Ex-FDA Commissioner Says RFK Jr. ‘Will Cost Lives’ As Head Of HHS | EUROtoday

Scott Gottlieb, who served as Food and Drug Administration commissioner throughout Donald Trump’s first time period, is severely alarmed on the president-elect’s intention to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to steer the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy is a vocal skeptic of vaccines and different mainstream public well being measures. His acknowledged intentions embody eradicating all fluoride from public ingesting water, undermining vaccination efforts and gutting the FDA, an company beneath the HHS umbrella.

“If RFK follows through on his intentions — and I believe he will, and I believe he can — it will cost lives in this country,” Gottlieb mentioned Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” he mentioned, citing analysis that implies only a 5% drop in measles vaccinations would probably have an outsized affect and result in “large measles outbreaks.”

“For every 1,000 cases of measles that occur in children, there will be one death,” Gottlieb mentioned. “And we are not good in this country at diagnosing and treating measles. If you look at the outbreak in Ohio, 30% of the kids were hospitalized, you look at the outbreak in Minnesota, 20% were hospitalized.”

(Ohio had a measles outbreak in 2022; Minnesota has had one this yr.)

“We’ve lost the ability to diagnose it because doctors aren’t accustomed to seeing it,” Gottlieb mentioned of measles.

“I’m not sure how people really understand how Kennedy’s intentions are going to translate into policy, and how serious he is,” he added on CNBC.

Gottlieb mentioned that he has personally had conversations with Republican senators who might be in command of confirming Kennedy to the highest HHS submit.

“There’s skepticism in the Republican caucus more than, I think, the press is reporting right now,” he mentioned, earlier than giving some examples.

“There’s going to be [agriculture] state senators that are concerned about his impact on food prices. There’s going to be pro-lifers who are concerned about his positions on abortion. There’s going to be a number of pro-public-health-minded senators who have deep concerns about his positions on vaccines.”

Gottlieb additionally gave examples of doubtless devastating actions Kennedy might take with ease, together with changing seasoned officers with handpicked candidates and irritating the power of states to make use of federal funding meant for childhood vaccinations.

Trump’s decide to run the FDA, Martin Makary, aligns with Kennedy on a number of matters, reminiscent of his concern concerning the affect of pharmaceutical firms on authorities coverage.

“There’s a lot of things [Trump officials] could do Day 1, very easily, administratively, and I don’t think there’s a thing Congress can do,” Gottlieb mentioned.

Gottlieb is on the board of Pfizer, the drugmaker behind one of the vital widely-used COVID-19 vaccines. Asked if that influences his stance on pictures for youths — an space of explicit concern for Kennedy — Gottlieb mentioned Pfizer didn’t make pediatric vaccines.

“Pfizer’s not in that market,” he mentioned.