Dr Oz and RFK Jr: What are their plans for US health care?
Trump’s two nominations for health roles in his new administration are as anti-establishment as they come. Here’s what to expect.
“GO wild on health,” Donald Trump told Robert F Kennedy Jr after he was nominated to lead America’s health agencies.
But how wild, exactly, might he be?
Trump’s two choices for health roles in his new administration are unconventional. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist with no medical or public health qualifications.
He was nominated by the president-elect last week to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the umbrella organisation for various federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Bobby’s going to pretty much do what he wants,” Trump said.
Trump’s second choice, Mehmet Oz, trained as a heart surgeon but found fame as a television doctor on Oprah Winfrey’s show, though his career has veered into increasingly alternative medicine.
Oz was announced on Tuesday as Trump’s choice to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency responsible for providing health insurance to more than 160 million Americans, reporting to Kennedy.
Alternative treatment
Oz is passionate about wacky - and often widely debunked - medicines. In 2010, he said that sleeping with a bar of lavender soap could help to prevent restless leg syndrome. On an episode of The Dr. Oz Show, which ran for 13 seasons, he said: “I know this sounds crazy, but people put it under their sheets.” It was widely refuted by medical experts.
A group of ten doctors later demanded that Oz be fired from Columbia University’s medical faculty, arguing that he had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine”. The university did not take action.
Kennedy is similarly fascinated by unconventional treatments, writing in the Wall Street Journal that half of the NIH’s budget should be spent on “preventative, alternative and holistic” medicines.
Last month he said he would reverse the Biden administration’s “suppression” of alternative medicines, including psychedelics, raw milk and clean foods.
Raw milk is unpasteurised and has recently become more popular, with the clean-eating community claiming that it supports the immune system and improves bone health. However, the FDA and the CDC strongly advise against consuming it due to potentially dangerous bacteria, including salmonella and E. coli.
Vaccinations
Kennedy has said he believed that “autism comes from vaccines”. This theory was popularised by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield in the late 1990s, though it has been comprehensively debunked and Wakefield discredited.
Kennedy, 70, has also said that there is “no vaccine that is safe and effective” and equated vaccinating children to the Holocaust. “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103F, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” he said at an event in 2015. “This is a Holocaust.”
Last week, however, Kennedy told the NPR radio network that vaccines “were not going to be taken away from anybody”, saying he wanted to improve their safety and the information surrounding them to ensure people could make informed choices.
“I am pro-vaccine,” he said. “I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health. But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible.”
Weight loss and false advertising
In 2014, Oz was questioned by the Senate about endorsing raspberry ketone and green coffee extract as weight loss aids. Oz had claimed that certain pills could “melt” fat when there was no discernible evidence, and was investigated for false advertising.
At one point during the hearing, Claire McCaskill, the Missouri senator at the time, told Oz: “The scientific community is almost monolithic against you.”
Oz also recommended the extreme “HCG diet” for weight loss, a method widely considered unsafe. It recommends taking supplements containing human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone produced by the placenta during pregnancy, and eat 500 calories a day, less than a quarter of the recommended amount.
The FDA later said using these products was “reckless”, writing: “If you have HCG products for weight loss, quit using it, throw it out, and stop following the dieting instructions.”
Economic inequality
Kennedy has said often that the American middle classes have suffered the most from the dominance of big corporations in the US economy, including the oil industry and “Big Pharma”, and has historically been a proponent of increased regulation.
He said last year that politicians have been “systematically hollowing out the American middle class and printing money to make billionaires richer”.
The friendly doctor
Oz made his name on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show and has, since the late 1990s, been enthusiastic about simple, healthy changes to people’s lifestyles. Eat green vegetables. Avoid sugar. Exercise for at least half an hour a day.
It was this basic, kitchen table advice which propelled him through the television ranks and helped him eventually being commissioned for his own show and becoming one of the biggest stars on daytime TV.
Drinking water
Kennedy has long campaigned against fluoride being added to water supplies. Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral which is increased in quantity to prevent tooth decay.
He believes that it is associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopment disorders and thyroid disease. Kennedy has also said he believes that chemicals in water are changing children’s sexuality and gender.
A number of studies have shown that no harmful effects have been associated with the low level of fluoride found in drinking water.
Trump has said he supports Kennedy’s wishes to remove fluoride entirely from the American system. “It sounds OK to me,” he said when asked about it.
Covid-19
Kennedy was banned from Instagram during the pandemic after sharing unfounded claims about the Covid-19 vaccine, including that it was the “deadliest vaccine ever made”.
He also claimed that Jews were intentionally spared from infection. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people,” he said in a video. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He later said that he did not believe that the virus was “deliberately engineered”.
Oz frequently promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment - later championed by Trump - for Covid-19. A Veterans Affairs study showed that patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than untreated patients.
Ultra-processed food
Despite tucking into a McDonald’s meal on Trump’s jet over the weekend, Kennedy has been vocal about the damage fast food is doing to the American public, saying it is “driving the obesity epidemic”.
He has said that chemicals in food are tied to autism, as well as psychotic episodes and depression. A link between diet and autism, as well as mental health, has been found by peer-reviewed research, although the precise nature of the connection is still being identified.
Kennedy has also made repeated calls for greater regulation of food additives and ultra-processed foods, which has led to a nationwide increase in obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Tips and tricks
Oz became known for his increasingly unconventional advice on his show, veering further away from mainstream views. He said that colloidal silver - which consists of silver particles suspended in liquid, used as an antimicrobial agent in the early 20th century - could treat colds, wounds, viruses and bacteria. There is no evidence to support its medical use.
The TV star also warned parents that apple juice contained unsafe levels of arsenic, advice that the FDA called “irresponsible and misleading”. In 2013, Oz told women that carrying mobile phones in their bras could lead to breast cancer. The National Breast Cancer Foundation said there was no link.
Mass shootings
Kennedy has claimed that there is a link between criminals who commit mass shootings and taking antidepressant drugs. He said in January that federal scientists should study shootings to “see if there are connections to some of the SSRI [antidepressant] and psychiatric drugs people are taking”.
There is no credible research linking the two, with studies showing only a small percentage of shooters take such medication.
Anti-establishment choices
Trump’s health nominations have shocked many: two men who are better known for the controversy surrounding their beliefs than for their experience in the health sector.
They have both been unpredictable and anti-establishment, drawn to the alternative rather than treatments supported by evidence, and are seemingly immune to the backlash from medical experts.
The exiles from the mainstream are now firmly on the inside.
The Times
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