Some in the scientific community are shocked and dismayed. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and other federal health agencies. Are their concerns warranted? Or, are they hypocritical?
Kennedy’s three stated goals for the federal health agencies are (i) evidence-based medicine, (ii) clean up corruption and conflicts of interest, and (iii) end the chronic disease epidemic, with special emphasis on our children and concrete results within two years. These are not only laudable goals, but urgent ones.
During the Covid pandemic, evidence-based medicine and the fundamental principles of public health were thrown out the window. With the health agencies’ singular focus on Covid, school closures and other lockdown measures generated enormous collateral damage that is increasingly obvious. The exception was Sweden, which had the lowest excess mortality during the outbreak.
Federal agencies questioned and ignored 2,500 years of scientific knowledge about immunity when they enforced vaccine mandates on students and working-age adults with superior infection-acquired immunity while my 87-year-old neighbor and other older people around the world were still unvaccinated. Covid vaccines saved the lives of many older people, but Covid vaccine mandates killed older people by directing vaccines to those not needing them. That was both unscientific and unethical.
It is noteworthy that many who abandoned evidence-based medicine during the pandemic are now criticizing Kennedy, who wants the CDC, NIH, and FDA to return to evidence-based medicine.
Scientists are tasked with both developing and evaluating drugs and vaccines, and it is important to separate these two important roles. Scientists evaluating drug and vaccine safety should not take money from pharmaceutical companies.
There is also a revolving door between federal health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, at both the higher and lower levels. It will be politically difficult, but if Kennedy can make scientists and federal health agencies more independent of the pharmaceutical industry, that would improve health, lower costs and increase trust.
With school closures, we utterly failed children during the pandemic. How can we make it up to them? In the 1970s, President Nixon declared war on cancer. With more than 40 percent of school-age children suffering from a chronic illness, it is now time to declare war on health problems affecting our children and adolescents, such as asthma, allergy, autism, anorexia, ADHD, addiction, abuse, diabetes, obesity, malnutrition, and mental health, with an emphasis on prevention.
Kennedy is especially concerned about vaccines, and we need to more thoroughly investigate non-specific effects of vaccines, which can be either positive or negative, as well as potential adverse reactions. It is equally important to investigate other potential environmental and genetic risk factors.
Such etiological research will unfortunately take decades rather than years, but there are three important areas we can take immediate action on with the new administration’s two-year goal in mind. The first is nutrition, simultaneously combatting unhealthy foods, obesity, and food insecurity. The second is physical exercise. This is an easy one, since a group of little kids will automatically run around like crazy if we just let them.
The third problem is broken homes after divorce. We know from multiple epidemiological studies that children have much better social, educational, physical, and mental health when they live equal 50/50 time with both parents, but that is not yet the norm. What stands in the way are family courts and mathematically flawed child support guidelines that sometimes starve children.
Our pandemic response was the biggest public health mistake in history. Kennedy now has his work cut out for him, but so do all of us scientists.
We must return to evidence-based medicine, remove conflicts of interest, and promote open scientific discourse without censorship or slander. We must help children who got the short end of the stick during the lockdowns.
This is all needed to restore integrity and trust in science. If we fail, then the relevance and reputation of the scientific community will continue to fade.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is an is an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, scientific director at the Brownstone Institute, and a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom. He is also a former professor of medicine at Harvard University. Dr. Kulldorff developed many groundbreaking methods for nearly real-time drug and vaccine safety surveillance that the FDA and CDC use to monitor drug and vaccine safety. He has spent the last two decades working on infectious disease outbreak detection and monitoring.
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