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RFK Jr.’s New Chronic Disease Agency Faces a Road Block: Congress
The new agency at the center of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda is hitting its first hurdle: Congress.
The administration’s sweeping reorganization plan for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would shrink the National Institutes of Health and slash a litany of disease prevention programs while making the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) a new crown jewel of the agency, focused on chronic disease.
The new division would absorb existing federal agencies and programs, including those responsible for mental health and substance use prevention programs and curbing HIV.
The administration has been trying to sell the plan to Congress, which is in charge of appropriating funding, and would likely have to vote to create the AHA and give it responsibilities and a budget. But congressional resistance to Kennedy’s reorganization threatens to derail the plan.
RFK Jr Says He Won’t Put ‘Anti-Vaxxers’ on Key Vaccine Advisory Panel
The next members of an influential federal vaccine policy advisory committee will be “highly credentialed physicians and scientists” and not “ideological anti-vaxxers,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said late Tuesday.
In a lengthy social media post on X, Kennedy said he would announce the new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) the same way in the coming days. The panel makes recommendations on vaccine usage to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“None of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers,” Kennedy wrote. “They will be highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense.”
Kennedy said the new members will be in place before the panel’s next scheduled meeting that starts June 25. His post came about 24 hours after he fired all 17 members of the panel, his most aggressive action to reshape U.S. vaccine policy to date.
FDA Tussles With Medical Community Over COVID Vaccines
The federal agency says it will mandate randomized, controlled clinical trials for vaccination of younger, healthy individuals. It’s been a confusing past few weeks in terms of what the general public’s access to COVID-19 vaccinations will be like in the future.
Public health experts have been verbally jousting with the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about moves its health officials made recently regarding the vaccines. This could put clinical laboratories on the front lines to help determine whether COVID-19 cases — particularly severe ones — eventually rise as a result.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner Martin A. Makary, M.D., MPH, and Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH, who leads the agency’s vaccine oversight, announced on May 20 that the agency will require randomized, controlled clinical trials before approving COVID-19 vaccines for healthy individuals under age 65.
They revealed the new policy in a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and later discussed it on YouTube. “While all other high-income nations confine vaccine recommendations to older adults (typically those older than 65 years of age), or those at high risk for severe COVID-19, the U.S. has adopted a one-size-fits-all regulatory framework and has granted broad marketing authorization to all Americans over the age of six months,” Makary and Prasad wrote in NEJM.
New York Lawmakers Approve Bill That Would Allow Medically Assisted Suicide for the Terminally Ill
Terminally ill New Yorkers would have the legal ability to end their own lives with pharmaceutical drugs under a bill passed Monday in the state Legislature.
The proposal, which now moves to the governor’s office, would allow a person with an incurable illness to be prescribed life-ending drugs if he or she requests the medication and gets approval from two physicians. A spokesperson for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would review the legislation.
The New York Senate gave final approval to the bill Monday night after hours of debate during which supporters said it would let terminally ill people die on their own terms.
“It’s not about hastening death, but ending suffering,” said state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat who sponsored the proposal.
Opponents have argued the state should instead improve end-of-life medical care or have objected on religious grounds.
