Rep. James Comer (R-KY) condemned the report published Friday by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calling for cancer risk warning labels on alcohol, signaling that Republicans in Congress will likely not heed the doctor’s recommendation.
Comer told the Washington Examiner that Murthy’s advisory “politicizes science to achieve a predetermined outcome” and “cherry-picks data” for an alarmist result on the link between alcohol consumption and the risk of developing seven different types of cancer.
Murthy’s recommendations identified that alcohol is related to 100,000 cases of cancer in the United States and 20,000 cancer deaths, making it the third-leading cause of cancer behind both tobacco and obesity.
The surgeon general’s report also highlights that women are at a higher risk of developing alcohol-related cancer than men, with a strong link between alcohol intake and breast cancer, which accounts for 15% of all cancer cases in women.
But Murthy’s recommendation comes at a volatile time in nutrition politics, as the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services are knee-deep in producing the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans — a document that has significant policy influence despite not having the strength of law.
In April 2024, Comer and Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) launched an investigation into the alcohol consumption findings for the federal dietary guidelines, with which HHS has subsequently been reluctant to cooperate.
A 2023 law required that the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine be the primary body by which to issue alcohol recommendations for the 2025 dietary guidelines, but HHS has largely conducted its alcohol investigations internally, without public accountability during the process.
“For nearly a year, the Oversight Committee has demanded transparency from the Biden administration regarding the formulation of its dietary guidelines, but it continues to obstruct our oversight,” Comer told the Washington Examiner. “The lack of transparency surrounding the surgeon general’s review process for this advisory is yet another example of the Biden administration operating behind closed doors rather than providing the American people with full transparency.”
Comer told the Washington Examiner that the NASEM’s report, published in mid-December 2024, is “far more extensive and complete, and does not draw the same drastic conclusion as the Surgeon General.”
Although the NASEM report does highlight with “moderate certainty” that moderate alcohol consumption in women is associated with a higher risk of developing breast cancer, there is less scientific certainty of the link between alcohol and other forms of cancer for both sexes.
This is partially due to problems in collecting solid data.
“The evidence base from which to draw conclusions about alcohol and health is imperfect, and conducting the research has many challenges — such as a lack of standardization for terms like ‘nondrinker’ or ‘moderate drinker’ and the possibility that people are underreporting their own alcohol consumption,” Ned Calonge, chairman of the NASEM review committee and public health professor at the University of Colorado, said when the report was published.
In September 2024, Comer issued a subpoena for outstanding documents from HHS regarding its adherence to the findings from NASEM and the degree to which it would be considered in developing the formal dietary guidelines.
According to Comer’s office, HHS only provided 18 pages of documents in response, and HHS staff members have failed to explain why they are unwilling to provide an anticipated timeline for producing additional documents.
Comer said the surgeon general’s call for cancer warning labels on alcohol products heightens the need for congressional oversight before the final dietary guidelines are published this year.
“Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services must release all documents and communications related to the development of this advisory so that the American people can see how this politicized recommendation was created,” Comer said.
Congress would need to update existing legislation to change the extant warning labels on units of alcohol, which will likely face significant opposition.
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Neither President-elect Donald Trump nor his nominee for HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are alcohol advocates and are both self-professed teetotalers. Their so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, aimed at improving the American diet and rooting out industrial influence, could play a role in attracting more attention to the warning labels debate.
But the Congressional Wine Caucus and the 21st Amendment Caucus, named after the amendment that ended prohibition in 1933, are likely to join Comer in thwarting any attempt to update the label to reflect cancer risk.