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.
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 realizing that telling people “educate yourself”, “organize”, and “go vote” is not as easy or effective for these folks.