Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
The public-health bureaucracy that the Trump administration will inherit is more focused on and skilled at treating America’s health problems than preventing them. That shortcoming—despite the billions of dollars spent every year at these agencies—has damaged the credibility of the public-health establishment enough that [Robert F.] Kennedy is now Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, has similarly risen in prominence by second-guessing “medical dogma” in the U.S. and beyond. And Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, former Representative Dave Weldon, has criticized the agency’s vaccine policies and once attempted to block its vaccine-safety research because of what he claimed were conflicts of interest. A set of men who have made careers of distrusting our existing health-care agencies may soon be empowered to try to blow them up.
Source: Nicholas Florko in The Atlantic