from the liar-liar dept

If you go through all of the bloviations from RFK Jr. when it comes to his stance on vaccines, one of his chief refrains is that vaccines that have been in wide use for many years haven’t been tested properly for safety, or that data about their safety has been hidden or ignored. He’s generally wrong about all of that, of course, but it doesn’t stop him from saying it over and over again. The end result, if you didn’t bother looking any further into what Kennedy has said and written on the topic, is that you might believe that what Kennedy really cares about is a cautious approach with stringent testing before allowing something to be put into American bodies.

But that isn’t what Kennedy believes. It’s not what he demonstrates through actions, either. And if you want proof of that, you need only read about how Kennedy has unilaterally adjusted rules at HHS to allow pharmacies to sell you peptides over the objections of the FDA.

Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has unilaterally passed a rule that will allow specialty pharmacies to sell six specific peptide drugs, overruling scientists at the Food and Drug Administration.

Kennedy’s new rule sidesteps the need to formally undo that FDA action. The rule is titled “Enforcement Discretion Policy Regarding 503A Compounding Using Certain Peptide Bulk Drug Substances” and was made available Wednesday on the Federal Register, with the final publication date set for October 30. The rule does not change the regulatory status of the peptide; instead, it states the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will no longer take enforcement action against compounding pharmacies for making the peptides, essentially giving them a green light to freely produce and sell them.

So what qualifications does Kennedy possess that is informing his decision to overrule actual FDA scientists on the topic of peptides? None, of course. Kennedy is not a scientist. He’s not a healthcare professional. What he is, instead, is both a user of peptides personally and someone who has many friends in the peptide business. It’s just another grift, though it is being wrapped in pretend backing from the panels that Kennedy personally stocked with sycophants.

One reason cited for all the peptides was that an FDA advisory panel voted in July to add these six peptides back to the list of drugs compound pharmacies can make. However, prior to the vote, Kennedy stacked that 12-member committee with eight new members. At least six of Kennedy’s additions have ties to peptide-related businesses and clinics, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns.

Another explanation for allowing the peptides is that the safety concerns are mainly hypothetical or “inferential” and not based on observed harm in humans. But this is mainly because there are few to no studies involving humans that show either benefits or harms from the peptides.

And here we put the lie to Kennedy’s concerns about vaccines. If he wants to claim that vaccines haven’t been tested enough to be in wide public use, he cannot create a non-enforcement policy over peptides that have had far less, if any, such testing. We are living under health policies that are purely Kennedy’s personal whims. That’s nothing like the gold standard science that he has been promising to follow throughout his tenure at HHS.

The peptide pushers are celebrating and it’s not hard to understand why. Many Kennedy allies are among them. He gave them a gift, almost perfectly circumventing his previous fears about testing to do so.

Filed Under: fda, hhs, peptides, rfk jr., vaccines