President-elect Donald Trump has picked Dr Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of medicine, to lead the Food and Drug Administration.
“I am very pleased to nominate Marty Makary MD, MPH, FACS, for FDA Commissioner,” Trump said in a statement, on Friday.
“FDA has lost the trust of Americans, and has lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator. The Agency needs Dr. Marty Makary, a Highly Respected Johns Hopkins Surgical Oncologist and Health Policy Expert, to course-correct and refocus the Agency.”
Trump’s statement continues that Makary “work under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to, among other things, properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our Nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our Nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic.”
Trump went on to describe Makary as a “pioneer in the fields of Public Health, Cancer Care, and Surgery” and lauded him for his work at Johns Hopkins, as well as his authorship of “more than 300 scientific articles and three New York Times bestselling books on Healthcare.”
Although Trump did not mention it, Makary is also widely known as a critic of the pandemic social-restrictions enacted by governments. After initially recommending lockdowns in the spring of 2020, in May 2020 Makary reversed course and called for society to be opened up to avoid disastrous knock-on effects that would be worse than the virus itself.
Makary was also critical of the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, of vaccine mandates and of what he described as the “complete dismissal of natural immunity.”
Earlier this year, Makary appeared at a Congressional roundtable with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., where he said “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation has been the United States government with the food pyramid.”
“We have the most overmedicated, sickest population in the world and no one is talking about root causes,” he continued.
“We have poisoned our food supply.”
On Friday, Trump also picked Rep. Dave Weldon, a Republican from Florida, to head the Centers for Disease Control, and Dr Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News contributor, to serve as the next surgeon general.