Tylenol may be only the beginning.
For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has railed against a number of medications and therapeutics claiming without scientific consensus or evidence that they cause some kind of harm — autism (Tylenol), suicidal thoughts (Ozempic). Now, as President Trump’s head of Health and Human Services, he’s begun turning his opinions into public policy. His Make American Healthy Again initiative has already made it harder for people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and pushed unverified claims about Tylenol, and he’s just getting started. So what might be next? Kennedy’s already told us.
On Monday, Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary wrote in a letter to 22 Republican attorneys general that the FDA was reviewing evidence about the safety of abortion drug, mifepristone, which is used in nearly two-thirds of medical abortions. If access to the pill were restricted, it would significantly cut back on abortion access.
Another big target: antidepressants. During Kennedy’s confirmation hearings, he falsely claimed that people have a harder time stopping the use of serotonin-based antidepressants “than people have getting off of heroin.” He’s also made the unfounded claim that teenagers who use them are more likely to commit school shootings (they aren’t.)
One of the goals of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement is to “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.” Any restrictions on them would be a grave concern to the approximately 11% of the population that uses them to treat depression, anxiety and other issues.
Another frequent target of Kennedy’s are statins, which more than 92 million Americans take to prevent heart disease and lower cholesterol. Most studies find that statins are both safe and help to prevent serious heart disease, which is the number one killer of Americans.
Yet Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy founded, has published articles questioning the relationship of cholesterol to heart disease, with one calling them "overprescribed and unnecessary.” And earlier this year, as HHS Secretary, Kennedy claimed on a podcast that pharmaceutical companies manipulated studies to show they work.
One of the rationales for the agency’s recent crackdown on pharmaceutical ads is increased uptake of the drugs. Statins were the drugs of an older generation. Also in the crosshairs are newer innovations, like the increasingly popular GLP-1s used to treat diabetes (Ozempic, Mounjaro) and obesity (Wegovy, Zepbound). These drugs have recently been approved for additional health problems, such as sleep apnea, and are even being investigated for drug addiction.
That remarkable success hasn’t stopped Kennedy from criticizing their cost (they are expensive) and making false claims about them. For example, he falsely said that Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, doesn’t market it in Europe. (It does.) He’s also said that ensuring Americans eat a good diet would solve the obesity problem–but multiple clinical studies have shown that GLP-1s are vastly superior to diet alone to helping people not only lose weight but keep it off.
In a first jab at their use, Kennedy rejected a plan to have Medicare cover the cost of GLP-1 drugs for obesity, which would have given 7 million Americans access to them, in April. (Medicare already covers these treatments for diabetes.) Could more restrictions on their use be seen down the road?
“They’re counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” Kennedy told viewers of Fox News about Ozempic and its manufacturer Novo Nordisk.
It’s not clear what, if anything, would change his mind.
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