Newly confirmed secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should begin his tenure by tackling “low-hanging fruit” that will help him overcome opposition to his Make America Healthy Again agenda, according to prominent physician and podcaster Dr. Vinay Prasad.
Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, said Kennedy will likely face significant opposition in implementing his agenda.
“I see Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader. He was lamenting the fact that RFK Jr. is not a pharmaceutical executive. He’s never run a drug company,” Prasad said, citing this as evidence that “the system is so rotten.”
Comparing Kennedy to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Prasad said Fauci spent most of his career in government, whereas Kennedy has “always been on the outside of government.”
Prasad shared several recommendations for how Kennedy can begin implementing his agenda, including ideas related to food safety, COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine safety more broadly, reforms to the clinical trial process, ending the “revolving door” between government and Big Pharma, and the promotion of academic freedom.
Ensuring food safety ‘a progressive or democratic thing to do’
Prasad said Kennedy could begin enacting his agenda to make food healthier and safer by banning artificial colors and other harmful ingredients from foods, following the example of Europe and Australia.
Prasad said:
“If you get rid of all the dyes from Froot Loops, it’s still going to be unhealthy. It’s full of sugars and refined carbohydrates … you’re not solving the health crisis by eliminating these things.
“However, I recently looked at a bag of bread that was sold at the store and the list of ingredients was a mile long. I think we truly don’t know what would happen if you started to reduce that list of ingredients.”
While there are other policies Kennedy should pursue that would help ensure healthier food, banning toxic ingredients that are already prohibited in other countries would be a way for Kennedy to ease into such reforms, Prasad said.
Referencing opposition toward Kennedy from Democratic Party senators — none of which voted to confirm Kennedy earlier this month — Prasad said Kennedy’s ideas to tackle food safety would have been “a progressive or democratic thing to do” in the past and that the party would have benefitted by supporting Kennedy.
Reforming vaccine injury surveillance system would be Kennedy’s ‘greatest achievement’
Prasad also addressed Kennedy’s calls for better vaccine safety surveillance. Characterizing the calls as “a core truth” about vaccine safety, Prasad said, “The current system has no incentive to actually identify all of the adverse events that vaccines cause. There’s no mechanism in place.”
Prasad said the current system is “so weak that, in the pandemic, this country did not detect the myocarditis safety signal from mRNA vaccines, nor did we detect” the vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia signal from the Johnson & Johnson, or Janssen, COVID-19 vaccine.
Kennedy is in a position to oversee the development of a new surveillance system and Prasad suggested that it should be “active, not passive.”
“It’s got to link people at the moment in which they decide to get the vaccine or not, [and] follow them out in the future,” Prasad said. “If Kennedy does this, this will be the greatest achievement.”
Prasad said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendations that all children aged 6 months and older receive the COVID-19 vaccine and boosters are “completely bogus” and have “no randomized data” to support them.
“This is another great place to hit,” Prasad said that by next fall, COVID-19 vaccines and boosters should no longer be available for children and teenagers, citing the low risk of serious infection among young people.
Prasad suggested the boosters could still be recommended for those over age 50 or 60, but on the condition that manufacturers perform randomized control trials of these vaccines among this age group.
Manufacturers “can be invited to conduct a randomized control trial to show COVID-19 boosters improved clinical endpoints while they are conducting that trial,” Prasad said. “Perhaps you could provisionally allow the vaccine products to be available for nursing home residents or the few people who actually want them while they are running that trial, but make them run the trial.”
Prasad said trials of this kind would be aligned with Kennedy’s calls for “good science” concerning vaccines.
“Here’s the key: If the trial is negative, it’s going to blow up in their face and it’s going to reveal, I think, the truth, which is that these products [have a] very marginal benefit, if any benefit at all,” Prasad said.
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Universities ceded public debate facilitator role to Joe Rogan
Prasad suggested that public health agencies could help support academic and scientific freedom by withholding federal grants from institutions that censor their faculty and researchers.
He cited the example of Dr. Scott Atlas, a Stanford University radiologist who joined the first Trump administration and publicly opposed mask mandates and school closures.
“The academic community at Stanford actually issued him a censure … a censure that they did not even repeal when they had the opportunity a year ago. Stanford does not allow academic freedom. It censored him,” Prasad said.
Prasad called Atlas’ remarks a violation of “passive academic freedom,” where an academic is punished simply for expressing certain views. He compared this with what he called “active academic freedom,” where universities themselves hold debates on “important policy issues.”
Prasad said universities supported the establishment view on COVID-19 vaccines and measures, shutting out contrary perspectives. He said:
“They should have had debates on masking kids. They should have had debates on vaccine mandates … Universities completely abandoned that. They ceded that role to Joe Rogan. They ceded that role to podcasters.
“They have abdicated the most important thing they had, which was being a forum for debate and dialogue in a society.”
Prasad suggested that public health agencies should consider a university’s “intellectual environment” when evaluating applications for federal grants.
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CDC committed ‘non-forgivable errors’ during the COVID pandemic
Prasad said Kennedy can help restore trust in public health agencies by tackling corruption and conflicts of interest.
“We have to be honest about the CDC. They have done a terrible job,” said Prasad, who called for reductions to the agency’s “bloated” budget and workforce. He cited a recent paper he co-authored, highlighting examples of CDC pandemic-era policies that he characterized as “non-forgivable errors.”
Prasad cited CDC mask and social distancing recommendations for children and their claims that COVID-19 was a leading cause of death for children, as examples of the agency using “propaganda rather than science to justify their preconceived policy notions.”
Referring to the “revolving door” between federal health agencies and Big Pharma, Prasad said, “RFK Jr. should go in right now and take a sledgehammer to the lax conflict-of-interest policies.”
Prasad said HHS should “set some clear benchmarks — one-year, two-year, three-year prohibitions depending on the role … some prohibitions on work in the private sector for the exact same industry you’re regulating.”
He said the public will likely support such efforts. “I think the public is sick of the swamp … and they want some regulation there.”
Watch Prasad’s podcast here:
Related articles in The Defender
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- ‘True Corruption’: Agency Capture Responsible for Chronic Disease Epidemic in U.S.
- Rogan Rips Mainstream Media for Failure to Cover ‘Real Numbers’ of People Injured, Killed by COVID Shots
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