RFK Jr.’s Extremist Views on CDC; Hysterectomy Misconceptions; Blowing Up the NIH?

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This past week in healthcare investigations

by
Sophie Putka, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage Today
December 4, 2024

Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.

RFK Jr. Likened CDC to Child Abusers and Fascists

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead HHS, may soon be able to bring his extremist views to an agency he has publicly castigated, according to NBC News.

In 2013 at AutismOne, a parent-run autism conference in 2013, Kennedy said the agency harms children like in “Nazi death camps.” And at the 2019 conference, he said, “The institution, CDC, and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect. It’s the same reason we had a pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church,” referring to what he has described as a widespread conspiracy to hide the truth about vaccine harms.

Kennedy has also painted vaccine scientists, including Paul Offit, MD, as villains who deserved to be jailed and even killed. He has also singled out arms of the CDC like the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the Immunization Safety Office, which he has characterized as corrupt or bought by industry.

Kennedy has promised to replace members of such committees and, according to a member of Trump’s transition team, make patient record data from the Immunization Safety Office’s Vaccine Safety Datalink public, exposing supposed vaccine harms, and leading to their removal from the market.

What Is a Hysterectomy, Really?

Women aren’t always aware of exactly which organs are removed during a hysterectomy, according to the New York Times.

A “total” hysterectomy refers to the removal of the uterus and cervix, and a “partial” one only removes the uterus. But until the 1990s, doctors who performed a hysterectomy were trained to perform an oophorectomy, too.

Hysterectomies are the second most common surgery performed on women, usually for uterine fibroids or cancer. But until research in the early 2000s started to reveal negative outcomes of removing ovaries, oophorectomies were seen as a way to prevent ovarian cancer in women after childbearing age. Doctors may or may not have considered oophorectomies a part of a hysterectomy, and might not inform patients what organs would be removed in the procedure, the Times reported.

Historically, the reproductive organs were seen as something of a package deal in women, the outlet reported. But ovaries serve important functions in the body besides releasing eggs: they release hormones important to other aspects of women’s health, including estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone.

A women’s health activist who sounded the alarm on ovary removal around 2000 told the Times, “The human body evolved a certain way for certain reasons, and taking things out willy-nilly — it just doesn’t make sense that it would have no consequences.” Now, doctors are often trained to preserve ovaries when possible — but not all have adopted this practice, and racial disparities in hysterectomy persist.

New Administration’s Plans to “Blow Up” the NIH

With the help of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, Trump’s incoming healthcare team has big plans to shake up the NIH, which has been called the “crown jewel of the federal government,” according to the New York Times.

Kennedy and others have proposed a dramatic restructuring of the research funder, one that would halt infectious disease research, pare down its 27 institutes to 15, and replace its employees with sympathizers. Republicans have already displayed opposition to gain-of-function research, along with embryonic stem cell and fetal tissue research.

Bhattacharya and others in Trump’s Republican camp have characterized the NIH as a bureaucratic, wasteful institution that has stifled creativity in research and blocked contributions like Bhattacharya’s own controversial epidemiological ideas.

Kennedy has proposed “reallocating half of the agency’s budget to ‘preventative, alternative and holistic approaches to health'” instead of infectious disease. The agency already devotes tens of billions of dollars on studying chronic diseases. His intent to replace hundreds of NIH employees might also run into roadblocks, because they are considered civil servants who cannot be fired without cause. Similarly, Congress sets the budgets for each of the agency’s institutes.

Still, experts are concerned about politically-appointed institute directors, who could be chosen to approve only research deemed acceptable by the new administration. Even a temporary pause in certain kinds of research, one public health expert told the Times, “would set us back decades in terms of our ability to respond to new threats and our ability to protect the public.”