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.
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.