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The ink is barely dry on Jim O’Neill’s appointment as interim chief of the CDC, and already Washington is buzzing with one question: Is this another quiet coup for billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel? After all, O’Neill is no stranger to Thiel’s world. He cut his teeth as a managing director at Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital. He went on to run the Thiel Foundation, where he helped launch the Thiel Fellowship and Breakout Labs.
Later, he became a partner at Mithril Capital, Thiel’s late-stage investment fund. But that’s precisely what has some watchdogs nervous. Thiel, who once sat on Trump’s 2016 transition team, has perfected the art of influence without office.
His protégé, JD Vance, is now second in line to the presidency. His former chief of staff, Michael Kratsios, leads the Office of Science and Technology Policy. A long-time close ally, Kevin Harrington is a senior director in the National Security Council. And Thiel’s tech firms—Palantir, Anduril, Scale AI—have all benefited from a surge in federal contracts, including a $10 billion enterprise service agreement that allows the U.S. Army and other Department of Defense agencies to purchase Palantir’s commercial products over the next 10 years.
With O’Neill now set to steer the CDC after last week’s extraordinary leadership exodus, critics worry that Thiel’s libertarian-tinged views on science and regulation will now stretch into the heart of America’s health bureaucracy.
JD Vance and Peter Thiel.
Jeff Swensen/John Lamparski/Getty Images
Meanwhile, O’Neill’s controversial views have also raised alarms. He has previously suggested the FDA should speed approvals by letting drugs hit the market before proving effectiveness. He’s championed unproven cures like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to protect against COVID-19. He also once served on the board of the Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute, whose founder, Patri Friedman (the grandson of right-wing economist Milton Friedman), advocated for corporations like Apple and Google to form libertarian cities at sea that could run like “successful dictatorships.” O’Neill graduated with a B.A. in humanities from Yale (where he was also general manager of the university band).
Unlike his predecessors and the CDC staff who walked out in disgust last week, he does not have any medical or scientific training. Still, the investment executive is suitably qualified in the eyes of equally unqualified Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has spent months seeking to advance anti-vaccine policies that are contradicted by decades of research. “The CDC must once again be the world’s leader in communicable disease prevention,” Kennedy wrote in an email to staff announcing O’Neill’s appointment last week. “Together, we will restore that trust.” Who needs science when you can have medical quackery?
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