Deciphering FDA’s “Modernizing” for “a Healthier America”

In a Newsweek article published on July 11, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary attempted to appeal to supporters of the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) campaign by bragging about how the Food and Drug Administration is ostensibly “modernizing” its approach.

Deciphering Makary’s message, however, reveals that the policy goal remains to serve the interests of the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of public health.

“Despite the genius of American scientific discovery,” Makary writes, “a new medication will take over 10 years on average, and more than $1 billion, to come to market—while American children remain the sickest in the developed world.”

The FDA Commissioner thus attributes the alarmingly poor health of the US childhood population to a lack of pharmaceutical drugging, which is precisely the opposite of the aim of health freedom advocates who voted for Donald Trump with the hope of getting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. into the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Makary makes clear that the overarching goal is not public health but industry profit. “If the FDA does not cut the red tape that burdens any bureaucracy over time,” he remarks, “the US will lose valuable market access and investment.”

In other words, drug makers in other countries will gain an advantage if the US government does not vigorously support its domestic pharmaceutical and biotech industries, including “cell and gene therapies”.

The legal immunity granted to vaccine manufacturers, of course, serves that financial agenda.

Makary argues that fast-tracking drugs to market won’t sacrifice safety while advocating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as an alternative to animal studies—as though neither human intelligence nor hypothesis-testing experimentation is required to determine drug safety.

Makary notably admits that “the FDA’s existing mechanisms for monitoring a drug’s safety and efficacy are laughably ineffective and fragmented.”

But it does not logically follow that the solution is for the FDA’s “AI-based computational models” to take over the job of determining whether a product should be on the market—and the government’s interference in the market is transparently aimed at serving the financial interests of special interest groups instead of public health.

Makary admits that “40 percent of American children have a chronic disease”, but he deflects from the role of pharmaceutical products in this tragedy by focusing on only “diabetes or obesity” and calling for the removal of “harmful and unnecessary chemicals and additives from our food supply.”

While ending the government-approved poisoning of the food supply is certainly an important goal, the focus on artificial food dyes is a deflection from bigger problems and a major betrayal for everyone in the health freedom movement who believed that if only RFK, Jr. were heading HHS, then the government would finally address concerns about the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule contributing to the epidemic of chronic diseases and disorders, including asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

And don’t believe the CDC’s claim that studies have proven that “vaccines do not cause autism”. It’s contradicted by its own cited sources, as Dr. Brian Hooker, Dr. Jeet Varia, and I demonstrate in our recent paper in the Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine, “Hviid et al. 2019 Vaccine-Autism Study: Much Ado About Nothing?”

The CDC’s claim is disinformation because, as we detail in our paper, no studies have ever been done to test the hypothesis that vaccinating according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism in subpopulations of susceptible children.

Consequently, it isn’t logically possible for the hypothesis to have been falsified.

Hviid was also senior author of the new study out of Denmark purporting to find no association between aluminum-containing vaccines and health harms including atopic and allergic diseases, autoimmunity, and neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD.

That study, too, though, was designed to find no association.

Dismissing any potential role of vaccines and focusing instead on food, Makary falsely claims that the “unhealthy and unnecessary” additives have been in the food supply “without oversight from the FDA”.

That’s a rather bizarre claim when it is precisely the FDA’s supposed “oversight” that has caused the food supply to be so “overloaded with chemicals” in the first place.

If we had a free market in which people didn’t rely on faith in the government to watch out for them and keep them healthy, the systematic poisoning of the food supply would never have happened.

It is precisely people’s delusional belief that the FDA and other so-called “public health” agencies have our best interests in mind, as opposed to serving the pharmaceutical industry and associated medical trade organizations, that got us into this problem.

The liability immunity for herbicide and pesticide manufacturers slipped into a bill recently introduced into the House of Representatives is another example of how they try to get away with harming us in service to protected industries.

Makary closes his article by calling on Americans to “restore the tradition of bold thinking”.

But his own thinking represents the same archaic paradigm that caused the US childhood population to become so sick in the first place.

The bottom line is that nobody in government is going to save us, to “make Americans healthy again”. The “public health” agencies cannot be fixed because they aren’t broken. They are working exactly according to design. And if we wish to realize the necessary paradigm shift, it is up to us to effect the change.