyone age 18 years or younger who is Medicaid-eligible, uninsured, underinsured,* or American Indian or Alaska Native can receive vaccines from VFC program providers at no cost. CDC currently funds 61 state, local, and territorial immunization programs to implement the VFC program.
This interview is several years old, and Weldon left Congress in 2009. I looked it up, and the 2024 budget for VFC was around $7.2 billion:
The Vaccines for Children (VFC) program (FY2024 estimate: $7.213 billion) provides vaccines to enrolled health care providers to vaccinate eligible children.20 As authorized in SSA Section 1928 (42 U.S.C. §1396s), the HHS Secretary can purchase vaccines as necessary for eligible children at a federally negotiated discounted price and then distribute vaccines to participating state and local health departments. State and local health departments then distribute a portion of the supply to participating health care providers and also administer vaccines through their own programs. In addition, some of the annual VFC funding is awarded to states and other jurisdictions for program operations and administration.21 VFC is financed by a Medicaid appropriation within the HHS Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and is administered by CDC.22 Like other Medicaid programs, VFC is an appropriated entitlement, meaning that VFC funding is provided through LHHS appropriations acts, but the funding level is determined based on budget projections for meeting the funding needs of the program as required by the program’s authorization law.23
Those nefarious “deep state” pharma operatives! Imagine the sheer evil of their buying discounted vaccines for poor children and then distributing them to the states! All with your tax dollars! The horror! Personally, the only horror I now have is imagining Weldon being in charge of administering these funds from 2025 on.
The point, of course, is that, contrary to antivax conspiracy theories, there I nothing nefarious about the VFC program, Weldon and RFK Jr.’s best attempts to make it sound like as sop to big pharma notwithstanding. The idea behind the program has been—and still is, at least for the moment—to make sure that uninsured and underinsured children do not suffer unnecessarily from vaccine-preventable illnesses on the basis of their parents not being able to afford the standard childhood vaccines, as well as to protect the health of everyone through keeping vaccination rates high enough for herd immunity. Moreover, in the $6 trillion-plus federal budget, the amount of funding provided to VFC is a real pittance, some of the best-spent money in Washington, and, worse, funding for state vaccination programs through VFC has already been cut.
But what about Weldon’s past?
During his 14 years in Congress, Weldon funneled his belief in an “autism epidemic.” He also apparently believed in the thimerosal-autism link, to the point of promoting highly dubious studies and attacking decent studies examining whether mercury in childhood vaccines had been responsible for such an “epidemic.” Back in the day, he even spoke at antivax “conferences” falsely billed as scientific conferences:
Understanding autism and searching for a cure is a passion that I will continue to carry with me. In 2004, I delivered an address at the Defeat Autism Now Conference and the keynote address to the Autism One Conference in Chicago regarding the autism epidemic affecting one in 163 children. I challenged public health officials to direct the funding to defeat this epidemic. Today, autism affects one in 88 children. America can’t afford further delay in autism research.
Defeat Autism Now! was the umbrella organization for a lot of antivax quacks abusing children with “autism biomed” treatments to “cure” them of the “vaccine injury” blamed by antivaxxers for their autism, while the Autism One conference was the longstanding fake medical conference held in Chicago annually for many years that showcased all forms of antivax and autism quackery. For those of you not familiar with Autism One, It was at the 2013 Autism One conference that RFK Jr. likened vaccines to the Holocaust, at least to my knowledge, and where Kerri Rivera described feeding bleach to children in 2012 to treat their autism.
Back in 2003-2004, Weldon used his position in Congress to write letters to then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding demanding an “investigation” of supposed links between vaccines and autism. Basically, the letters made the same claims that RFK Jr. made in his 2005 conspiracyfest Deadly Immunity. Recall that the central claim in RFK Jr.’s article, co-published by Rolling Stone and Salon.com (to their eternal shame), something I like to call an example of the Central Conspiracy Theory of the Antivaccine Movement, was that there was evidence that thimerosal in vaccines was associated with a highly elevated risk of autism in children but that the CDC, at a meeting in 2000, “covered it up.” This is a claim that I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, after the conference center where the meeting was held, an example of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (at least in the US), one I’ve deconstructed in the past. Basically, Weldon, even though he’s a physician, fell for the Simpsonwood conference conspiracy theory, promoted a year and a half later by antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hook, line, and sinker. The first letter basically regurgitates the “concerns” being promoted by the antivaccine movement at the time. The second letter turned up the heat, trying to persuade Gerberding to postpone an important Institute of Medicine conference until the “concern” about the Verstraeten study had been addressed. As we all know, the IOM conference did go on and the IOM report strongly stated that there was no correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism. Once again, antivaxxers were deceptively looking at standard epidemiological and statistical techniques to account for confounders as something nefarious, as they misrepresented how the observed “association” between thimerosal and autism risk declined and disappeared as appropriate confounders were accounted or as the CDC intentionally “covering up” an association, and Weldon was the Congressional spearhead for this conspiracy theory.
Truly, the vaccination program and public health efforts by the CDC are in serious jeopardy, even worse than I had imagined. I suppose I should be happy that Trump didn’t appoint Andrew Wakefield as CDC Director.
Oz turning CMS into…Oz?
What can be said about Dr. Mehmet Oz that we haven’t said before many, many times here on this blog (and that I haven’t said many times before on my not-so-super-secret other blog)? As a result, this section will be relatively short compared to the section about the horror that is Dave Weldon for CDC. That’s not to say that Dr. Oz is in any way a good pick. My longtime readers here and elsewhere might remember that back in the day I routinely liked to refer to Dr. Oz, the once promising cardiac surgeon turned advocate of “integrating” quackery into medicine (i.e., “integrative medicine“) turned Oprah Winfrey’s go-to physician for dubious medicine, turned daytime “medical” talk show host (and I use the term” medical” loosely), as “America’s Quack.” I don’t know whether I coined the term or not, given that adding the term “quack” was a very obvious riff on the title of “America’s Doctor” bestowed on him by Oprah and that Dr. Oz even trademarked the term “America’s Doctor,” but it sure feels like it. So what the heck? As I’ve done for years, I’ll go with it and say that I coined the term, unless and until someone shows me otherwise.
In fairness, whenever I discuss Dr. Oz, I note that over three decades ago, he was a legitimate phenom in academic surgery, a true rising star. In any timeline, I have to note that between 1988 and 1991, Dr. Oz won the prestigious Blakemore Research Award four years in a row, no mean feat. Also dating back to the 1990s and his early days as an academic surgeon, Dr. Oz holds 11 patents for inventing methods and devices to assist in heart surgeries and transplants, including helping to research and develop the left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, which helps keep people alive while they’re awaiting a heart transplant. Indeed, Dr. Oz played a major role in growing Columbia’s LVAD program into one of the biggest in the world. Around the same time, though, in the early 1990s, the seeds of Dr. Oz’s heel turn into America’s Quack were being sown as well:
In the early ‘90s, according to Argenziano, Oz could often be found in his lab, studying “alternative medicine, hypnosis, Eastern medicine, all that stuff — guided imagery, acupuncture.” Argenziano added, “That was 10 years before he ever went on TV.”
By later in the 1990s:
They [Dr. Oz and his collaborator, certified perfusionist and registered nurse Jery Whitworth] also used audiotapes to try to subconsciously relax patients before surgery and brought reiki — or “energy medicine” — into the operating room. Reiki, an ancient Japanese healing art, has never been shown in scientific studies to alter the outcomes of patients. One high-quality study on the effect of reiki on pain in women after C-sections showed that it had no effect. Science-based thinkers have wondered whether it’s ethical to continue studying reiki, given that we know it works no better than a placebo and we may be diverting funds from treatments that could actually help people.
Oz’s work with the center drew critics. One Mount Sinai physician told the New York Times in 1995: “I call practitioners of fraud practitioners of fraud. It’s my feeling that the [center] has been promoting fraudulent alternatives as genuine.”
Fast forward to the early 2000s, just before Oprah Winfrey discovered Dr. Oz and plucked him from mainstream obscurity:
In the early 2000s, he worked with a reiki healer named Raven Keyes. She told me recently, “My reiki master is the archangel Gabriel. All I have to do is ask Gabriel to activate all the angels, and everybody’s angels come to life.” In the operating room, she said, she’d perch on a stool behind the anesthesiologist and transfer her good energy. “I’m connecting with the divine light within me and allowing myself to absorb the divine light in myself so it expands outward.”
Raven attributed Oz’s experimentation with reiki to his desire to help people and to understand “energy medicine.” Oz, in turn, endorsed Keyes by writing the introduction to her book, The Healing Power of Reiki.
Of course, here at SBM and elsewhere, I and my fellow SBM contributors have been long been pointing out how much dubious medicine and outright quackery Dr. Oz has promoted over the years. I’m not talking “soft” quackery either. I’m talking quackery as bad as The One Quackery To Rule Them All (homeopathy) and even faith healing, as well as the promotion of the antivaccine views of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and even psychic scammers like John Edward and Theresa Caputo. In addition, he’s promoted unproven (and almost certainly nonexistent) links between cell phones and breast cancer, GMO fear mongering, By 2014, Dr. Oz’s reputation for quackery had gotten so bad that he was increasingly facing less than adoring press and was hauled before Senator Claire McCaskill’s (D-MO) committee for his unscrupulous boosterism for unproven weight loss supplements, where he was soundly humbled. It got so bad that not long ago Dr. Oz’s social media people tried to do a an “Ask Dr. Oz” segment on Twitter under the hashtag #OzsInbox. Let’s just say that it backfired spectacularly and hilariously. f,
More recently, during the pandemic, Dr. Oz also boosted quack tycoon Joe Mercola, who’s now (hilariously) in the thrall of a psychic medium claiming to channel Bahlon, “ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane,” and as a result now thinks he’s a “new Jesus” who will save the world. (He’s even started abandoning old friends in the antivax movement.) His promotion of COVID-19 misinformation started early too. During the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, Dr. Oz, enamored of Didier Raoult‘s horrendously awful science, promoted Didier’s protocol using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, as a cure for COVID-19. Meanwhile, as he was angling to run as a Republican to be one of Pennsylvania’s Senators, he started embracing the minimization of COVID-19, in particular becoming critical of school closures. Indeed, he went so far that he was forced to apologize for having suggested that reopening schools was a “very appetizing” opportunity because it was estimated that reopening schools might “only” increase the total number of COVID-19 deaths by 2-3%:
His apology came too late to avoid the appearance of memes like this:
I also can’t help but note that Dr. Oz had Donald Trump on his show in September 2016 during the election, and the two got along so famously that I referred to it as a “huckster bromance.”
So what might we expect from having Dr. Oz in control of the sprawling bureaucracy that is CMS, which controls Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges? Nothing good would be my guess. First, I would expect that he will likely do his damnedest to get the sorts of quackery that he’s promoted all these years paid for by Medicare, Medicaid, and ACA insurance plans, all in the name of promoting RFK Jr. and Trump’s MAHA agenda in the form of “preventing chronic disease” and encouraging the use of various “natural” interventions that quacks like him cloak in woo. In this, he is totally in line with Casey and Cally means, the sibling duo who’ve been advising President Trump and working with RFK Jr. Look for a significant degradation of science-based standards with respect to “holistic,” “complementary,” and “integrative” medicine; in other words, I expect a lot more “integration” of quackery with science-based medicine.
Indeed, just look at this editorial that he cowrote last year, Longer life expectancy can solve our busted budget. The idea is that more years of healthy life might alleviate the budget deficit, which might be somewhat true, but it’s definitely exaggerated. The other thing to consider is that Dr. Oz has no experience running an organization this large. He was never even the chairman of the surgery department where he worked for decades. CMS is huge. Bending it to your will requires bureaucratic and leadership skills that Dr. Oz probably does not have. That might be the only good thing about this nomination. His own lack of experience is likely to stymy his ability to make major changes.
Marty Makary: What will he do with the FDA?
Marty Makary is, of course, familiar to readers of this blog, given how much Dr. Jonathan Howard and I have written about him. As you might recall, Makary is a well-published surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins, which is why I frequently joke (as a fellow surgical oncologist) about needing to put a paper bag over my head when I see some of his pronouncements. You probably recall that Jonathan and I don’t think much of Makary, who first came to my attention as one of the foremost promoters of the myth that medical errors constitute the third leading cause of death in the US, all based on a risibly incompetent study that used unjustifiable extrapolation from small numbers to conclude that 250,000 deaths occur each year in hospitals due to medical error. As I pointed out at the time, whenever you see an estimate of how many deaths are “deaths by medicine,” it’s very helpful to compare that estimate with what we know to assess its plausibility. According to the CDC in 2016, of the 2.6 million deaths that were occurring every year in the U.S., 715,000 occurred in hospitals, which meant that, if Makary’s estimates were correct, 35% of all hospital deaths were due to medical errors. But the plausibility of Makary’s estimate was worse than that. Remember that the upper estimate used by Makary and Daniels was 400,000 inpatient deaths due to medical error. That was 56%—yes, 56%—of all inpatient deaths. It was never anywhere near plausible that one-third to over one-half of all inpatient deaths in the US were (or are) due to medical error.
Since then, Marty Makary started out semi-reasonable on COVID-19 but was, as our very own Jonathan Howard has long documented, quick to be captured by his audience and fully embrace the “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic in a futile effort to achieve “natural herd immunity,” which, he promised, was always no more than six months away, after which he rapidly pivoted to fear mongering about COVID-19 vaccines. I can’t decide whether he would be more of a disaster heading up the FDA or the CDC, given his ideology and lack of qualifications for either.
As little as I think of Makary, putting him at FDA might be one of the “least bad” choices made by Trump. The FDA approval process is codified by law and longstanding regulations that would take a lot to roll back, including legislation. Moreover, my perception of Makary is that he is an opportunist. I don’t know that he is generally antivaccine, except anti-COVID-19 vaccine because his political fellow travelers became anti-COVID-19 vaccines, which is likely mostly why he became anti-COVID-19 vaccine.
Here’s what Trump said on Truth Social announcing the nomination:
As I’ve noted before, though, there is a profound disconnect between the competing goals of MAHA. On the one hand, RFK Jr. claims to want to make the FDA approval process more rigorous for pharmaceutical drugs because he thinks the organization is captured by big pharma and, as a result, too lenient on its products. On the other hand, he wants the FDA to loosen or eliminate regulations on raw milk, stem cell treatments, ivermectin for COVID-19, peptide therapies (does he know that most vaccines would be considered peptide therapies?), and the like. Makary will have a difficult time reconciling those competing plans.
A Fox News pundit for Surgeon General? Why not?
I must admit that I hadn’t even heard of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat. I guess I just don’t watch much Fox News, and, for some reason, she’s never shown up in a story that caught my attention enough to blog about. Trump announced her appointment on Truth Social thusly:
To be honest, I don’t know what to think of Dr. Nesheiwat. It will be interesting to see how she fits in, given that, whatever her beliefs on COVID-19 public health matters, she does not appear to be antivaccine. This Newsweek story contrasted her to RFK Jr. thusly:
In contrast, Nesheiwat has previously described the COVID vaccine as a “gift from God.”
“I’m optimistic we are on our way to ending the needless loss of lives starting with the nothing short of miraculous coronavirus vaccine and the development of therapeutics,” she wrote in an opinion piece published on Fox News in 2021.
“We have many vaccines in existence that treat a variety of non-life-threatening diseases but to have a COVID vaccine, i.e. a Pfizer or Moderna mRNA that will actually save you from dying is a gift from God.”
She has also said that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is highly effective.
“The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has been around for many many years, at least 50/60 years, and it’s highly effective. It’s about 97 percent effective in preventing you from catching measles, mumps and rubella, and this is really important, because it is the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease out there,” she said during a Fox News interview in January.
On the other hand, Dr. Nesheiwat does talk the talk with respect to vaccine mandates, as well as the manufactured controversy over gender dysphoria and gender-affirming care of trans youth. She also sells supplements, because of course she does:
Nesheiwat, who specialized in emergency and family medicine, has supported vaccines that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for HHS secretary, has cast doubts about.
But she at times seemed to criticize the CDC’s guidance about Covid vaccines, saying earlier this year that for many Americans, especially young people, the vaccine’s risks would outweigh the benefits — while acknowledging that risk is small for the majority of patients. Nesheiwat has been critical of government mandates through the pandemic.
She has also called into question the standards of care for youth with gender dysphoria from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
She regularly contributes to Fox News and other outlets, has written a book about “miracles in medicine” and promotes dietary supplements she formulates, according to her website.
I take that back. I think I’m starting to understand more and more why Trump nominated her, despite her previous praise of vaccines, including even the COVID-19 vaccine. Even so, Dr. Nesheiwat is probably the least bad of the picks for anything, if only because Surgeon General doesn’t really have much in the way of real power other than the power that her platform provides.
And so it begins…
We now know most of the team that will be tasked with implementing RFK Jr.’s MAHA manifesto. In our Bizarro World, we will, if RFK Jr. and Dr. Weldon are confirmed, have longtime antivaxxers running HHS and the CDC, respectively, an opportunistic pandemic minimizer and exaggerator of the harms of modern medicine running the FDA, a TV grifter and quack running CMS, and a Fox News personality who, although seemingly provaccine, sells overpriced vitamin supplements from her website. None of these people has demonstrable qualifications or competence to do the actual jobs tasked to them, and three of them (RFK Jr., Dave Weldon, and Marty Makary) are downright hostile towards the agencies and departments that they’ve been chosen to lead. Look for a brain drain due to a mass exodus in which those in these HHS agencies who can get out do get out, rather than face years of hostility and the hollowing out of the core missions of these agencies. (Who could blame them, either?) They will, of course, be replaced by MAHA loyalists, this degrading US health policy and science even further, damage that it could take a generation to undo, if it can be undone at all.
As the great Charles Pierce likes to say, “This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.” As for me, I’ll echo Pierce again by adding that I’ll be back next week for whatever fresh hell awaits in SBM’s bailiwick. Also: What, no Joseph Ladapo? Yet?