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Trump's commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Martin Makary, has resigned. During Makary's 13-month tenure, he attempted to split the difference between Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda and a more traditional approach to regulation, ultimately angering both camps. "Nobody was happy with what he did," says Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Shortly before his resignation, Makary had drawn the ire of President Trump for attempting to block the approval of fruit-flavored vapes, and anti-abortion groups for not placing harsher restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone. But even before Makary took the helm, mass layoffs and the loss of scientific expertise had already thrown the FDA, which has oversight powers extending to more than a fifth of the U.S. economy, in turmoil.
The FDA's deputy commissioner for food, Kyle Diamantis, will now assume Makary's position in an acting capacity. Diamantas, a personal friend of Donald Trump Jr., does not have a background in medicine. The abrupt leadership shakeup is worrisome for the future of health and medicine in the United States, says Dr. Robert Steinbrook, the health research director at watchdog organization Public Citizen. "We need a strong public health agency," he explains. "[But] when you pick them apart for particular theories and the idiosyncrasies of the Health and Human Services secretary, you destroy things which take years, if not decades, to rebuild."
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 Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastWe're almost there, folks. The presidential election is nearly upon us, and not a second too soon. We are a people on edge because, while the specific issues at play are familiar enough, the election's underlying narrative is about something more fundamental than immigration policy, tax policy, foreign policy. The central issue is none of those things. Instead, the unarticulated question at the heart of this election isn't what do we want to do, but who do we want to be?
The U.S. is a strange country, the first nation created around an idea. That idea—self-governance of the people by the people—was a radical one. Could a nation of Calvinists and corporatists somehow figure out how to create a peaceable governance stripped of primogeniture? Could thirteen colonies with disparate customs and cultures forge a union whose legitimacy doesn't rest at the point of a bayonet?
It's also a strange country because of who inhabits it. For the most part, we American citizens are not descended from centuries of native stock. Most of us cannot trace our American ancestry back more than a few generations. We arrived by ship and plane, sometimes by our own free will and sometimes not. We are the sons and daughters of merchants and ministers, sinners and slaves.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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