Tuesday the Senate confirmed Dr. Martin A. Makary as Commissioner of Food and Drug Administration and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing two critics of the medical establishment for influential places in the midst of a Trump administration campaign to cut health costs.
In a vote from 56 to 44, dr. Makary has been confirmed to guide an agency with a wide regulatory authority on the products including drugs and vaccines, putting it at the center of the safety pill safety pill and a wide range of inociations.
The confirmation of Dr. Bhattacharya-Da 53 to 47, with a party-party vote placed at the head of the main medical research agency in the world, which has recently been affected by cuts to staff and orders to pause or cancel vast research funding.
Dr. Makary, a pancreatic cancer surgeon and researcher of health policies at Johns Hopkins University, attracted the attention of the Trump team as a personality of Fox News and Covid commentator who in 2021 erroneously provided that the nation was “running towards an extremely low level of infection”.
During a confirmation of this month, dr. Makary reported that she had shared republican concerns about the ampliveness of access to the pill for abortion, which the Biden administration has made available for people to be obtained without a person’s medical appointment.
He also expressed support for vaccines, although he suggested that the FDA had to review the role of vaccine experts to whom the agency is aimed at consulting.
Legislators warned that staff cuts and the hiring of freezing by the Trump administration could weaken the efforts of the FDA to ensure the safety of the food supply.
The NiH, which has a budget of $ 48 billion and finances medical research on diseases such as cancer and diabetes, was also short of layoffs and the moves of the Trump administration to block the key parts of its process of granting subsidies and discarding some subsidies.
Dr. Bhattacharya, an economist of health and medicine professor in Stanford, has largely triggered questions about these decisions during a confirmation hearing in early March.
He made a public reflector in 2020, when he was among the authors of an anti-blocco treaty, the declaration of Great Barrington, who supported for the protection of older and more vulnerable people from Covid, letting the virus spread among the youngest and most healthy people.
He also supported the reforms of scientific financing practices, including the application of greater control to research results that are not confirmed by subsequent studies and directing money to the most distant and innovative research rather than incremental studies.
Questioned by legislators this month on vaccine safety, dr. Bhattacharya said to support the inoculation of children against diseases such as measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines, a position in contrast with extensive tests that did not show any link between the two.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health, who has faced criticism for his reluctance to explicitly recommend vaccinations in the middle of a deadly burst of measles in western Texas, supervision both the FDA and the NiH