2024 Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump recently said that, if elected, he plans to turn conspiracy theorist and all-around nutjob Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. loose on the Federal government — specifically the FDA. What could possibly go wrong, right? What follows is an excerpt from an article on the Science-Based Medicine website by one of my favorite Internet doctors, David Gorski. If you are not familiar with the Science-Based Medicine site, please check it out. You will find long-form articles filled with important information/discussion about medicine and science.
By Dr. David Gorksi, Science-Based Medicine, RFK Jr. declares MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] war against the FDA, October 28, 2024
Let’s look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claims. Basically, it’s a misrepresentation of what the FDA has done and, of course, the promise of all the things listed. Again, I will start by saying that the FDA has never engaged in suppression, much less “aggressive suppression” of exercise or sunlight that I am aware of. Moreover, as we’ve complained about before, the FDA, if anything, has been far too lax in regulating, for example, quackery involving unproven stem cell treatments for conditions ranging from autism (for which quack clinics have even set up unethical and scientifically dubious pay-to-play clinical trials registered with ClinicalTrials.gov to sell their quackery), to stroke, to cancer. There are even profitable companies marketing stem cell quackery without evidence that it works. Ditto chelation therapy, which has never been shown to work for anything except acute toxicity from heavy metal poisoning and has even been studied for cardiovascular disease in two very expensive and unnecessary (and negative) randomized clinical trials. Let’s also not forget that neither hydroxychloroquine nor ivermectin have been demonstrated to work against COVID-19—quite the contrary, in fact—nor ivermectin shown to be efficacious against cancer. As for raw milk, it has no health benefits greater than pasteurized milk, but it does have a much higher risk of food borne infections. (It is, however, “natural,” I guess.)
Of course, nutraceuticals (and vitamins and supplements) are already legal and weakly regulated (if you can call it regulated at all), thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), which we’ve written about here many, many times, most recently how it helped conspiracy theorist Alex Jones fund his media empire. Basically, as long as you are vague enough about the health claims for your supplement, nutraceutical, or vitamin concoction, you can sell it to treat almost anything, and the supplement industry has, through its powerful patrons, prevented any strengthening of the law to deal with all the quacks who claim without evidence that their supplements treat disease. On the rare occasions when the FDA does try to crack down on quacks selling unproven or even potentially harmful supplements, the health freedom movement inevitably portrays it as “fascist” or “jack-booted thugs” trying to “suppress” all those “natural” cures.
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So what would the FDA look like if Trump were to win next week and actually follow through with his appointment of RFK Jr. to a high-ranking health position? The answer illustrates a bit of the dilemma that the “health freedom” movement has, being, as it is, an uncomfortable alliance between crunchy “all natural” health freedom lovers and more hard core libertarians like Nick Gillespie, who believe that the “power of the free market” will “unleash innovation” if only the nasty old FDA were less strict about its standards for pharmaceutical companies. There is an inherent tension there between wanting to be more strict with the “bad” pharmaceutical companies, while approving modalities (or at least much more weakly regulating them) that alternative practitioners want.
On the one hand, MAHA would seem to want to muzzle the FDA with respect to all the quackery listed in RFK Jr.’s post, basically letting quacks do whatever they want with almost anything. Remember, a lot of what is in RFK Jr.’s list is not “natural.” Certainly extracting and isolating stem cells and injecting them into the bloodstream is not “natural,” nor are chelation therapy and hyperbaric oxygen—and especially ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, peptides, and psychedelics, all of which are manufactured drugs. Again, what “health freedom” really wants is the freedom for quacks to ply their grift without interference from the government.
What will be fascinating to watch is how tensions between the libertarians who believe that big pharma should be unleashed in order to produce “innovation” and cures and the “natural” crunchy crowd and its overwhelming suspicion of anything produced by big pharma will be resolved. Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t want to see RFK Jr. in any sort of official capacity with power over federal health care policy, but, in the unfortunate event that Trump wins and he is appointed HHS Secretary (or, at least, keeps helping Trump pick leaders of the FDA, CDC, and NIH), in particular because his MAHA agenda conflicts with so much of Trump’s other agenda:
RFK’s health mission puts him at odds with Trump’s own track record. As president, Trump heavily subsidized the agricultural industry to alleviate pains he inflicted on farmers with his own tariff policies. His administration peeled back toxic chemical regulations and environmental rules. He undermined school lunch programs and flooded cafeterias with junk food, rejecting the healthy options pioneered by the Barack Obama administration.
The reason is, likely, this:
Being responsive to public opinion doesn’t necessarily make someone smart. It makes them pliable. And perhaps that’s why Kennedy and his followers are willing to take a chance on Trump. They see him as a person who—in his lust for adulation—can be changed or manipulated.
The challenging thing about being around RFK and his crowd is that while their ideas can be hard to take seriously, the underlying concerns they carry are basically unimpeachable: frighteningly high healthcare costs, the murky relationship between pharmaceutical companies and doctors who prescribe their pills, and a very real decline in overall health among the population.
But they are seeking solutions to real problems in the wrong places. Looking into the past won’t save us any more than forgoing your vaccine shots, drinking raw milk, or voting for Trump will.
That is precisely the issue. There are very real concerns about US health policy, but, as is the case with the nostrums RFK Jr. champions for disease and to demonize vaccines, he’s applying policy quackery to address these problems in a way that is inherently self-contradicting. After all, the “free market” contingent of the “health freedom” movement that wants to “unleash innovation” by neutering the FDA is good at manipulation too. I hope we never have to see which faction of the health freedom movement will triumph if there is a second Trump administration. I fear that federal health policy will end up being the worst of both worlds, with far less regulation on big pharma and much laxer standards for drug approval, plus a lot more freedom for quacks to peddle quackery like bogus stem cell therapies, chelation, and “repurposed” ivermectin for everything, while NIH is forced to waste even more money studying useless quackery.
As for a “corrupt system,” no one out-corrupts Donald Trump.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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