RFK Jr. Needs to Explain Himself
If dramatic cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services aren’t reversed, the US will squander its edge in medical innovation and patients could suffer.
Don’t blow it.
Photographer: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg
Some 10,000 federal health workers lost their jobs earlier this month — among them, a group of regulators who help new medicines get approved. If Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t reverse course, American patients will suffer and half a century of US leadership in pharmaceutical innovation could come to a precipitous end.
Three decades ago, the US lagged Europe in access to new medications. Respiratory drugs, on average, were available to Britons more than five years before Americans; cardiovascular drugs had a three-year lead. Pressured to narrow this disparity, Congress passed a law in 1992 to speed up drug approvals. The new framework allowed regulators to collect fees from drug companies, which vastly increased resources at the Food and Drug Administration for reviews.