President-elect Donald Trump is picking some new faces to lead the country’s public health and healthcare policy.
Notably, that list includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health and Human Services, television personality Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and former U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I think we can all safely assume that we have a lot of challenges ahead in the health care landscape,” Dr. Katherine Gergen Barnett told Boston Public Radio on Monday. Gergen Barnett is a family medicine physician and the vice chair of Primary Care Innovation and Transformation in the Department of Family Medicine at Boston Medical Center.
The agency Kennedy will lead has a $1.7 trillion operating budget that oversees the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Food and Drug Administration and the Surgeon General’s Office.
Gergen Barnett said she and her colleagues are concerned about impacts to public health if Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric, and eliminating funding for vaccine research, leads to a decline in vaccinations. But she said there are other aspects of his platform that are appealing.
“I think it’s really important for people who are reading and listening and thinking through this to recognize there’s a lot of nuance in these picks. There’s actually some terrific things that I hope are going to be prioritized, including chronic illness for children and nutrition and things that we know very much need to be addressed,” she said.
Kennedy has pledged to crack down on ultraprocessed foods that he sees as the root of the childhood obesity epidemic. Kennedy also said under his leadership, the FDA will restrict the use of certain food additives, and he will limit pharmaceutical marketing.
It also pays to look further upstream to address these health issues, said Gergen Barnett. That could look like the FDA evaluating endocrine disruptors found in plastic that also contribute to obesity. Or boosting the nutrition of school lunches.
“How are we going to pay schools to produce better lunches? So there’s a lot of pieces that are not being addressed that we’ve heard about so far,” Gergen Barnett said.
But she said the greatest health risk to children is not obesity, nutrition or endocrine disruptors — it’s gun violence. Firearms accounted for 18% of childhood deaths in 2022, according to the CDC. It’s the number one cause of death among people under 18 years old, surpassing car crashes and drug overdoses.
“So if we are actually talking about kids’ health…this absolutely needs to be a priority as well. But we know there … will be massive pushback on that,” Gergen Barnett said.
