\u201cI\u2019m going to let him go wild on health,\u201d former President Donald Trump promised Sunday at his rally at Madison Square Garden. \u201cI\u2019m going to get him go wild on the food. I\u2019m going to let him go wild on the medicines.\u201d <\/p>\n
Trump was talking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., <\/strong>the former political rival who Trump has increasingly been promising will take a health role in his administration if he\u2019s elected to a second term. <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s plans have been met with alarm in the public health community, not so much for the specific policy proposals Kennedy has communicated as part of his \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d platform as much as for the key issue he\u2019s been leaving out: vaccines. <\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019re seeing an effort at rebranding himself in the weeks before the election, but it shouldn\u2019t be taken seriously,\u201d said Dr. Jason Schwartz, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health. <\/p>\n Kennedy, who founded the nonprofit Children\u2019s Health Defense, which promotes anti-vaccine material such as the recent documentary \u201cVaxed III: Authorized to Kill,\u201d has more recently been focused on chronic disease, not mentioning his signature issue in a September opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or in an appearance Tuesday on \u201cFox and Friends.\u201d <\/p>\n Instead, Kennedy has advocated for regulating chemicals in food \u2013 including an idea to swap tallow fat in for seed oils to make McDonald\u2019s french fries healthier \u2013 and limiting access to soda and processed foods through school lunches and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. <\/p>\n \u201cHe knows that [vaccines are] a lightning rod issue and that it doesn\u2019t help him,\u201d said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. <\/p>\n But, Osterholm warned, \u201cI can\u2019t imagine anyone who would be more damaging to vaccines and the use of vaccines than RFK.\u201d <\/p>\n In a livestreamed event with supporters Monday, Kennedy said Trump had promised to give him \u201ccontrol\u201d of several public health agencies, including the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture. <\/p>\n A spokesperson for Kennedy didn\u2019t directly respond to a question about whether he expected to take a role as an agency head in a Trump administration but said the former president had asked him \u201cto rid the federal health agencies of conflicts and corruption and return them to the tradition of gold standard evidence-based science.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cHe has also asked him to address the chronic disease epidemic, which is affecting more than 50% of Americans and is having a devastating impact on the nation\u2019s health, economy and global security,\u201d said the spokesperson, Stefanie Spear. <\/p>\n Kennedy has recently put the spotlight on obesity and diabetes as well as kidney disease, autoimmune conditions, cancer and addiction. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he wants to reform the US Food and Drug Administration\u2019s system of funding via user fees from the pharmaceutical industry, cap drug prices to where they are in Europe and review direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising guidelines on TV. <\/p>\n He also said he\u2019d prohibit members of the US Department of Agriculture\u2019s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee from making money from food or pharmaceutical companies, keep National Institutes of Health funding from going to researchers with conflicts of interest and review standards for pesticides and chemicals. <\/p>\n \u201cAmericans are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system isn\u2019t addressing effectively,\u201d Kennedy wrote. <\/p>\n In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast, Trump held up a chart comparing life expectancy and health expenditures around the world, with the US an obvious negative outlier on both metrics. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going to send this to RFK Jr.,\u201d Trump told Rogan, who responded, \u201cI love the fact that you guys teamed up.\u201d <\/p>\n Adams said that Kennedy could \u201cspread misinformation and take us back to the dark ages in regards to vaccine-preventable diseases\u201d but that he hoped he would focus instead on \u201cpromoting overall well-being.\u201d <\/p>\n And, Trump allies point out, it\u2019s hard to argue the US health-care system couldn\u2019t be improved. <\/p>\n \u201cAnything RFK can do to draw attention to that should be appreciated and welcomed by anybody who wants Americans to be healthy,\u201d Grogan continued. \u201cRegardless of political party.\u201d <\/p>\n Kennedy\u2019s messaging, at least on food policy, is resonating with some health experts in that field. <\/p>\n \u201cThey are calling for fixing the food system, doing something to coordinate and address diet-related chronic diseases, stopping corporate power, eliminating conflicts of interest between industry and government, getting toxic chemicals out of the food supply, and doing everything possible to refocus the food environment and dietary advice on health,\u201d food policy researcher Marion Nestle wrote on her Food Politics blog. <\/p>\n She was referring to a roundtable discussion on nutrition and policy led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, which involved Kennedy and others who Nestle described as \u201cmainly influencers.\u201d <\/strong> <\/p>\n \u201cThese are things I\u2019ve been writing about here for years,\u201d Nestle said on her blog. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to argue with any of this and I won\u2019t.\u201d <\/p>\n Still, she noted, \u201cpolitics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows.\u201d <\/p>\n On the medicine side of things, Kennedy\u2019s omission of vaccines from his latest policy discussions isn\u2019t assuaging public health experts\u2019 fears. Schwartz noted that anti-vaccine advocates often allege \u2014 without credible evidence \u2014 links between vaccines and increases in chronic disease rates, suggesting that a focus on vaccines is just below the surface of Kennedy\u2019s current messaging. <\/p>\n Kennedy has also issued warnings that he plans to gut federal agencies, like the FDA and NIH. <\/p>\n \u201cFDA\u2019s war on public health is about to end,\u201d he posted Friday on X, formerly known as Twitter, railing against \u201caggressive suppression\u201d of a laundry list of things including psychedelics, raw milk, ivermectin, vitamins, sunshine, exercise \u201cand anything else that advances human health and can\u2019t be patented by Pharma.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIf you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records,\u201d Kennedy continued, \u201cand 2. Pack your bags.\u201d <\/p>\n That warning followed comments Kennedy has made about ending NIH research into infectious diseases, putting doctors in the field on edge. <\/p>\n \u201cInfectious diseases are very much a part of our present and will be very much a part of our future, and he <\/strong>wants to stop studying them?\u201d said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious diseases physician at Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia. <\/p>\n Offit said Kennedy has continued to make misleading or false statements about the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine \u2014 including some that were linked to a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 \u2014 even as evidence shows they\u2019re untrue. When it comes to vaccines, Offit said, \u201che\u2019s a science denialist.\u201d <\/p>\n Schwartz called Kennedy\u2019s more recent pivot away from discussing vaccines an \u201celeventh hour attempt to sanitize his reputation and rebrand himself as a reasonable champion of chronic disease prevention \u2013 presumably to land a position in a potential Trump administration,\u201d something he said \u201cjust isn\u2019t credible.\u201d <\/p>\n Osterholm, who noted that he\u2019d served in a health policy role in every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan\u2019s and thinks of himself as a \u201cnonpartisan public health soldier,\u201d said he felt compelled to weigh in publicly where he hadn\u2019t before, concerned about potential Trump policies and what he referred to as Kennedy\u2019s \u201cpseudoscience.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cEverything that we see and know about what a Trump administration would look like would devastate public health in this country,\u201d he said. \u201cDevastate it.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI\u2019m going to let him go wild on health,\u201d former President Donald Trump promised Sunday…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2522,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Focus on chronic disease<\/h2>\n
\u2018Strange bedfellows\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018A science denialist\u2019<\/h2>\n
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