The U.S. Senate has voted 52-48 Thursday to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, where he will oversee the nation’s largest healthcare programs including Medicare and Medicaid.
Sen. Mitch McConnell from Kentucky was the only Republican who joined Democrats in opposing the candidate, whom they see as an unqualified wildcard.
Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has spent decades calling out industry influence over regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, and has brought attention to the role ultra-processed foods and chemical additives play in the chronic disease epidemic.
He has also been criticized for questioning the safety and efficacy of certain vaccines, though he denies the label of “anti–vaxxer.”
“In my advocacy, I’ve often disturbed the status quo by asking uncomfortable questions. Well, I’m not going to apologize for that. We have massive health problems in this country that we must face honestly,” Kennedy said during his first confirmation hearing. “My approach to HHS is radical transparency.”
Kennedy had stumbled over his answers and seemed uncertain on specifics when Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., asked him about potential improvements to Medicaid and Medicare. The lawyer was adamant, though, that reforms are necessary, particularly given the cost of healthcare in the United States and the growing numbers of sick Americans.
“The United States has worse health than any other developed nation, yet we spend more on healthcare – at least double, and in some cases triple – as other countries. Last year we spent $4.8 trillion,” Kennedy said.
As of 2024, roughly 60% of Americans have at least one chronic disease and 40% have two or more, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy has said he will push for nutrition reforms, such as scrutinizing food additives, providing healthy food options to those on SNAP benefits, and removing the agriculture lobby’s influence on the FDA’s nutrition department.
He promised, however, to work with the Department of Agriculture and all invested stakeholders when considering policies that may impact the food supply or the livelihoods of farmers.
Most Republicans celebrated Kennedy’s confirmation as a blow to Big Pharma and corrupt actors in the healthcare industry as Kennedy fights to “Make America Healthy Again.”
“Congratulations to @RobertKennedyJr on his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on X. “Finally, someone to detox the place after the Fauci era. Get ready for health care freedom and MAHA!”
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The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide from its shelves — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs
Physicians have a duty to put forward the best possible evidence, not ideology, based treatments
Late last month, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) announced that it, along with three Alberta doctors, had filed a constitutional challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26 “to protect the relationship between patients, their families and doctors when it comes to making treatment decisions.”
Bill 26, which became law last December, prohibits doctors in the province from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapies for those under 16; it also bans doctors from performing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors (those under 18).
The unprecedented CMA action follows its strongly worded response in February 2024 to Alberta’s (at the time) proposed legislation:
“The CMA is deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care, including the Alberta government’s proposed restrictions on gender-affirming treatments for pediatric transgender patients.”
But here’s the problem with that statement, and with the CMA’s position: the evidence supporting the “gender affirmation” model of care — which propels minors onto puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and in some cases, surgery — is essentially non-existent. That’s why the United Kingdom’s Conservative government, in the aftermath of the exhaustive four-year-long Cass Review, which laid bare the lack of evidence for that model, and which shone a light on the deeply troubling potential for the model’s irreversible harm to youth, initiated a temporary ban on puberty blockers — a ban made permanent last December by the subsequent Labour government. And that’s why other European jurisdictions like Finland and Sweden, after reviews of gender affirming care practices in their countries, have similarly slammed the brakes on the administration of puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to minors.
It’s not only the Europeans who have raised concerns. The alarm bells are ringing loudly within our own borders: earlier this year, a group at McMaster University, headed by none other than Dr. Gordon Guyatt, one of the founding gurus of the “evidence-based care” construct that rightfully underpins modern medical practice, issued a pair of exhaustive systematic reviews and meta analyses that cast grave doubts on the wisdom of prescribing these drugs to youth.
And yet, the CMA purports to be “deeply concerned about any government proposal that restricts access to evidence-based medical care,” which begs the obvious question: Where, exactly, is the evidence for the benefits of the “gender affirming” model of care? The answer is that it’s scant at best. Worse, the evidence that does exist, points, on balance, to infliction of harm, rather than provision of benefit.
CMA President Joss Reimer, in the group’s announcement of the organization’s legal action, said:
“Medicine is a calling. Doctors pursue it because they are compelled to care for and promote the well-being of patients. When a government bans specific treatments, it interferes with a doctor’s ability to empower patients to choose the best care possible.”
Indeed, we physicians have a sacred duty to pursue the well-being of our patients. But that means that we should be putting forward the best possible treatments based on actual evidence.
When Dr. Reimer states that a government that bans specific treatments is interfering with medical care, she displays a woeful ignorance of medical history. Because doctors don’t always get things right: look to the sad narratives of frontal lobotomies, the oxycontin crisis, thalidomide, to name a few.
The thalidomide saga is particularly instructive: it illustrates what happens when a government drags its heels on necessary action. Canada was the last developed country to pull thalidomide, given to pregnant women for morning sickness, from its shelves, three months after it had been banned everywhere else — three months during which babies continued to be born in this country with absent or deformed limbs, along with other severe anomalies. It’s a shameful chapter in our medical past, but it pales in comparison to the astonishing intransigence our medical leaders have displayed — and continue to display — on the youth gender care file.
A final note (prompted by thalidomide’s history), to speak to a significant quibble I have with Alberta’s Bill 26 legislation: as much as I admire Premier Danielle Smith’s courage in bringing it forward, the law contains a loophole allowing minors already on puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones to continue to take them. Imagine if, after it was removed from the shelves in 1962, government had allowed pregnant women already on the drug to continue to take thalidomide. Would that have made any sense? Of course not. And the same applies to puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones: they should be banned outright for all youth.
That argument is the kind our medical associations should be making — and would be making, if they weren’t so firmly in the grasp, seemingly, of ideologues who have abandoned evidence-based medical care for our youth.
