During an event challenging the idea that “scientific truth is … achieved by consensus,” Food andDrug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary laid out the agency’s goals to promote nutrition over prescription drug use and expressed concern about how politics have affected the scientific community in recent years.
Makary highlighted the FDA’s “effort to Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) through finding “more cures and meaningful treatment for the American public,” during a Wednesday Capitol Hill Lecture event. The MAHA slogan represents an initiative by the Trump administration — pioneered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — to end chronic diseases and reduce health care spending.
Makary said he’d “like to see more cures” and new treatments for type one diabetes, stage four cancers, PTSD, ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), and Alzheimer’s. He also emphasized the importance of studying the “root causes” to find cures for increasingly common health issues like cancer, obesity, and Alzheimer’s by starting with basic nutrition.
“We have this fixation on drugs,” Makary said. “Maybe we should be funding more school lunch programs and talking about cooking classes instead of just insulin and Ozempic for every six-year-old in America.”
The FDA approved three natural food colors in May, and Makary said they will “probably approve two more in the next couple of months.” In April, the FDA announced “a series of new measures to phase out all petroleum-based synthetic dyes from the nation’s food supply.” In June, Kraft Heinz and General Mills announced steps to eliminate artificial colors from their products.
“We have to think differently and creatively and get beyond this approval process that was designed in the 1960s,” Makary said.
When asked about his thoughts about women being told to take birth control, Makary said, “I worry that young women are never told that these pills increase the risk of benign liver tumors or blood clots.”
“If someone tells you a pill is 100% safe, run for your life,” he said.
Birth control is not the only drug marketed to women as “safe” while posing serious health risks. Earlier this year, an analysis of insurance claims found that the FDA’s adverse events rate prediction for mifepristone, the nation’s most popular abortion pill, is 22 times higher “than what the FDA and Danco Laboratories, manufacturer of mifepristone pill Mifeprex, suggest,” The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood continues to claim the abortion pill is “safer than Tylenol.” In May, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered a review of mifepristone. Makary’s comments at the event come just days after he confirmed an “ongoing review” of the drug.
Amid Trump’s efforts to cut waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, the administration identified millions of taxpayer dollars going to fund National Institute of Health studies with clear political undertones — including $455,000 to test so-called “gender-affirming hormone therapy” on mice. Like the FDA, the NIH falls under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services. When asked by The Federalist what the FDA is doing to remove politics from the stream of scientific funding, Makary said he will “promote civil discourse.”
Makary acknowledged that there has been an “injection of politics into the scientific funding” within the “last five years.”
“You have never seen the dismissal of people who have different views on transgender ideology, as you have in the recent American Academy of Pediatrics,” he said, adding, “anybody that has a different point of view is immediately dismissed from the committee.”
“Some careers have been destroyed,” he said. “I’m very concerned about it.”
The tide has begun to shift around transgender ideology, in particular with an increase in public outcry against doctors performing harmful trans surgeries on minors. Last month, SCOTUS ruled that Tennessee has the right to ban such procedures. Last year, internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health made it clear “that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” Not long after, a prominent independent review in the U.K. found that there is “no good evidence” to back up the use of opposite-sex hormones in gender-confused children.
Abigail Nichols is a correspondent for The Federalist. She was previously the opinion editor for the University of South Florida’s student newspaper, The Oracle. She is now working as the business manager at the University of North Florida’s student-run media outlet, Spinnaker Media, while obtaining a Master’s Degree in Social work.
