In a speech broadcast at the Food and Drug Administration Maryland campus on Friday morning, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed up as a secretary to the health of the nation with a tortuous speech that touched everything, from birds to prey to pollution in the Erie Lake
Kennedy told the agency staff members, in the grip of the loss of 20 percent of their workforce under his review of the health and human services department, to courageously avoid the impulse to protect the companies that regulate.
The layoffs, voluntary departures and cuts in funding have already decimated divisions that regulate the supervision of tobacco, the process of approval of drugs, the milk and cow’s test test for avian influence and food safety that monitors and protects consumers from diseases of food origin.
In his observations on Friday, Kennedy suggested that the reason why the agency did not approve “alternative medicines” was due to its submission to wealthy companies. Previously he accused the FDA of suppressing raw milk, ivectin and stem cells treatments. The agency veterans have argued that alternative remedies often cannot overcome safety and efficacy standards.
He urged the staff to resist the temptation to serve a small group of rich companies at the expense of public health. “We want to detach ourselves from this so that we can make our children healthy,” he said, according to a video and a transcription of his speech that was shared with the New York Times.
At another point, he said, “the deep state is real”, a worsening reference to the temptular federal bureaucracy that President Trump has blamed as an obstacle to achieve his goals in his first term.
Kennedy has also called the FDA “A SOCK PUPPET” for the industries that should regulate, the language he has used in the past.
Andrew Nixon, spokesman for the health and human services department, said in a declaration that with his observations on Friday, Mr. Kennedy was “saying the truth that many Americans already know”.
Drug manufacturers benefited from a series of efforts from the FDA to accelerate certain drug approvals or encourage companies to develop drugs for serious diseases that are not lacking in treatments. The agency officials said that the programs aim to help patients.
Mr. Kennedy said Those “rapid regulations” were well intentioned. But over time, he said, “they have become tools for historical operators, very, very powerful historical operators in the sector, to exclude dissidents and, you know, rare diseases and alternative medicines and that kind of things”.
Kennedy has also urged FDA employees to speak if their superior Greenlight products. “If your boss is making a mistake, if they are approving something that should not be approved, we want to hear,” he said.
Dr. Marty Makary, the new FDA commissioner, presented Kennedy to Friday’s meeting and approved his objectives to model a healthier food supply. He recognized that the cuts to the agency “were tough on the ground” for a bit of staff. He said the changes were “aimed at consolidating, being more efficient and creating more teamwork”.
Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Makary were broadcast in a video broadcast on the Oak White Oak campus of the Agency in the Suburban Maryland.
Kennedy recalled in the speech on being a child who visited his father, the prosecutor General Robert F. Kennedy, at the Washington Department of Justice and the observation of Pellegrini Falchi nesting in the dome in the old building of the post offices. He also discussed his experiences by working with people with intellectual disabilities and the battles he conducted as an environmental lawyer.
Kennedy has also complained about the rules that regulate the food division of the agency that allow companies to certify that the new ingredients are generally recognized as safe. The measure initially covered the ingredients such as salt or vinegar as acceptable in food without review. In the following years, however, thousands of ingredients have been added to the supply of food without notice or test by the Agency.
Food companies are required to provide revisions of the ingredients to the inspectors of the FDA on site, but these inspections can take place once every five years or less. Kennedy asked for the aim of allowing food-graphic food companies that the ingredients are safe.
“We do not literally test chemicals before they are added to our food,” he said. “Everything is printed by the sector as generally recognized as sure.”
He continued to attribute the nation’s diabetes’ diabetes rates, adding that sugar also plays a role.
The speech remembered a post on social media of Mr. Kennedy in October, accusing the FDA of conducting a “public health war”. He said that the agency has engaged in “aggressive suppression” of a series of unreliable or unsafe products, including raw milk, cherlants compounds, ivemectin and “anything else that makes human health advance and cannot be patented by the drug”.
The post went on: “If you work for the FDA and you are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserves your records and 2. Prepare your luggage.”
The agency is still recovering from thousands of work cuts and voluntary departures in the weeks when Mr. Kennedy was appointed secretary to health. The FDA employees who have left in recent weeks include staff members who examine drugs for by -products that can cause cancer and others who work with the international food safety personnel to try to prevent contaminated products from entering the United States.
The cuts in some areas were so profound that the former FDA officials suggested that they could jeopardize billions of dollars in commissions that the pharmaceutical industry pays to the Agency to ensure that the approval process for drugs is adequately personal.
The drug producers have been anxious about what Mr. Kennedy’s leadership will mean for their interests. They are concerned that the cuts to the agency will slow down the reviews of the drugs, including clinical studies, and will add delays to the final approval.
A public letter signed by dozens of biotechnological investors and managers said that the industry leaders were “deeply worried about the current state of the agency and its future”.
“Some of us have already encountered regulatory difficulties that we believe are the consequences of the loss of expert staff of the FDA,” said the letter.