His attacks have grown more sweeping, with Kennedy suggesting he will clear out "entire departments" at FDA, including the agency's food and nutrition center. The program is responsible for preventing foodborne illness, promoting health and wellness, reducing diet-related chronic disease and ensuring chemicals in food are safe.
If confirmed, Kennedy in principle could overturn almost any FDA decision. There have been rare cases of such decisions in previous administrations. Under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, HHS overruled FDA approval decisions on the availability of emergency contraceptives.
Unwinding FDA regulations or revoking approval of longstanding vaccines and drugs would likely be more challenging. FDA has lengthy requirements for removing medicines from the market, which are based on federal laws passed by Congress. If the process is not followed, drugmakers could bring lawsuits that would need to work their way through the courts.
Kennedy, who has said "there's no vaccine that is safe and effective," would be in charge of appointments to the committee of influential panel experts who help set vaccine recommendations to doctors and the general public. Those include polio and measles given to infants and toddlers to protect against debilitating diseases to inoculations given to older adults to protect against threats like shingles and bacterial pneumonia as well as shots against more exotic dangers for international travelers or laboratory workers.
— "We need to act fast," Kennedy was reported to have said during an a Scottsdale, Arizona event over the weekend. "So that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave." [...] Kennedy wants half of the NIH budget to go toward "preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in September. "In the current system, researchers don't have enough incentive to study generic drugs and root-cause therapies that look at things like diet."
Kennedy has not focused as much on the agency that spends more than $1.5 trillion yearly to provide health care coverage for more than half of the country through Medicaid, Medicare or the Affordable Care Act. [...] Instead, he's been an outspoken opponent of Medicare or Medicaid covering expensive weight-loss drugs, like Ozempic or Zepbound. Those drugs are not widely covered by either program, but there's some bipartisan support in Congress to change that.
I'm sure the man who orchestrated a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa will do a fine job with our public health policy.
Feel like some states should coalition together and organize their own agencies
That isn't a bad idea. If they truly plan to gut the federal government and reduce its income, this will have an outsized effect on funds available for the red shithole states. Let the blue states band together to provide for their citizens while those who wanted this can wallow in their own shit.
It would also make it easier to secede (gods I wish)
Wow, that's a disgusting take. Not everybody in red states wanted it and not everyone can afford to move to a blue state or they might be penalised for visiting one for health care.
Honestly? Why should states that actually can get it together to take active measures to try to take care of their constituents have to be limited by what the most ignorant and backward parts of the country decide on? How many times do we have to see some court in Texas shoot down a measure that would help people before we land on no longer caring what Texas thinks about anything?
I get that there are people in these states who don't want this stuff and they can't all easily relocate, but we don't want it either and we actually manage to organize and vote in accordance with that. Why should every state in the US be held back by every state in the US that just went out and voted to tear apart all the collective good that we have?
Maybe we'd be better off separating power down to the state level or just straight up breaking up the US. Funneling money into red payee states so they can have things like roads and health care clearly isn't helping to drag them any further to the left, but maybe if they didn't actually have access to those funds it might incentivize policies that don't just hand everything to the worst people they can find. Or at the very least, maybe they couldn't afford to fuck things up so badly.
They voted for this. We didn't.
While I understand where this sentiment comes from and even agree with the fact that it's a good idea to consolidate a Democratic voting bloc there's a lot of fucked up generalization in this comment.
I'd encourage you to take a look at the popular votes from the presidential election and consider that even if a state was ultimately red, there are many where nearly 40-50% of the people did NOT vote for this and did NOT want it. In fact they actively voted against it. Where do we draw the line for blue states? Is the 51.8% vote for Kamala in Virginia "good enough"? What about the 50.7% vote for Kamala in New Hampshire?
The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" rhetoric on the right is absolute bullshit and I consider calls for abandoning the people in red states the same thing with different language. It ignores systemic issues - the level of voter suppression happening in these states, the censorship of progressive ideas, and the lack of access to educational resources. Democrats often recognize systemic issues related to race and gender but have a much harder time considering that telling people "educate yourself", "organize", and "go vote" is not as easy or effective for these folks.
EDIT: Changed some wording to be more precise
My issue is very much this whole attitude of either outright stating or having implications of "Fuck you, I've got mine now all the others can die".
I don't believe that lives in general are worth sacrificing just so some can have good things.
That is what is being overlooked here I feel, the real cost in lives.
Fundamentally there's nothing wrong with the other ideas being espoused except for the cost in lives everyone seems to be either overlooking or not caring about.
I genuinely dont know what your argument here is. The government of California is powerless to help reasonable citizens of Mississippi so they should not help themselves?
Yes there will be real costs in lives but fixing it nationally went out the window 2 weeks ago. State level is the best that can be done right now. Yes that means that people who totally dont deserve it will suffer because their neighbors support horrible stupid policies and that sucks, but fixing what can be fixed now makes more sense than trying the impossible. Perfection should not be the enemy of the good. That is how the US ended up with Trump again.
My argument here is, if you read the comments then people keep acting like it's okay for people to lose lives or not to be looked after. That's not a great attitude to have just because someone lives in a red state and invariably it'll be those that are marginalised that suffer the most and it's part of the same attitude that gets us people like trump in the first place.
That's all I'm pointing out, that people don't care.
I didn't create the reality they're facing, and it's happening regardless. No reason everyone has to suffer too. Sucks to suck.
That's a terrible thing to say.
Honestly yes but it’s reality. Republicans led states-I live in one-need to hurt. And they need to know it’s their own fucking fault.
Yikes.
This is my current hope that the sane states can cobble something together and hopefully hire a lot of the talent at those agencies that will be looking for work.