Donald Trump has tapped Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and long-time associate of billionaire Peter Thiel, as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control.
Taking the place of Susan Monarez, whose firing has raised alarm over the dangerous incompetence of the health department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., O’Neill will bring to the role no medical or scientific background.
But he does have a history of feverish advocacy of deregulation and libertarianism, as the progressive group Public Citizen highlighted when he was nominated for his current role at Trump’s health department.
In a 2014 speech, for instance, O’Neill—then managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital—proposed allowing drugs onto the market without first determining whether they even work. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he said. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”
He revealed in the same speech that, while working for George W. Bush’s health department, he opposed the Food and Drug Administration regulating firms that use algorithms in lab tests, such as biotech company 23andMe.
He’s also a proponent of legalizing the organ trade. “There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused,” as he put it during a 2009 talk—where he also argued in favor of generally leaving health care to the whims of the market. “Because there’s not a free market in health care, people are suffering very significant health consequences that in a free market they would not suffer,” he claimed.
The 2009 remarks were delivered at a seasteading conference. For those who don’t keep up with plutocrats’ vanity projects, seasteading is the idea of establishing autonomous, floating communities at sea. Until last year, O’Neill served on the board of a Thiel-backed seasteading venture, which was founded by anarcho-capitalist Patri Friedman—of whom O’Neill is a self-described disciple—who outlined his goal as follows, according to SFGate:
“I envision tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country,” where the high-tech giants would govern and residents would have no vote. “If people are allowed to opt in or out, you can have a successful dictatorship.”
O’Neill also appears to share, with many of his Silicon Valley peers, a fixation on anti-aging.
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