Yikes. The Lancet on Bad Kennedy’s war on HHS:

10 days after his speech about trust and openness, HHS rescinded a 54-year-old policy of soliciting public comments for new rules and regulations, silencing the voices of many of the stakeholders he pledged to serve. Kennedy has summarily dismissed advisers and experts, communicated policy changes on pay-walled media, fired a whistleblower, and overseen the revisions of guidelines and recommendations, contradicting decades of established science, often to the benefit of industries he formerly condemned. Under Kennedy’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shuttered programmes studying the health effects of air pollution, HHS withheld a report linking alcohol consumption to cancer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew warnings of potential harm from consuming products (such as raw milk and chlorine dioxide) falsely marketed as treatments for autism. His changes at CDC have driven 26 states to reject official guidance on vaccine policy, and in December the CDC awarded an unsolicited $1·6 million grant to conduct a vaccine study in Guinea-Bissau that raised so many ethical concerns—the design would have risked exposing thousands of unvaccinated children to hepatitis B—that it has been compared to the infamous Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.

Holy shit. I did not know that. How fascinating that the study is (was) in Guinea-Bissau and not, say, Massachusetts.

HHS under Kennedy has made a habit of throwing good money after bad science. Amid the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding and personnel there has been a harmful shift in priorities. Cutting-edge discoveries and clinical investigations—on subjects ranging from mRNA vaccines to diabetes and dementia—are denied crucial resources while junk science and fringe beliefs are elevated without justifiable explanation.

I wonder how much of that stems from the fact that Kennedy is in no way a medical or scientific professional. As far as the science of medicine goes he’s just some shlub off the street. We shlubs are not equipped to lay down the law on medical matters, because it’s not a subject for amateurs. I wonder if Kennedy is kicking out the knowledge-based stuff in favor of amateur hour because he is himself an amateur. If the sheep hides among all the other sheep the wolf will likely never find that one sheep.