The team that President-elect Donald Trump has selected to lead federal health agencies in his second administration includes a retired congressman, a surgeon and a former talk-show host. All could play pivotal roles in fulfilling a political agenda that could change how the government goes about safeguarding Americans' health — from health care and medicines to food safety and science research. In line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services secretary is environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine organizer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump's choices don't have experience running large bureaucratic agencies, but they know how to talk about health on TV . Centers for Medicare and Medicaid pick Dr. Mehmet Oz hosted a talk show for 13 years and is a well-known wellness and lifestyle influencer. The pick for the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, and for surgeon general, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, are frequent Fox News contributors. Many on the list were critical of COVID-19 measures like masking and booster vaccinations for young people. Some of them have ties to Florida like many of Trump's other Cabinet nominees: Dave Weldon , the pick for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, represented the state in Congress for 14 years and is affiliated with a medical group on the state's Atlantic coast. Nesheiwat's brother-in-law is Rep. Mike Waltz , R-Fla., tapped by Trump as national security adviser. Here's a look at the nominees' potential role in carrying out what Kennedy says is the task to “reorganize” agencies, which have an overall $1.7 trillion budget, employ 80,000 scientists, researchers, doctors and other officials, and effect Americans' daily lives: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Atlanta-based CDC, with a $9.2 billion core budget, is charged with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other public health threats. Kennedy has long attacked vaccines and criticized the CDC, repeatedly alleging corruption at the agency. He said on a 2023 podcast that there is "no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and urged people to resist the CDC's guidelines about if and when kids should get vaccinated . The World Health Organization estimates that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives over the past 50 years, and that 100 million of them were infants. Decades ago, Kennedy found common ground with Weldon , 71, who served in the Army and worked as an internal medicine doctor before he represented a central Florida congressional district from 1995 to 2009. Starting in the early 2000s, Weldon had a prominent part in a debate about whether there was a relationship between a vaccine preservative called thimerosal and autism. He was a founding member of the Congressional Autism Caucus and tried to ban thimerosal from all vaccines. Kennedy, then a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, believed there was a tie between thimerosal and autism and also charged that the government hid documents showing the danger. Since 2001, all vaccines manufactured for the U.S. market and routinely recommended for children 6 years or younger have contained no thimerosal or only trace amounts, with the exception of inactivated influenza vaccine. Meanwhile, study after study after study found no evidence that thimerosal caused autism. Weldon's congressional voting record suggests he may go along with Republican efforts to downsize the CDC, including to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which works on topics like drownings, drug overdoses and shooting deaths. Weldon also voted to ban federal funding for needle-exchange programs as an approach to reduce overdoses, and the National Rifle Association gave him an “A” rating for his pro-gun rights voting record. Food and Drug Administration Kennedy is extremely critical of the FDA, which has 18,000 employees and is responsible for the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs, vaccines and other medical products, as well as overseeing cosmetics, electronic cigarettes and most foods. Makary, Trump’s pick to run the FDA, is closely aligned with Kennedy on several topics . The professor at Johns Hopkins University who is a trained surgeon and cancer specialist has decried the overprescribing of drugs, the use of pesticides on foods and the undue influence of pharmaceutical and insurance companies over doctors and government regulators. Kennedy has suggested he'll clear out “entire” FDA departments and also recently threatened to fire FDA employees for “aggressive suppression” of a host of unsubstantiated products and therapies, including stem cells, raw milk , psychedelics and discredited COVID-era treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Makary's contrarian views during the COVID-19 pandemic included questioning the need for masking and giving young kids COVID-19 vaccine boosters. But anything Makary and Kennedy might want to do when it comes to unwinding FDA regulations or revoking long-standing vaccine and drug approvals would be challenging. The agency has lengthy requirements for removing medicines from the market, which are based on federal laws passed by Congress. Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services The agency provides health care coverage for more than 160 million people through Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, and also sets Medicare payment rates for hospitals, doctors and other providers. With a $1.1 trillion budget and more than 6,000 employees, Oz has a massive agency to run if confirmed — and an agency that Kennedy hasn't talked about much when it comes to his plans. While Trump tried to scrap the Affordable Care Act in his first term, Kennedy has not taken aim at it yet. But he has been critical of Medicaid and Medicare for covering expensive weight-loss drugs — though they're not widely covered by either . Trump said during his campaign that he would protect Medicare, which provides insurance for older Americans. Oz has endorsed expanding Medicare Advantage — a privately run version of Medicare that is popular but also a source of widespread fraud — in an AARP questionnaire during his failed 2022 bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania and in a 2020 Forbes op-ed with a former Kaiser Permanente CEO. Oz also said in a Washington Examiner op-ed with three co-writers that aging healthier and living longer could help fix the U.S. budget deficit because people would work longer and add more to the gross domestic product. Neither Trump nor Kennedy have said much about Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income Americans. Trump's first administration reshaped the program by allowing states to introduce work requirements for recipients. Surgeon general Kennedy doesn't appear to have said much publicly about what he'd like to see from surgeon general position, which is the nation's top doctor and oversees 6,000 U.S. Public Health Service Corps members. The surgeon general has little administrative power, but can be an influential government spokesperson on what counts as a public health danger and what to do about it — suggesting things like warning labels for products and issuing advisories. The current surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared gun violence as a public health crisis in June. Trump's pick, Nesheiwat, is employed as a New York City medical director with CityMD, a group of urgent care facilities in the New York and New Jersey area, and has been at City MD for 12 years. She also has appeared on Fox News and other TV shows, authored a book on the “transformative power of prayer” in her medical career and endorses a brand of vitamin supplements. She encouraged COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, calling them “a gift from God” in a February 2021 Fox News op-ed, as well as anti-viral pills like Paxlovid. In a 2019 Q&A with the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation , Nesheiwat said she is a “firm believer in preventive medicine” and “can give a dissertation on hand-washing alone.” National Institutes of Health As of Saturday, Trump had not yet named his choice to lead the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research through grants to researchers across the nation and conducts its own research. It has a $48 billion budget. Kennedy has said he'd pause drug development and infectious disease research to shift the focus to chronic diseases. He'd like to keep NIH funding from researchers with conflicts of interest, and criticized the agency in 2017 for what he said was not doing enough research into the role of vaccines in autism — an idea that has long been debunked . Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Matt Perrone and AP editor Erica Hunzinger contributed to this report. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. This story has been corrected to reflect that the health agencies have an overall budget of about $1.7 trillion, not $1.7 billion. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Build your health & fitness knowledge Sign up here to get the latest health & fitness updates in your inbox every week!
Technology has eliminated many jobs over the years. Buggy whip makers have been out of business since McKinley was in the White House. The iceman hasn’t made home deliveries in nearly as long. And there’s just not as much call these days for switchboard operators as there once was. Oh, and knocker-uppers have vanished from British streets as well. Wait, what? This story is a reminder of the fundament truth in George Bernard Shaw’s quip that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” In Brit Speak, to “knock someone up” is slang for waking them up. The name derives from knocking on a bedroom door to rouse a sleeper. Here on this side of the pond ... well, let’s just say “knocking someone up” involves something completely different and leave it at that. Getting back to our British cousins, there’s more involved than just a simple phrase. From the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century up to World War II, people in the U.K. were actually paid to be “knocker uppers.” As large factories and business offices began appearing, people suddenly had to show up for work by a specific time, often early in the morning. That could be difficult for sound sleepers in that era long before alarm clocks. (And when they were invented, many early models were unreliable.) Being late too many times carried the very real possibility of losing a much-needed job. What to do? Enter the knocker uppers. For a few pennies a week, they would come around to homes and make sure working-class people were awake. They did so by utilizing a variety of methods. Most common was the use of a long, thin pole, similar to a fishing rod. They would lift it up and rap on a bedroom window until the party inside got out of bed. Sometimes, rattles were used. Some enterprising people even used peashooters to hit the glass windows and awaken their clients. They were especially popular in industrial cities like Manchester but were also commonly found in most metro areas. So, just who were the knocker uppers? Poor retirees, mostly. Older men and women looking for extra money to help them scrape by. Moms-to-be, frequently not allowed to work during pregnancy, did it to help replace their lost wages. Sometimes, police officers walking the beat would supplement their meager income by performing the service. Children were occasionally employed, though not often due to their fondness for oversleeping. In England’s coal country, miners sometimes hung slate boards on the outer walls of their houses and wrote the times they were to be awakened. They eventually gained the nicknames “knocky-up boards” or “wakeup slates.” And the practice wasn’t limited to England. Although the custom didn’t catch on in this country, knocker-uppers were also used in Ireland and the Netherlands. But nowhere was the practice as widespread as it was in Britain’s working-class neighborhoods. All good things must eventually come to an end, and so it was for the knocker-uppers. Alarm clocks became both more affordable and dependable after World War II. Most knocker-uppers stopped making their rounds in the 1950s, with a few isolated pockets carrying on into the 1970s. A woman named Molly Moore claimed to be the last practitioner of the trade, as was her mother before her. Both women favored the peashooter approach to making sure their clients greeted the new day. It’s a quaintly picturesque image today: An old man or woman wandering down a street in the morning’s first light, reaching up and gently tapping on a window, then moving on down the block and repeating the process until finally, with the sun inching higher overhead, a whistle blows, and the workday begins anew once more.The potential policy adjustments are also seen as a response to domestic economic conditions. With growth slowing down and inflation remaining subdued, policymakers are looking for ways to support the economy. By signaling the intention to continue with accommodative monetary measures, policymakers aim to create a favorable environment for sustainable growth and development.Clippers’ Amir Coffey finding himself in spotlight more often
3. **Inadequate Healthcare System:** The healthcare system in the province has been in shambles, with hospitals overcrowded and understaffed. Governor Larragus has failed to address this pressing issue, leading to a healthcare crisis.In conclusion, the event "Exploring the Top 100: Into Renji - A Storm of Discussion on Artificial Intelligence" was a testament to the growing importance of AI in healthcare and the need for comprehensive discussions on its implications. As we continue to unlock the potential of AI, it is crucial that we do so with a deep sense of responsibility, ethics, and a commitment to improve the lives of patients and communities.