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This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 24 episode of “Velshi.”
Ahead of Donald Trump’s incoming administration, his public health team is taking shape.
For director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump picked Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman who has advocated the extensively debunked and repeatedly proven-to-be-false claim that vaccines cause autism. The CDC is an agency tasked with disease prevention, including making recommendations for vaccine and immunization schedules.
For commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Trump has tapped Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and Fox News contributor, who opposed Covid vaccine mandates for the general public during the pandemic. The FDA is an agency whose mandate includes approving vaccines.
For surgeon general, Trump chose Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and also a Fox News contributor who is currently a medical director at CityMD, a chain of urgent care centers in New York and New Jersey. She specializes in emergency and family medicine.
Oz has also invested heavily in multiple health care and pharmaceutical companies, some of which are tied directly to the agency he has been tapped to run.
The president-elect also chose former TV doctor Mehmet Oz to lead the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS. Oz has pushed junk science and debunked medical misinformation throughout his career as a talk show host, including promoting supplements and health advice — much of which is not supported by any evidence or scientific study.
He’s promoted weight loss supplements that don’t work, colloidal silver for colds and infections despite no evidence of its efficacy and pushed hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, which was later deemed useless in the treatment of Covid by the medical community. Oz has also invested heavily in multiple health care and pharmaceutical companies, some of which are tied directly to the agency he has been tapped to run.
Now, each one of these positions and agencies fall under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS, as it’s more commonly known, handles a budget of over $1.7 trillion annually and sends more funds to states than all other domestic agencies combined. HHS has about 85,000 employees and plays a huge role in promoting health, wellness and disease prevention both domestically and around the world.
Given all that, of course, Trump’s choice to lead that critical department is none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s an environmental lawyer by trade, but over the years he has pushed anti-vaccine viewpoints. He said just this year that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
He has also pushed a lot of medical misinformation, including several debunked claims linking vaccines to various medical conditions including autism. He has suggested that the government should remove fluoride from water. He’s suggested people consume raw milk, risking exposure to illnesses like listeria and E. coli. In the recent past, he’s urged people to resist CDC guidance.
Kennedy has been vocal in his skepticism of the Covid vaccine and he’s been linked to conspiracy theories suggesting the pandemic was planned by the government as a means to control the public.
Trump chose Kennedy with the promise that he would “let him go wild on health.” And while Kennedy has said he won’t ban any vaccines, he continues to promote distrust in vaccines and the expert-run institutions that are built to protect us.
He has pushed flat-out false statements that erode public trust in our top medical institutions, which will likely discourage people from opting to get vaccines that prevent deadly and debilitating diseases.
Public health programs, especially disease prevention, work when enacted on a large scale by the government. When an effort to inoculate a population against a disease works, it’s largely invisible.
The absence of an outbreak — or the lack of a crisis — is proof of a successful public health program. No one notices when it works, because that’s the goal. Nothing has gone wrong. When your public health system is strong, you don’t notice that kids don’t get measles, polio or whooping cough.
For instance, in the 1950s and '60s, just before the measles vaccine became available to the public, the U.S. saw more than half a million cases of the disease and hundreds of people died from it every year. But now that Americans routinely get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, MMR, during childhood, the Mayo Clinic’s most recent annual count found just 13 U.S. cases of measles had been reported in 2020. Diphtheria, smallpox and polio have also been eradicated.
Despite that, the CDC has found that vaccination rates are falling in the United States. Since 2019, childhood vaccination rates have begun to decline. The CDC found that in the last school year, child MMR vaccination rates fell below the target rate of 95% in more than three-quarters of all 50 states.
In the last year alone, more than 30 states experienced declines in vaccination rates across all state-required vaccines, including MMR., DTaP, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, and polio and chicken pox vaccines.
And what do you know, measles cases, while still rare, have been on the rise in the United States. Roughly 280 cases of measles have been reported in the country this year. In 2022 the U.S. saw the first case of polio in more than a decade, in New York state.
So now, with the incoming Trump administration bringing the promise of a public health apparatus run by someone who has pushed disputed, false or dangerous notions about public health, it’s time for Americans to get real about what happens next.