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<\/p>\n Email Link<\/p>\n \n US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disparaged the department he\u2019s been tasked with running in his appearances on Fox News this week, describing HHS as \u201con a 30- or 40-year decline\u201d and calling the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention \u201ca broken agency.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWhen you look back, what would you say is the last great success that our government public health agencies have had?\u201d \u201cFox and Friends Weekend\u201d co-host Charles Hurt asked on Sunday.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWell, I don\u2019t think there have been successes,\u201d Kennedy responded.\n <\/p>\n \n But career public health professionals and historians say he\u2019s wrong.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThese are advances that take a lot of time to research and prove, and often help people who are already healthy,\u201d Dr. Barron Lerner, a physician and historian of medicine at New York University, told CNN. \u201cThe accomplishments we can talk about are often on a population basis. They are proven over years and sometimes decades.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Here are a few of the biggest ways public health agencies have improved people\u2019s health.\n <\/p>\n \n For decades, HHS \u2014 through the surgeon general, the CDC and other offices \u2014 has led campaigns to cut smoking rates. It began with the landmark 1964 surgeon general\u2019s report<\/a> linking cigarettes to lung cancer and culminated in 2009, when the US Food and Drug Administration was granted authority to regulate tobacco products directly.\n <\/p>\n \n Over that \ufefftime span, smoking among US adults fell from about 42% in 1965 to just 12% today, according to an analysis of CDC data<\/a> by the American Lung Association.\n <\/p>\n \n In 2003, Congress created Medicare Part D to cover outpatient prescription drugs, which had previously been excluded from Medicare benefits. When the program launched in 2006, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services \u2014 part of HHS \u2014 made the program work by partnering with private insurers, setting the rules for what drugs would be covered and how much people would pay, and running a national campaign to help seniors sign up.\n <\/p>\n \n Today, tens of millions of Medicare beneficiaries rely on Part D to afford their medications.\n <\/p>\n \n In 1996, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health discovered the breakthrough drug combination that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. It found that a combination of three drugs reduced mortality by nearly half<\/a>, and just a year later, AIDS-related deaths dropped 48%, according to CDC data<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Those achievements have been amplified globally by PEPFAR \u2013 the President\u2019s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched in 2003 by President George W. Bush \u2013 which has invested over $100 billion in the global HIV\/AIDS response and helped save over 25 million lives, according to HIV.gov.\n <\/p>\n Covid-19 and Operation Warp Speed<\/p>\n \n One of the most recent improvements to public health came through the rapid development and rollout of Covid-19 vaccines under Operation Warp Speed, a signature achievement of the first Trump administration.\n <\/p>\n \n The NIH helped design and test the vaccines, the FDA reviewed and authorized them, and the CDC coordinated distribution and public guidance.\n <\/p>\n \n Vaccines typically take five to 10 years to develop, according to Johns Hopkins University, and sometimes longer. But Operation Warp Speed delivered shots within a year of the pandemic\u2019s onset and is credited with saving millions of American lives, according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n In the early 1990s, just 60% of children under 3 in the US had received the full set of recommended vaccines. To close that gap, in 1994 the CDC launched the Vaccines for Children program, which provides vaccines at no cost to pediatricians and clinics serving families who couldn\u2019t otherwise afford them. By the end of the decade, vaccination rates climbed to nearly 90%, and the CDC estimates that the program has prevented more than a million deaths<\/a> in children born since then.\n <\/p>\n \n Vaccine safety has become a central criticism of Kennedy, who in June fired all 17 members of the CDC\u2019s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the group of independent experts who make recommendations on childhood and adult vaccinations. The committee now has seven new members and is expected to get more soon.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAnybody who has the privilege of serving in a leadership position in HHS is usually awed by the many achievements the agency has led,\u201d Dr. Howard Ko, a professor of public health leadership at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who served as HHS assistant secretary under President Obama, told CNN. \u201cHe is setting back public health progress by a generation, at the very least, and that has got to stop. We are losing ground so rapidly, and it\u2019s a tremendous concern for everybody in the public health community.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n An HHS spokesperson told CNN in a statement: \u201cSecretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world\u2019s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform. \u2026 HHS remains committed to supporting the health of the American people while respecting their right to clear, honest information and personal choice.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Facebook Tweet Email Link US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disparaged the department he\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-138560","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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