HHS

The Make America Healthy Again movement has already accomplished more in its first year than many reformers dared to hope. Major food companies are starting to phase out those artificial dyes. States are testing ways to remove junk food from SNAP benefits. The MAHA Commission delivered a refreshingly honest assessment of the childhood chronic-disease crisis. Vaccine schedules have been thoughtfully adjusted toward the shots with the broadest consensus, and federal attention is finally turning to ultra-processed foods, seed oils and environmental toxins. These are real, tangible wins we can build on. Yet there’s a quiet risk brewing within the movement: the temptation to slide into puritanism.

For the past month, the tone among Washington insiders was dour as it related to the confirmation prospects of Donald Trump’s edgier nominees. Sure, the argument went, Marco Rubio is a slam dunk, and no one takes issue with Doug Burgum or Sean Duffy. But the attitude toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health and human services secretary and Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as director of national intelligence were grim. More than a dozen Republican insiders in the past week assured me that one or both nominations were doomed, citing the opposition from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, legacy newspaper columnists such as David French and Marc Thiessen and the editors of National Review, who took a particularly aggressive stance against Gabbard. All of them lost.

Anthony Fauci’s final months in office, in which he opposed a federal judge striking down a federal travel mask mandate and unilaterally funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a scandal-plagued NGO, were most likely illegal, according to findings from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee claims that his term was never legally renewed. According to the findings, the Department of Health and Human Services “repeatedly misled” Congress and tried to cover its tracks in order to dismiss allegations that Fauci and his allies were unlawfully working for months, during which they handed out tens of billions of dollars of government contracts, many of which are now in legal jeopardy.

A group of Republican congressmen and senators sent a letter to top US government health officials on Monday demanding answers on recent claims about "directed evolution" research made by a Pfizer employee during an undercover sting operation. A copy of the letter, which was sent to Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Robert Califf, and National Institutes of Health acting director Lawrence Tabak, was obtained by The Spectator. Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, and Representatives Chip Roy, Andy Biggs, Greg Steube, Eric Burlison, Bill Posey, Mary Miller, Lauren Boebert and Bob Good all signed the letter.

Cockburn spent his long weekend the same way most Americans did: reading the Functional Government Initiative’s recent report. It found that “on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working.” Government inefficiency is nothing new, but in this case teleworking is exacerbating the problem. And that isn’t about to improve — at least not under this administration. Biden continues to push for more teleworking options, even as the pandemic finally begins to fade. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Brian Harrison, the former HHS chief of staff who commissioned the investigation of telework participation, speculates that many recent federal agency errors may be due to an inactive teleworkforce.

The Biden administration announced Tuesday that Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary of health, will be sworn in as a four-star admiral in the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Levine will not only be the first openly transgender four-star officer in the uniformed services — according to the Biden administration, Levine will also be the "first female four-star admiral" of the health corps. Allow Cockburn to be the first to congratulate Ms Levine — sorry, Admiral Levine! — on this historic achievement. How inspiring that Rachel, formerly known as Richard, only had to identify as female for about 15 percent of her life before becoming one of the most successful women in the world.