Everyone agrees that Americans are unhealthy

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. he is wrong about many things in public health. Vaccines do not cause autism. Raw milk is more harmful than pasteurized milk. And cell phones have not been shown to cause brain cancer. But the premise of his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is unhealthy, and our current administration has not fixed the problem.

Joe Biden came into office promising to “beat” the coronavirus epidemic, cure cancer, and provide more people with health care. Arguably no one on Earth can be more passionate about supporting cancer research than Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and, in 2022, announced the initiative of halving American cancer deaths in the next 25 years. Robert Califf, Biden’s FDA commissioner, has been firm in his claim that the agency must play a role in reversing the “dramatic decline” in American life expectancy, and has repeatedly warned of “an epidemic that continues of chronic diseases related to diet,” such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. A 2019 study found that only 12 percent of Americans considered healthy, based on waist circumference, blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol.

Of course Biden’s White House wouldn’t end cancer or obesity in four years. But many of its policies did not address many of America’s health problems. Despite Califf’s ironic speech about the country’s food crisis, for example, the FDA’s efforts to improve the situation are largely dependent on giving Americans more information about healthy foods.

The public health system that the Trump administration will inherit is more focused and skilled at treating America’s health problems than preventing them. That weakness-despite the billions of dollars spent annually on these organizations-has damaged the credibility of the public health center to the point that Kennedy has become Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Marty Makary, Trump’s nominee to lead the FDA, has also gone further with US “medical education”. And Trump’s choice to lead the CDC, former Rep. Dave Weldon, has criticized the agency’s vaccine policies and has tried to block vaccine safety research because of what he says are conflicts of interest. A group of men who have made it their business to distrust our existing health care institutions may soon be empowered to try to blow them up.

The Biden administration, to be fair, had little time to deal with the serious issues of American health, because it had to deal with a few crises. Much of Biden’s time has been spent steering the country out of this pandemic. Overall, his administration has met most of its COVID goals. The Biden White House offered free COVID tests to Americans and launched a vaccination campaign that resulted in more than a quarter of the country being vaccinated. However, the outbreak left the CDC reeling from accusations that it was simultaneously too slow and aggressive in its efforts to combat the virus. During the Biden presidency, the agency promised to “rapidly share science and data” and “translate science into actionable policy,” but has struggled to respond to the outbreak of bird flu. Public health experts have criticized the CDC for not sharing enough information about virus infections, including a human case in Missouri earlier this year, and farmers have been reluctant to implement the agency’s recommendations to prevent transmission of the virus from sick cattle to humans.

Some of those tragedies were selfish. The FDA is entrusted with making sure our food and medicines are safe, and it often solves problems quickly after they arise. But for months, the FDA failed to act on a whistle-blower complaint alerting regulators to deplorable conditions at an infant formula factory that eventually led to a nationwide formula shortage and infant deaths. two. The FDA also has to decide which tobacco products can be sold, but it has failed to regulate the illegal market for vapes and nicotine patches, such as Zyn. And for all the administration’s talk of being guided by “science and truth,” the White House appeared to have bowed to political pressure and abandoned the plan to ban menthol cigarettes at the end of a long process to make laws. The past four years have revealed that key aspects of the organisation’s supply chain—particularly its tobacco and food management—have been neglected by the sector’s leadership; in 2022, independent reviews of the FDA’s food and tobacco agencies found that both lacked clarity about intent and purpose.

At the same time, the administration has failed to fulfill its lofty ambitions. Biden quietly dropped his ideas, such as his campaign promise to create a public-choice insurance plan. The Center for Advanced Research Projects for Health, a new federal agency that supports high-risk, high-reward research that is critical to Biden’s cancer cause, is in its infancy, and Republicans in Congress he is eager to reduce its budget. And some promises, like Biden’s ambitious goal to help transform the American diet, are now being approached as trivial.

The administration billed its 2022 hunger and nutrition conference, for example, as the largest and most important nutrition policy conference since the Nixon administration. That 1960s conference led to millions of children having access to school lunches and created the Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (or WIC), which provides with food for nearly 6 million Americans every month. The Biden administration’s summit ended with a pledge to end hunger and improve America’s diet by 2030, but the steps taken to address those goals — such as creating a plan to add warning labels to unhealthy foods – it was easy. And all the agency has done so far in that project is to research the possible design of the labels. The FDA has also promised to lower sodium in foods, but the goals it has set for the food industry are entirely voluntary.

This effort is logically conscious and systematic. The agency’s warning about the draft warning letter comes amid threats from the food industry to sue any label deemed unfair. Indeed, in the US legal system, regulators have a hard time ordering companies to do anything unless it is said to be unconstitutional. But the Biden administration’s efforts seem inadequate given the magnitude of America’s health problems.

RFK Jr. it promises a break from the status quo. This does not mean that, if he can be confirmed as a health writer, he has a good plan. Most of his ideas are declarations that he will take drastic measures as soon as Trump is sworn in as president. The reality is that many of those efforts can take months, if not years, to implement—and some may not be possible at all. For example, he has signed on to clear the FDA’s food facility, even though there are laws that prevent federal officials from being fired. He has also pledged to ban certain chemicals in food, which he says contribute to lowering the life expectancy of Americans. But for each chemical banned by the FDA, it will have to go through a long regulatory process, which may be challenged by food companies in court. Kennedy’s proposal to radically change the system of fees that drugmakers pay the FDA to test their products could send the agency into a budget crisis.

If Kennedy is confirmed to lead HHS, he will soon face the reality that governing is a slow and tedious process that does not take big ideas and bold ideas, even if an impatient leader like Trump call the shots. At the beginning of his first term, Trump declared war on drug companies, which he said were “getting away with murder” because of their high prices. Trump’s former health secretary, Alex Azar, also spent the next four years pushing for sweeping reforms that included requiring drugmakers to post their prices on TV ads, to import drugs from Canada, coordinate US drug prices in other countries, and remove rebates. for middlemen to negotiate with insurance companies. But every thought was caught by the officers and the cases. Trump’s first attempt to contain COVID by banning international air travel similarly did little to stop the virus from leaving America, though he said at the time that the policy “saved us” from a big explosion.

Biden benefited from the quick operation of Operation Warp Speed ​​to create the vaccines, but it was his team of experts who ended up distributing them. And they ended up lowering drug prices too, much more easily than Trump intended. But technology has also failed to solve our biggest—and most visible—health problems. Trump’s nominees have no experience running the Rube Goldberg game that is American sovereignty. They are certainly not afraid to try something new, but we are about to find out how far that will take them.