It is a common truism that the person who is responsible for your health is staring at you in the mirror. The government can be helpful or harmful to your health, but if you are looking for a helping hand, the best one is attached to your arm. This is why we use Indian pharmacies, order our own tests, pick our own doctors and heath advisors, why we study and research health ourselves, and take trips abroad for medical tourism.
So I don’t care who gets appointed for what. I never counted on that anyway, because I saw the track record decades ago. We set curing cancer as a priority #1, back in the 70’s - cancer is still killing at rates only exceeded by CVD. Vaccines were a great medical achievement, therefore we immediately looked for ways to undermine the very concept. We had some success in getting rates of MACE down, so we immediately looked for ways to undermine that accomplishment. Statins have been some of the most beneficial medications ever invented, so we immediately unleashed social media firestorms of statin denialism. Conspiracy thinking infecting goverment institutions? Very expected.
Who in their right mind imagines that any appointment to a governmental medical establishment is going to move the needle on longevity in 4 years? And who thinks that the best way to fix a troubled system is to throw a grenade at it? I’ll tell you who - it’s the same person who sees that a situation is bad, and therefore thinks any change must therefore automatically be good; what that person never sees is the other outcome of blowing up the status quo - the change can be for the worse. I know this, because all my life I’ve heard the “it’s so bad, it can’t get worse”, and “it’s already bad, what do we have to lose”. And then the shocking, shocking discovery, that yes, Virginia, it can get worse, and a lot worse. Rinse, repeat. Right now there’s that mood again, of well we seem to be on the wrong path, what the heck, let the dog take the wheel for now, it can’t get any worse.
Reform is a difficult, often frustratingly slow process that needs rational evidence based consideration, and not ideology and hot takes.
I too am frustrated and disgusted by the dysfunction of our medical research establishment. It’s just that I am old enough to know that randomly blowing up the system based on someone’s ideology free from evidence, not only never leads to success, but results in much, much worse outcomes. Change is good, and change is necessary, but what kind of change makes ALL the difference. A difficult situation on the chessboard is frustrating and needs hard thinking and deliberation, but the solution is not to, out of that frustration, throw the whole chessboard off the table.
In the end, there’s not much point in speculating about who gets appointed to what position and what they’ll be doing there. We’ve seen this movie before, and we have the track record when it comes personnel turnover, tenure and “accomplishments”. There is no reason whatsoever to expect anything different. Which is why I personally will pay zero attention to the brownian motion of personality appointments, and focus, as always, on what it is that I can do for my health. YMMV.
