RFKjr! OMG "why would a former herion addict be put in position of power over Heatlh and Human services" ?

Echo opinion What's Next for Public Health, by Dr. Ashish K. Jha* 

The hurricane of nominations by President-elect Donald Trump has the country reeling and trying to understand just how 🌪️ big a storm is coming and what it will bring.  🌪️🌀💥

There are big winds  blowing around the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, with related health care appointments feeding the storm. At this time of uncertainty for public health, it’s important to understand what these nominations mean for the health of the American people.

There are challenges to be sure. More people have health insurance, but health care costs are still too high. COVID-19 has left empty seats at too many tables this Thanksgiving. But there’s been much progress in public health, and the data prove it. Fewer people are dying from heart disease. Cancer deaths are down. Even our latest public health scourges — opioids and respiratory disease like COVID — are on track to cause fewer deaths. In the past 50 years alone, life expectancy in the United States has increased by nearly a decade.

Understanding what is — and has been — driving progress also brings an understanding of what’s at risk in these nominations and what they will mean to health care and the health of the American people. Over generations, progress has been driven by data and science, rigorously collected, analyzed, and translated into action and policy. It is a dynamic process, with our understanding of what works and what doesn’t continually improving over time and experience. Scientific exploration is constantly expanding, fueled by new technologies and a continuous supply of new insights and information.

The Department of Health and Human Services, with a budget of nearly $2 trillion, has been responsible for much of this progress in health. It includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

For decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, leaders, informed by experts and evidence, have created the rules governing hospitals, doctors, and others providing health care, as well as evaluating medical devices, vaccines, and the regulation of food and medicine to keep Americans safe.

Although there is a need and room for improvement and reform across HHS. But the incoming administration is signaling more: a disturbing change of direction, away from science and data, beyond reform and improvement, to instead take a wrecking ball to the whole place. Its justification is rooted in bumper sticker slogans, pseudoscience, and personal grievances.

Some of those nominated to lead agencies responsible for protecting and improving the health of Americans have long records of pushing bad information — unsupported (and often refuted) by facts, data, or evidence. Consider that Kennedy has argued for an approach to health and medicine antithetical to how we have made progress. 

He espouses ideas that have been widely debunked with data, such as the notion that vaccines cause autism (they don’t) and that HIV does not cause AIDS (it does). He says that on his first day in office, he’ll stop funding research into new medicines and infectious diseases for eight years.

This would stop and reverse the engine of science, data, and discovery that has driven progress improving the health of the American people. There is no apparent plan for a better approach.

Hoping for a cure for a rare cancer that has hospitalized your child? The US government won’t help you find it.

Concerned your elderly parents will skip their flu shots or COVID boosters as vaccines are discouraged❓ Some of the folks being discussed to lead our key public health agencies won’t recognize the link between missed vaccines and deadly illness — though that connection is clear. 

Consider the recent experience in Samoa, where a Kennedy campaign to end childhood vaccinations led to a measles outbreak and 83 deaths, mostly of unvaccinated children.

And Kennedy has promised to hollow out large parts of the FDA. How do we then bring data and science to approve new treatments and improve America’s health? Imagine you depend on insulin every day. Will it be safe? Can we be sure essential food and medicines are safe?

I get it. The pandemic shook people’s trust in key institutions — like the FDA, the CDC, and HHS — and for good reasons. But our work should be to reform these institutions, not erase them, leaving nothing in their place to protect and advance our health.

The bumper sticker slogans are appealing. No one is arguing against protecting Americans from dangerous chemicals or poisons. 

We are all committed to helping Americans eat healthy and stay healthy. But we’ve got to be honest about how we’ve done that and how we can continue to make progress.

Here’s to a confirmation process through the US Senate that provides the critical opportunity for questions to be honestly asked and answered, not just for the senators but also for the millions of Americans they represent. It’s our health that’s on the line.

*Dr. Ashish K. Jha is dean of Brown University School of Public Health and a contributing Boston Globe Opinion writer.

Comment on this opinion:  I consider such (incompetent) nominations to be criminal acts aimed at the health of Americans. 

Musk and Putin are likely telling Trump to nominate people who will weaken and terrify us. I consider Trump to be a criminal who should never have been allowed to run. The danger posed by a man like Kennedy pushes us into an America we have never experienced before--not even in Trump 

Biden should take whatever action he can right now--but failure to get Trump where he belongs in jail long before this has led us to this nightmare.

Incompetence in charge of our nation's health❓😠 "I can't understand why a former herion addict woul be put in position of power like this one will."