()— Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged to address high rates of chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (HHS). They are goals that many in the public health world agree with, despite fearing what the infamous anti-vaccine activist may do in the future.
But don’t suggest he address those goals with medications like Ozempic.
“They’re counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” Kennedy said in an appearance with Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld that he posted on instagram last month, concluding that Ozempic, an extremely popular drug approved to treat type 2 diabetes and used off-label for weight loss, will not “Make America Healthy Again.”
Kennedy said Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, does not market the drug in its home country of Denmark, where “it is not recommended for diabetes or obesity; They recommend dietary and behavioral changes.”
In fact, Denmark does use Ozempic, so much so that the Danish Medicines Agency said in May that it would restrict its use until people had tried less expensive drugs to treat diabetes. Rather than a move to forego medication in favor of lifestyle changes, as Kennedy suggested, it was a cost-cutting move, as more than 100,000 people had received the drug or others in its class, known as agonists. of the GLP-1 receptor.
Denmark also uses Ozempic’s approved sister drug for weight loss, Wegovy, and has faced similarly the cost, questioning whether its benefits justify them. It’s a debate which is also happening in the US, where drug prices are much higher.
Kennedy said in the same appearance that the European Union “is currently investigating Ozempic for suicidal ideation,” although the European regulator concluded in April that the available evidence does not suggest that Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications cause suicidal thoughts or actions.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which Kennedy would oversee as HHS secretary, also arrive to that conclusion, although it continues to monitor possible risks.
Those kinds of safe but false or misleading claims are Kennedy’s signature, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. And they can be especially dangerous, he said, when applied to pillars of public health like vaccines.
“He acts like he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t, and he says things with a definition that convinces people he has the data to back up his claim,” Osterholm told . “Trying to follow him and understand what he’s talking about is often like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance put public health experts on edge even before Trump announced Thursday that Kennedy was his pick to lead a department spanning the FDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. . (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and more.
Kennedy assures who is not anti-vaccines, but has falsely said that they cause autism, that they may cause more deaths than they prevent, and that they could have triggered some of the world’s deadliest pandemics.
“It will hurt children all over America” if Kennedy is in charge of HHS, said Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a doctor who helped with a vaccination effort in Samoa after a deadly measles outbreak there in 2019. has been related with the disinformation spread by Kennedy, a connection which he denies. “Let’s rethink this. Let’s remove this designation and let it be part of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Many in the public health world see Kennedy’s focus on pesticide regulation or restructuring agricultural subsidies as potentially positive and a safer place for him to work than the department that oversees vaccine regulation.
Even while agreeing that it is important to address rising rates of diabetes and obesity, doctors in the field say Kennedy’s plans miss the mark.
“It is incorrect to assume that people with high body weight and BMI simply sit around eating low-quality foods,” said Dr. Jody Dushay, assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and attending physician in Endocrinology at the Center Beth Israel Deaconess Physician. “Taking medications to treat obesity should not be demonized.”
Childhood obesity in the US increased considerably in 20 years
Kennedy claimed in the same Fox segment that if the U.S. spent a fraction of what it would cost to treat every overweight person in America with Ozempic — something no one is suggesting, since GLP-1 drugs are not approved for everyone who is overweight—in “giving good food, three meals a day to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight.”
Dr. Angela Fitch, co-founder and medical director of Knowwella provider specializing in health care for people with obesity, said Kennedy’s suggestion that diet and exercise alone can solve obesity “overnight” sets back hard-won efforts to better address the condition.
“For many years we’ve been trying to break down that stigma,” Fitch told . “What we’ve heard a lot in their rhetoric is ‘I want people to just eat less and exercise more.’ And what we know is that that doesn’t work.”
Dr. Daniel Drucker, a pioneer in research on GLP-1, the hormone that Ozempic and similar drugs mimic, agreed.
“I don’t think anyone in the health business or area would argue against lifestyle modification, diet and exercise and healthy foods as the cornerstone to improving women’s health and weight management. people,” Drucker told . “The challenge we have is that there have been multiple trials that have tried to see: can we markedly improve people’s health and achieve substantial weight loss with diet and exercise? And the answer has been no; “People lose a little weight.”
LPG-1 class has revolutionized the way doctors approach weight loss treatment because it offers a therapy that works—clinical trials showed 15 to 20% body weight loss, on average—after decades of lean options with safety concerns often severe. Doctors don’t argue that medications alone are the solution to rising obesity rates, but they also don’t think they should be abandoned, and they are recommended in addition to lifestyle changes that include healthy diets and exercise.
Not everyone with obesity will want the medications, and for some they can have strong side effects, such as nausea. Furthermore, many people do not have sure that covers them nor care for obesity in general, a problem that Fitch argues would be much more effective in addressing obesity in the US, if it were treated.
In one publication On social media in September, Kennedy acknowledged “that weight shaming is cruel and that obesity is not a failure of character” and suggested instead that “our sick food system” is partly to blame.
Doctors who treat people with obesity suggest that improving the food system should not be mutually exclusive with the use of weight loss medications, when appropriate.
Kennedy’s views on Ozempic do not appear to be universally shared in Trump’s orbit. In one publication On Friday, Elon Musk, the billionaire who has been tapped to cut government spending in the Trump administration, suggested that making GLP-1 drugs “available at low cost to Americans who want to use them would greatly improve health and “It would reduce health care costs.”
Musk said in October 2022 who had been using Wegovy.
Kennedy told NPR that Trump hopes it will show him “measurable impacts on a decline in chronic diseases in two years.” He has suggested getting there through measures that include prohibiting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients from using those benefits to buy soda or processed foods, and reexamining “standards for use of pesticides and other chemicals”.
It’s a goal Osterholm expressed skepticism he will meet.
“We all agree that it is a very important issue,” Osterholm said. “But a lot of their thinking is like ‘A plus B plus C plus miracle, and you have an answer.'”
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