Vice President J.D. Vance said the only way to fix the nation’s health is to shake up the status quo and not be afraid of people pushing back on unconventional ideas.
Mr. Vance made the call on Wednesday for outside-the-box thinking at the inaugural Make America Healthy Again summit in Washington, where he engaged in a on-stage conversation with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He said Mr. Kennedy’s team is “not terrified to think about things in new and interesting ways.”
“If you think about what has been so broken about the public health bureaucracy in this country for years, for decades, generations, even, it’s that people think in incredibly conventional ways, and if you bring them a nonconventional idea, their automatic assumption is, no, no, we’re not allowed to talk about that, much less fund something related to that,” the vice president said.
As they discussed the nation’s health, the two praised President Trump for shaking up the status quo when it comes to policy.
Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Trump “takes a bulldozer to Overton Windows,” a concept representing a range of ideas that’s politically acceptable at a given time.
“That is a good summary of Donald J. Trump — is that he takes a bulldozer to Overton Windows every single day,” Mr. Vance said. “But it just had to happen.”
Mr. Vance said science needs to be criticized and debated, and that it bothers him that in public health debates, “they tried to silence the people who were saying things that were outside the Overton Window.”
“There is no way that this country is going to advance unless we’re comfortable with people who are willing to challenge orthodoxy,” he said. ” And that’s what I think got so broken, not just about the scientific bureaucracy.”
The two discussed Mr. Vance’s upbringing in Appalachia.
“If any place in this country deserves not to be left behind, it’s Appalachia,” Mr. Vance said. “But on the public health stuff in particular, the numbers don’t look good, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m such a big supporter of what you’re doing, because these are people who deserve to live better, healthier lives, but they really have been left behind by this country’s leadership.”
He said questions should be raised about what Americans are putting in their bodies and where it is coming from, using both food and medicine as examples.
“We should only be taking stuff, we should only be giving our kids stuff if it’s actually necessary, safe and effective. And I think it’s an attitude that’s really beneficial to the entire country, because we do have … an obesity epidemic in the United States of America. I think a big part of that is not asking where our food comes from,” he said.
The MAHA movement has been a big part of the president’s administration, resulting in “Most Favored Nation” drug pricing for Americans with companies like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and EMD Serono.
Several MAHA positions have been widely criticized, including the claim that taking Tylenol during pregnancy could lead to autism, as scientific studies show no clear link.
Mr. Kennedy walked it back, saying Tylenol should be used with caution during pregnancy, but there is not “sufficient” evidence to link it to autism.
