Disrupting the Health Agencies Will Save American Lives

The public health establishment and left-wing media are rushing to discredit President-elect Donald Trump's picks to lead health agencies. The New York Time smears them as "outside the medical mainstream."

Circling the wagons, Dr. Paul Offit, a current adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, lamely observes, "What they're saying when they make these appointments is that we don't trust the people who are there."

You bet.

Trump and the public have every reason to distrust the current agency heads, after the repeated blunders, deceptions and coverups during COVID-19. Trump is appointing disrupters with the courage to challenge the status quo.

Like Dr. Marty Makary, nominated to head the Food and Drug Administration.

Makary's credentials will make it impossible for the U.S. Senate to reject him. A Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of public health, Makary was voted into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, which is like the hall of fame for doctors.

More important, if you're in the hospital, you want Makary on your side.

Two decades ago, he declared war against the epidemic of medical errors killing as many as 100,000 patients a year: errors like patients being given the wrong dose of a medication, or the surgeon operating on the wrong body part, or a lethal germ invading the patients' body to cause an infection.

The medical establishment was hush-hush about them. But not Makary. He argued for surgeons always taking a "timeout" in the operating room to look for errors. He also pioneered doctors using checklists, like pilots do, to ensure protocols are followed. My organization, the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, considers Makary a hero.

In 2017, Makary went to bat for patients saddled with unfair medical debt. Even nonprofit hospitals were suing patients, garnishing wages and taking their homes. In many cases, hospitals had charged patients several times more than what insurance companies were charged for the same procedures. Makary called for an end to it.

When COVID-19 struck, Makary had the guts to speak out about mistakes he saw the federal health agencies making, like wasting scarce vaccine doses on people who already had natural immunity while other patients died waiting for a shot.

The federal health officials doubled down, ignoring actual evidence that disproved their insistence natural immunity was not as good as a shot. In fact, it's many times more effective. The Biden administration pushed its social media lackeys to block his research from public view.

Makary told Congress "public health politicos" were to blame for numerous COVID-19 deaths.

He called for "using scientific evidence and not political badges and censorship in debating public health policy."

But the Left is still attacking scientists based on politics.

Left-wing Washington Post health reporter Lena Sun falsely claims that Trump's team "is largely untested, possesses scant infectious-disease expertise" and would leave the nation in dire straits "when the next pandemic strikes." Ridiculous.

Truth is, the public health elite marched in lock-step, muzzling critics even as the mistakes accumulated and 1 million Americans died of COVID-19. The U.S. per capita death rate far exceeded what other developed countries suffered.

To prepare for the next pandemic, the Trump administration must clean house and bring in bold scientists who challenge groupthink and demand evidence, which was totally lacking last time to support masking, 6-foot distancing, school closure and other recommendations.

When evidence is lacking, the rest of us become mere pawns, adhering to misguided medical recommendations that can cost us our lives.

Makary tells how an incorrect recommendation made by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2000 -- that children 3 and under as well as pregnant and lactating mothers should avoid all peanuts -- resulted in a peanut allergy panic in the U.S.

Too embarrassed to admit they had no research on peanut allergies, AAP made up that rule. Peanut allergies exploded, with the number of children rushed to emergency rooms with allergic reactions tripling from 2005 to 2014.

Research published in 2015 shows that exposing babies to peanuts actually reduces the risk of an allergy by 86%. But even the National Institutes of Health dithered for two years before giving parents a straight story.

The day Makary takes over at the FDA and brings his unflinching demand for evidence to Washington, D.C., will be a good day for science and for America.

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Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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