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      Mitch McConnell condemns petition to revoke approval of polio vaccine by RFK Jr adviser

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      US Senate minority leader and polio survivor Mitch McConnell has condemned attempts to undermine the polio vaccine after reports that a lawyer affiliated with Robert F Kennedy Jr – the health secretary pick for Donald Trump’s second presidency – petitioned for the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the vaccine.In a statement reported by numerous outlets on Friday, McConnell, who contracted the disease as a child in 1944 – 11 years before the licensing of the world’s first polio vaccine – said: “The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed – they’re dangerous.”The 82-year-old went on to add: “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”McConnell’s latest comment comes after the New York Times first reported that Aaron Siri, a lawyer helping Kennedy select incoming health officials for Trump’s second White House term, filed a petition in 2022 in which he called on the FDA to revoke its polio vaccine approval. Trump has nominated Kennedy, an avowed vaccine skeptic, as health secretary for his incoming administration – a move widely criticized by health experts.According to the New York Times, Siri filed the petition on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a major anti-vaccination organization in the US. Siri has also asked federal regulators to withdraw or suspend vaccines for hepatitis B and 13 other vaccines, the outlet reported.Kennedy’s anti-vaccination beliefs have been widely debunked, including the unsupported link between vaccines and autism.Polio, also known as poliomyelitis, is a highly infectious viral disease that mostly affects children under five years old. Transmitted through contaminated water, food or contact with an infected person, the poliovirus destroys nerve cells in the spinal cord, in turn causing muscle wasting and paralysis.Since 1988, polio cases have decreased by more than 99% across the world, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated on its website, adding that polio vaccines have prevented approximately 20m cases of paralysis in children since then.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn response to the reports, a Trump spokesperson for Kennedy Jr told the Washington Post that Siri “has never had a conversation about these petitions with Mr Kennedy or any of the [health and human services] nominees at any point”.Among other things, the spokesperson added that the vaccine “should be investigated and studied appropriately”, which it already has been. More

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      in US Politics

      RFK Jr to research unsupported link between vaccines and autism, Trump says

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      Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, a noted vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview in which he called for more vaccine testing.“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for other every other medication. Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”Trump – who has previously said Kennedy would be allowed to “go wild” on health – said his health secretary pick would not “reinvent the wheel totally”.“He’s not going to upset any system,” he said.But on autism, he added: “Somebody has to find out. If you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism. Now you have it … When you talk about autism, because it was brought up, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20 or 25 years ago, it’s pretty scary.”Scientists have attributed the rise in autism diagnoses to improved screening methods while saying it is caused by a complex mix of factors, including genetics, environment and conditions during pregnancy and birth.The World Health Organization has definitely ruled out a connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine or other childhood inoculations.Research led by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield asserting a link between autism and the MMR jab was later discredited, with the Lancet, a medical journal, issuing a full retraction of a paper it had published based on it.Wakefield was later banned from practicing in Britain after being found by the country’s general medical council to have broken its rules on research and to have acted “dishonestly” and with a “callous disregard” for children’s health.The Guardian reported in 2018 that Wakefield had attended an inaugural ball marking the start of Trump’s first presidency the previous year at which he was quoted calling for a shakeup of the US medical establishment.“What we need now is a huge shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a huge shakeup,” he said. “We need that to change dramatically.” More

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      in UK Politics

      Britain needs a ‘vaccine taskforce’ to prepare for the next pandemic, Lords warn

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      Your support helps us to tell the storyFrom reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreBritain needs a “peacetime vaccine task force” to prepare for the next pandemic, ministers have been warned amid concerns that the government could forget the lessons of Covid-19.The Commons science and technology committee has also called for the government to appoint a chief vaccines officer to help prepare the country for future threats. In a letter sent this week, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, chair of the committee, said evidence to an inquiry held by the committee raised “troubling concerns about our capacity to manufacture vaccines for future biological threats”.The warning comes after the government announced it has bought more than 5 million doses of bird flu vaccines to help battle a potential future pandemic. This follows an increase in transmission of the virus among animals. The committee said its interest in vaccine development in the UK was prompted by “a series of worrying developments”, including the sale of the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) in Oxfordshire, and the later mothballing of the facility. It also cited 11 reports that a planned reduction in state aid threatened AstraZeneca’s proposed vaccine manufacturing facility in Liverpool. Giving evidence in January, Dr Clive Dix, former chair of the vaccine taskforce, said the Conservative government had “destroyed almost everything that was going on” in favour of reliance on Moderna. He said there was less resilience in the UK now because many manufacturers had walked away from the UK. The committee’s letter added: “Our witnesses raised concerns that “other countries have learned the lessons … from where we are sitting, it appears that government and the public have concluded that the UK can do this and that we do not need to improve our systems”, comparing it unfavourably to the more pro-active EU response discussed below.”It added: “The UK needs to ensure it retains robust vaccine manufacturing and scale-up capacity for the next pandemic, but it is falling behind other countries. Witnesses argued that the UK was fortunate to be able to produce a vaccine at speed in 2020 and should not assume this will be possible in the future without renewed and sustained support, and that this relative success may have led to some complacency compared to countries that have funded vaccine manufacturing more urgently.”Earlier this year the government announced a new partnership with pharma giant Moderna to trial a new norovirus vaccine. More

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      in US Politics

      Raw milk CEO whose products have been recalled may lead US raw milk policy

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      Mark McAfee, a California raw milk producer whose products have been recalled several times recently due to bird flu contamination, said he has been approached by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s team to guide the upcoming administration on raw milk policy.McAfee, whose dairy products were recalled after state officials detected bird flu virus in milk samples, said that the transition team for Kennedy, the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, asked him to apply for a position advising on raw milk policy and standards development. The idea, he told the Guardian, would be to create a “raw milk ordinance”, mirroring the existing federal “standard milk ordinance”.Kennedy is a notable fan of raw, or unpasteurized, milk, including McAfee’s products. If confirmed, he has said, he would work to remove restrictions on raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have so far advised against consuming.Kennedy’s team did not respond immediately to the Guardian’s request for comment.If McAfee, whose farm is the largest producer of raw milk in the US, were to gain a role in the upcoming administration, it would be in line with the upcoming administration’s broader edict to put industry heads in roles regulating the very products they sell.Trump has also appointed oil executive Chris Wright for secretary of energy, and Wall Street executive Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary.McAfee’s Raw Farm in Fresno supplies raw milk and milk products to grocery stories across California, and has the unique distinction of supplying the kefir used in the smoothies at Los Angeles’s celebrity-approved Erewhon market.Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate when he ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, interviewed McAfee for a documentary about raw milk released earlier this year. She told McAfee that Kennedy was a fan, and drinks his milk when he is home in Malibu. In a post on X in October, Kennedy said that with Trump in office, the FDA’s “war on public health” would end, as would its “aggressive suppression” of raw milk.Raw milk, which is not heated to kill harmful pathogens, has been linked to the outbreak of bacterial infections including a strain of E coli that can cause kidney failure. McAfee’s farm has also been involved in several lawsuits stemming from a salmonella outbreak that sickened at least 171 people in California last year.The federal government does not regulate the sale of raw milk – states do – but the FDA prohibits the interstate sale of unpasteurized milk for human consumption. In 2008, McAfee’s company pleaded guilty to putting “pet food” stickers on its raw milk in order to illegally sell it across state lines for human consumption.McAfee and other proponents of raw milk have claimed that it has more beneficial enzymes and diverse probiotics than pasteurized milk. The current FDA and researchers have countered that milk is not, in fact, a significant source of probiotics in the first place, and that the bacteria found in raw milk – which come through infected udder tissues, or the dairy environment including soil and cow manure), and milking equipment – are not the kinds that benefit our digestive systems.But the consumption of raw milk has come under particular scrutiny this year amid a bird flu, or H5N1, outbreak, which included the first documented human cases of the virus. No known cases of bird flu virus have been confirmed in people who drank raw milk, although there are three cases in North America where the source has not been identified. Contact with raw milk and the handling of raw milk, however, has been associated with infections – especially among dairy workers.Research suggests that milk carries huge amounts of viral particles. “The most infectious thing from the cows is the milk,” said Meghan Davis, a molecular epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University studying environmental health. In some cases, cows that tested negative for H5N1 in their respiratory tracts were found to be carrying the virus in their milk.Consuming raw milk amid the bird flu outbreak, Davis said, is inherently risky. While most people who have been infected with bird flu have reported mild illnesses, people with compromised or suppressed immune systems could experience more severe symptoms. And as more people are infected, the virus is more likely to mutate and develop more infectious or severe strains that could affect the broader population.“The impact of another pandemic would be awful,” said Davis. “Especially of a pandemic that really affects our food-producing animals as well as people.”Cats who have drunk infected raw milk have exhibited severe neurological symptoms and died.Still, McAfee vehemently denies that raw milk could be implicated in any such risks.“This is the newest platform for the FDA to attack us,” McAfee said. “There are no reported illnesses in the United States regarding [bird flu] and raw milk. Zero. But yet they say the sky is falling.”Like other proponents of raw milk, he has suggested that milk from infected cows boosts immunity to bird flu by passing on antibodies. Antibodies to H5N1, however, have not been found in raw milk products, and cow antibodies would not confer immunity to humans.This week, Raw Farm voluntarily recalled all milk and cream products made between 9 and 27 November after tests found bird flu virus in retail samples and dairy storage and bottling sites. The California department of food and agriculture also quarantined the farm and suspended the distribution of Raw Farm product produced on or after 27 November. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘The science of fluoride is starting to evolve’: behind the risks and benefits of the mineral

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      A national conversation about fluoride’s health benefits exploded this fall after a federal toxicology report, court ruling and independent scientific review all called for updated risk-benefit analysis.Fluoride, a naturally occurring mineral in some regions, has been added to community water supplies since the mid-20th century when studies found exposure dramatically reduced tooth decay.The controversy, heightened by description of the mineral as “industrial waste” by Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US health department, highlights questions some towns are now wrestling with: should the mineral’s well-established protective effects against tooth decay be prioritized lest Americans, and especially children, be subject to unnecessary pain and shame from an unhealthy smile? Or should the possibility of neurodevelopment effects be prioritized, even as studies continue?“Fluoride is the perfect example of helping people without them even having to do anything,” said Dr Sreenivas Koka, the former dean of the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s school of dentistry. The state is a “dental desert”, where there is only one dentist for every 2,120 residents. “Fluoride in the water – all you have to do is drink water and you’ll get the benefit.”Fluoride is added to about 72% of community water supplies in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC again endorsed the practice in a scientific statement this May, saying it found no “convincing scientific evidence linking community water fluoridation with any potential adverse health effect or systemic disorder such as an increased risk for cancer, Down syndrome, heart disease, osteoporosis and bone fracture, immune disorders, low intelligence, renal disorders, Alzheimer disease, or allergic reactions”.Still, controversy over water fluoridation recently made headlines after two high-profile reports and a federal court ruling. The US National Toxicology Program set off a firestorm in August when it published a systematic review that found with “moderate confidence” that children exposed to fluoride levels twice those recommended for drinking water (1.5mg per liter versus the recommended 0.7mg per liter) “are consistently associated with lower IQ in children”.Then, in October, a new Cochrane Review lowered the estimated impact of fluoride, citing the widespread use of fluoride in toothpaste beginning in 1975.“Studies conducted in 1975 or earlier showed a clear and important effect on prevention of tooth decay in children,” Cochrane Review researchers wrote. “However, due to the increased availability of fluoride in toothpaste since 1975, it is unlikely that we will see this effect in all populations today.”The public debate comes as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest publicly funded research agency, is both a key funder of research advancing society’s understanding of fluoride’s non-dental health effects and an agency squarely in Trump’s crosshairs.The agency is one of the top targets for cuts and restructuring. Paradoxically, that could mean that critics such as Kennedy cut research on fluoride, even as the NIH funds research into potential detriments. The incoming administration has not made proposals on how to improve oral health in the US.Fluoride’s health benefits were investigated in the early 20th century, when a Colorado Springs dentist questioned why town residents had brown, mottled and decay-resistant teeth – now known as fluorosis.It was later found that fluoride naturally occurred at high levels in Colorado Springs, causing the cosmetic defects. Its decay-resistant properties were confirmed in a landmark 1945 study in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which found children in Grand Rapids were 60% less likely to develop dental caries (better known as cavities) with fluoride added to water.By 1999, the CDC hailed water fluoridation as one of public health’s greatest victories, alongside seat belts and vaccination. That view was buttressed by a 2015 Cochrane Review, considered the gold standard, that found fluoridating water at 0.7mg per liter led to a nearly 26% reduction in tooth decay, a figure still cited by the American Dental Association (ADA) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) today.The need for preventive oral health solutions is profound in the US – more than 68 million people lack dental insurance and about one in four adults said in a survey they have avoided the dentist because of cost.In addition, school children lose an estimated average of 34m school hours each year due to unexpected dental visits; 2 million Americans visit the emergency room each year because of tooth pain; half a million travel abroad for cheaper care and one in five American seniors lack a single natural tooth. Lack of dental access is so common in some areas, doctors in prison frequently have patients who have never seen one.“One of the things I routinely ask young people in juvenile jail is: ‘Do you have a doctor? Do you have a dentist?’” said Dr Fred Rottnek, former medical director of St Louis county jails in Missouri and now a professor of community medicine at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. “A lot of them have never reported going to the dentist.”Modern inquiry into fluoride’s non-dental health effects began to pick up pace in 2015, when the National Toxicology Program (NTP) requested a systematic review on fluoride’s impact on neurodevelopment. By 2019, toxicology researcher Bruce Lanphear, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, co-authored a study finding fluoride exposure was associated with decreased IQ, which would later be incorporated into the NTP’s systematic review.“That gives you an indication that the science of fluoride is starting to evolve – it wasn’t set in stone 70 years ago,” he said.Lanphear, and a small group of like-minded toxicology researchers, argue now is the time for us to “pause and have an independent scientific committee look at all this new evidence” as “we have a lot of new science specifically about fluoride and the developing brain,” he said.Critics were buttressed again when a federal court ruled in September that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) needed to evaluate fluoride under the Toxic Substances Control Act.But physicians, dentists and mainstream professional associations from the American Dental Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics stand by recommendations for fluoridated water.While some towns step away from fluoride, communities such as Buffalo, New York, are restarting programs.“This is a shame if we don’t take advantage of what we know from the science,” said Koka about the preventive effects of fluoride. “Are there challenges to doing it right? Yes, but should they be so strong they overcome trying at all? That’s a tragedy.”The CDC has also refined guidance about fluoridation in recent years. In 2015, its water fluoridation recommendations went down to 0.7mg per liter of water, from 0.7 to 1.0mg per liter dependent on climate. Later, the CDC issued a 2019 report that advised parents of children younger than two to speak with their dentist about fluoridated toothpaste, and reminded parents of children younger than three to use only a “grain of rice”-sized “smear”.As critics argue that federal agencies’ recommendation lag behind, the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has become one of the chief funders of research into fluoride’s potential impacts on IQ.“Getting funding from the NIH shows they are interested in this important question,” said Christine Till, an assistant professor at York University in Canada and a co-investigator with Lanphear, whose grant studying tooth dentin and neurodevelopment in Canada was funded by the NIH, but turned down by the Canadian government.Others, such as Ashley Malin, epidemiology professor at University of Florida, and Dana Goin, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, have also received NIH funding to research fluoride’s non-dental health effects. Malin is studying fluoride’s impact on children’s sleep and Goin is investigating reproductive health effects.“There is a lot of ongoing work in this area, particularly in the US,” said Goin. “Hopefully, the results from these studies will help determine whether EPA drinking water regulations and CDC recommendations for water fluoridation are adequately balancing improvements in dental health from fluoridation versus any potential negative effects.”Goin’s current funding builds on her previous work, which found water fluoridation was not associated with small-for-gestational age or preterm births. She is now exploring whether fluoride is associated with gestational diabetes.Malin added that it’s a sign of “progress” that the studies can be discussed: “Over a decade ago, to even ask the question of whether optimally fluoridated, or the concentration in drinking water, could be impacting neurodevelopment was quite controversial.” More

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      in US Politics

      We must defend elective abortions, not just the most politically palatable cases | Moira Donegan

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      A Kentucky woman known by the pseudonym Mary Poe recently filed a lawsuit against her state, seeking an abortion for what was once a banal reason: because she wanted one.Poe, who was about seven weeks pregnant at the time of the lawsuit’s filing, has since had an abortion out of state. But her attorneys argue that she still has standing to sue to overturn Kentucky’s two abortion bans – a six-week ban and a separate total ban – arguing that the laws violate the state constitution. This much, at least, is typical: lawsuits challenging abortion bans have sprung up across the country since Dobbs, with women and their families seeking to overturn bans, expand exceptions, or get some compensation from the state for the graphic, distressing, disabling or deadly outcomes that the bans have made them suffer.The US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe in Dobbs cited the surge in activist litigation around abortion – a product of conservative investment in anti-choice legal shops – as part of their reason for doing so. Surely this must be a contentious, controversial issue that the federal bench is ill equipped to resolve, the judges from the conservative legal movement reasoned – because look how many complaints the conservative legal movement has filed against it!This rationale was always disingenuous, but it has also been proved flatly wrong: Dobbs has not got the courts out of the abortion business. Instead, lawsuits over abortion have exploded. The anti-choice camp has pounced, seeking to further restrict abortion by banning pills; targeting reproductive rights advocates, abortion funds and sexual health educators; claiming rights for fetuses or embryos; or by asserting that men who father pregnancies have a right to keep women from terminating them.But the pro-abortion rights side has been busy with litigation, too. Women who have been put at great health risk or made to suffer terrible, painful complications as a result of bans brought a class-action lawsuit in Texas. Bans have been challenged over and over again – on religious liberty grounds, on the grounds of state constitutional provisions securing the right to make individual healthcare decisions, under a federal law that guarantees emergency room treatment for patients needing stabilizing care, and under state constitutional clauses guaranteeing liberty, due process and privacy.The Kentucky lawsuit is part of this latter camp. Mary Poe has cited Kentucky’s constitutional guarantees of individual rights to both privacy and self-determination, which she says have been violated by the bans. “I feel overwhelmed and frustrated that I cannot access abortion care here in my own state,” she said in a statement delivered via her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I am bringing this case to ensure that other Kentuckians will not have to go through what I am going through, and instead will be able to get the healthcare they need in our community.”This kind of desire for an abortion – the dignified simplicity of it – has been missing from much of the post-Dobbs abortion rights discourse. After the ruling, as trigger bans shot into effect across the country, clinics shuttered their doors, and scared women tried to discern their options, there was no shortage of tragic stories highlighting the brutality, indignity and gendered bigotry of the laws. But as the dust settled and members of the Democratic party, the major reproductive rights advocacy groups and the liberal legal movement surveyed the national scene, a consensus emerged that the face of the mainstream pro-choice movement would be the patient who experienced a medical emergency.Women who had suffered horrific medical complications became lucid, moving and highly sought after tellers of their own stories, explaining how abortion bans has risked their health: Amanda Zurawski, for example, was denied an emergency abortion at 18 weeks, subsequently went into septic shock twice, and one of her fallopian tubes was so scarred that it is now permanently closed, inhibiting her future fertility. Kate Cox was denied an abortion after discovering that her fetus has trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition which is incompatible with life, and which, because of Cox’s own medical history, also endangered her fertility and life.During her presidential run, Kamala Harris ran an ad featuring a woman identified only as Ondrea, who suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks and was denied the standard care due to her state’s abortion ban. She developed sepsis and almost died. The ad features a shot of Ondrea in a bathroom, staring at her body in a mirror wearing only a sports bra. Her belly bears the scars of the emergency surgery that eventually saved her life – the surgery that she never would have had to have if it weren’t for the ban.It does not diminish these women’s bravery, their suffering, or the wrongness of what was done to them to say that they are only one small fraction of those who need abortions in America. These are married, middle-class women with wanted pregnancies; Zurawski and Cox are both white. Cox has spoken movingly about her hopes to meet her future child, a girl; in the ad that features Ondrea, she and her husband hold a baby blanket. These are women whose suffering at the hands of abortion bans has nothing to do with a refusal or distaste for heterosexual, married, middle-class life. Their suffering can be made visible precisely because they are so acceptable.Not so with Mary Poe. Poe may well be married, middle-class and white; from her statement, in which she talks about the difficulty of finding childcare, we can infer that she, like most abortion patients, is already a mother. But Poe is not suffering a physical emergency; she is not enduring any pain or medical misfortune that she can use to purchase social license. She is not, in other words, a woman whose claim to an abortion is based on a plea for mercy. She is merely a woman who seeks to be in control of her own life, one who believes that things like privacy and self-determination apply to her, too.“I have decided that ending my pregnancy is the best decision for me and my family,” Poe writes in her public statement. “This is a personal decision, a decision I believe should be mine alone, not made by anyone else.”This was not always a radical proposition. But in the post-Dobbs world, it has sadly become one.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Hear me out: RFK could be a transformational health secretary | Neil Barsky

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      Among the cast of characters poised to join the Trump administration, no one is as exasperating, polarizing or potentially dangerous as Robert F Kennedy Jr. But in a twist that is emblematic of our times, no single nominee has the potential to do as much good for the American people.Bear with me. RFK Jr has been rightly pilloried for promoting a litany of theories linking vaccines with autism, chemicals in the water supply to gender identity, how people contract Aids and saying the Covid-19 vaccine, which in fact stemmed the deadliest pandemic of our lifetimes, was itself “the deadliest vaccine ever made”. He claimed Covid-19 was meant to target certain ethnic groups, Black people and Caucasians, while sparing Asians and Jewish people.In normal times, these notions would be disqualifying. Spouting unfounded scientific claims is corrosive to a functioning democracy. It weakens the bonds of trust in our public institutions, and feeds the rightwing narrative that all government is illegitimate. This is why, writing in the Guardian this September, I dismissed the prospect of RFK Jr, saying his “anti-vaccine work is more likely to make America have measles again”.But these are not normal times. RFK Jr is Donald Trump’s pick to run our country’s health and human services department. He will have a massive impact on our broken, expensive and largely ineffectual delivery of healthcare services. How shall we deal with this?On one hand, RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine views are beyond the pale. To obtain Senate approval, I think he will have to repudiate the unproven assertion that the Covid-19 vaccine was harmful, and embrace the scientific reality that vaccines for measles, smallpox, coronavirus and other contagious diseases are in fact modern medical miracles that spared the lives hundreds of millions of people. And here is where I will part company with many of my Trump-fighting friends: should RFK Jr be able to abandon his numerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, he can be the most transformative health secretary in our country’s history.This is because RFK Jr has articulated what our Democratic and Republican leaders have largely ignored: our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight. He recognizes the inordinate control the pharmaceutical and food industries over healthcare policy, and the revolving door that exists among congressional staffers, pharmaceutical lobbyists and corporate executives. In testimony during hearings chaired by the Republican senator Ron Johnson this past September, Kennedy offered a lucid analysis of what is making America metabolically sick; he railed against big pharma and big food, and drew links between the damage done by ultraprocessed foods such as seed oils and sugars to our health, as well as the efforts of the food industry to come up with chemicals that make these foods addictive.He advocates banning pharmaceutical advertising on television, and wants to clamp down on the corporate ties to federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and National Institute of Health. (To my knowledge, he has not spoken out against the egregious cost of life-saving drugs or unequal access to medical treatment, but hopefully he will get around to that as well.)We spend $4tn on healthcare annually, and lead the world in spending more than $12,000 per person, 50% more than Switzerland, which is the second biggest spender per capita. American doctors dominate the Nobel prizes for medicine, and our medical schools are considered the best in the world. Yet we appear incapable of stemming the epidemic of chronic diseases. A staggering 73% of us are obese or overweight and more than 38 million people suffer from diabetes.This issue hits home for me, as I was diagnosed with severe type 2 diabetes in 2021, and – after receiving terrible medical advice to rely on insulin and metformin – reversed my condition by adopting a diet low in carbohydrates. This year, I published a “follow the money” series for the Guardian, Death By Diabetes, in which I highlighted the heavy influence of big pharma and big food on the American Diabetes Association (ADA). The ADA is a so-called patient advocacy group that sets the standard of care for diabetes treatment in this country, and yet it accepts money from food companies such as the makers of Splenda and Idaho potatoes – two products which have been found to increase people’s risk of getting diabetes.I subsequently wrote about amputations, and the reality that African Americans with diabetes are four times more likely to endure that grim procedure than white people. I view nutrition and metabolic health as a matter of racial and economic equity. I am clear-eyed, I think, of the serious risks to public health that RFK Jr’s unfounded anti-vaccine views pose. But so long as we still have a voice and can find a drop of hope in these terrible times, I think we should try to tilt policy toward the public good where we can. To that end, here is the game plan I believe RFK Jr should pursue.

      Lose the conspiracies and stick to the science. RFK Jr is right, and there is more than ample research to focus on the deleterious impact of sugars and seed oils. Following the money has always been a valuable strategy. Let’s start there.

      Lean on the vast ecosystem of committed researchers, clinicians and writers who have devoted their career to promoting metabolic health, even while knowing they would forfeit access to government and pharmaceutical grants. Many of these mavericks come from top medical schools, but they are a decided minority on their faculties. They include clinicians such as Georgia Ede, Mariela Glandt, Tony Hampton, Eric Westman, scientists such as Benjamin Bikman, Ravi Kampala, Cate Shanahan, and writers such as Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholz and Casey Means. These are heroic people who, in getting to know them and reading their work, I have found to be intellectually honest health practitioners.

      Appoint a diabetes czar to come up with proposals to once and for all fix this deadly and utterly reversible disease. I choose this particularly chronic ailment because it is ubiquitous, ruinously expensive, a disease that disproportionately afflicts the poor, is closely connected to our obesity epidemic, and utterly reversible through diet. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could finally reverse type 2 diabetes in our lifetime?

      Increase federal funding of nutrition studies. The FDA and NIH historically have tilted the research scales in favor of studies that might produce the next blockbuster drug. In reality, we still do not understand why we get fat and why we have seen an increase in chronic (non-contagious) diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Crohn’s.

      Severely regulate the ability of cereal companies to market their sugary wares to children, and the ability of pharmaceutical companies to barrage the rest of us with advertisements. Will a Republican-controlled Congress allow for more government regulation – even if it saves lives?
      RFK Jr’s ascent represents a tricky issue for people like myself who strongly supported the election of Kamala Harris. Healthcare is far from the only issue I am committed to, and I am disgusted by the Trump administration’s plans to deport millions of undocumented people, its attack on democratic institutions, and possible abandonment of Ukraine and the Nato alliance. While I disagreed with Liz Cheney about many, if not most, issues, I also embraced her apostasy when it came to the election – I adhere to the approach of not interrupting people you disagree with while they are doing the right thing.After writing something unkind about RFK Jr in the days leading up to the election, I received a private note from Jan Baszucki, a prominent metabolic health advocate I have come to admire over the past year. “With all due respect,” she wrote. “I am a big fan of your reporting on type 2 diabetes. But your comments about RFK Jr … are not helpful to the cause of metabolic health, which is only on the national agenda because he put it there.”Leading up to the election, I believed RFK Jr was fair game. I was, and remain, particularly concerned that his fringe ideas about vaccines and poisons would get conflated with his excellent perspective on metabolic health, and hurt the cause. Now I think we should be constructive where we can advance the public good.The larger question hanging over RFK Jr’s term as HHS secretary is whether Donald Trump will back him up when he takes on the pharmaceutical and food industries. The US’s health is not an issue the president-elect has evinced an interest in in the past. And his embrace of corporate executives such as Tesla’s Elon Musk suggests crony capitalism could be the dominant theme of the second Trump administration. But if we know anything about what makes Trump tick, we know that he responds to positive reinforcement.After all, it was the criminal justice advocates such as Van Jones and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who coaxed him into supporting the First Step Act, a significant piece of criminal justice reform (and one which Trump now forswears). As founder of the Marshall Project, the non-profit journalism organization that covers the US criminal justice system, I believe criminal justice reform should also be a matter of national urgency, yet at the time, I was ambivalent about efforts to work with the administration. In retrospect, whatever harm Trump might have otherwise inflicted, I would say we are a better country for the First Step Act.We are in a similar dilemma with respect to healthcare today: the system is ruinously expensive and inhumane. If there is someone in the administration who wants to make things better, let’s not interrupt him.

      Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of the Marshall Project More

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      in US Politics

      The appointment of Robert F Kennedy has horrified public health experts. Here are his three most dangerous ideas | Devi Sridhar

      by

      The announcement that Donald Trump has appointed Robert F Kennedy as the US secretary of health and human services has sent shock waves through the health and scientific community. Kennedy ran as an independent presidential candidate before bowing out and supporting Trump’s run in exchange for an influential position, so we have a pretty good idea of his positions on public health.The main goal Kennedy has trumpeted recently is to “Make America healthy again”. At face value, it’s a noble aim. That’s the essence of public health: how to reduce risk factors for disease and mortality at a population level and improve the quality of health and wellbeing. But behind this slogan comes a darker, conspiracy-laden agenda. As someone who has spent a lot of time researching global public health, these are the positions I believe could be the most dangerous.Anti-vaxxer viewsKennedy is well known as a prominent anti-vaxxer. He has claimed that vaccines can cause autism, and also said that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective”. He called the Covid-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made”. None of these claims are true: repeat studies have shown that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism, we have numerous safe and effective vaccines against childhood killers such as whooping cough and measles, and the Covid-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives globally.Much of what he is saying is what people want to hear: being anti-vax is increasingly a way to build a fanbase. I have seen this as a scientist: if you talk about childhood vaccinations, you get daily abuse. If you talk about the dangers of vaccines, you can end up with a cult following, as Russell Brand and Andrew Wakefield have. It’s not even clear that Kennedy personally believes what he’s saying: guests invited to a holiday party at his home in December 2021 were told to be vaccinated or tested for Covid-19 (he blamed his wife).The big question is about how much harm he can do in the next few years as the man who oversees health agencies in the US. Will he roll back budgetary allocations for vaccination campaigns? Eliminate research into new vaccines? With avian flu continuing to spread in mammals and birds, will he support the stockpiling and rollout of H5N1 vaccines if necessary in a future outbreak or pandemic? If his appointment is approved, experts say that vaccines will be “the first issue on the table”.The “benefits” of raw milkSimilarly, he has tweeted about the benefits of raw milk, which has become a bizarre Maga talking point generally. Raw milk consumption is a risk factor for a number of dangerous illnesses from E coli to salmonella, but is even more worrying with the widespread infection of dairy herds in the US. While pasteurisation has been shown to kill the H5N1 virus in milk and prevent its ability to infect, raw milk retains its pathogens. This year, 24 cats who drank raw milk on a farm become infected by avian flu; 12 died and 12 suffered from blindness, difficulty breathing and other serious health problems. This is when we need federal agencies to regulate what is being sold to the public and ensure clear communication of the health risks. Instead, raw milk demand has gone up, with some vendors claiming that “customers [are] asking for H5N1 milk because they want immunity from it”. (There’s a certain irony in the logic behind vaccination – training our immune system in how to respond to a pathogen – being used in this situation.)Anti-pharmaceutical conspiracy theoriesPart of the problem of the “Make America healthy again” campaign is that it contains nuggets of truth within a larger false narrative. We know that the prices charged by “big pharma” in the US are a problem – but instead of thinking this is a conspiracy to medicate the public when that’s not in their best interests, it’s worth reflecting on how the UK has managed to negotiate more reasonable prices. This is where government can have real power: ensuring fair prices for healthcare providers and individuals, and going after the extraordinary profit margins of pharmaceutical companies. But instead of taking this on – for instance, Trump could have negotiated Covid-19 vaccine prices in his first presidency – it is easier to demonise all pharma companies. Many of them of course play a valuable role in trialling and bringing drugs and vaccines to market. They just need to be regulated.Taking on these ideas will be a challenge when their proponent is leading US health policy. How do you try to engage with those who believe things that are simply not true? It’s hard: a recent Nature study found that the more time you spend on the internet trying to validate what is true and not true, you more you go down the rabbit hole of false information. Those who believe outlandish theories are generally people who think of themselves as more intelligent than the average person, have a lot of time to do their own research on the internet, and are convinced that everyone else is being duped.The US has a big health problem. Life expectancy is going dramatically backwards, Covid-19 killed a huge number of working-age Americans and trust in the federal government is at 23%. But the solution, if we look to healthier countries such as Denmark and South Korea, involves basic public health interventions, access to affordable medical care and trust in government. And not drinking raw milk.

      Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

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