No amount of rigorous academic research or testing ever seems good enough to quell Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s doubts about vaccines. Yet for products he favors, anything goes. The hypocrisy is especially rank as RFK pushes the Food and Drug Administration to loosen restrictions on peptides, an experimental fad among wellness influencers who scorn traditional medicine.
Peptides are chains of amino acids that tell the body’s cells what to do. In the pharmaceutical world, the term refers to a large class of medications that take advantage of that biological function. That includes legitimate drugs, such as insulin to treat diabetes or GLP-1s to treat obesity. It also includes an endless list of alternative “therapies” that are not FDA approved and have no clinical data to support their use.
Those latter peptides, which are typically delivered via injections, exist in an awkward “gray market” thanks to a legal loophole that allows compounding pharmacies to sell them under a label that says “for research use only.” FDA scientists have long warned that these products — which have no standardized dosages and may contain unregulated ingredients — are ineffective and potentially dangerous. Last year, for example, two women at an anti-aging conference in Las Vegas became critically ill after receiving peptide injections.
Despite these concerns, Kennedy declared in a recent podcast interview with Joe Rogan that he is a “big fan” of the unproven drugs and noted that has taken them to treat injuries with “really good effect.” He vowed to end the government’s “war on peptides” and reverse restrictions on “about 14” of the drugs that the FDA imposed in 2023, barring compounding pharmacies from manufacturing them due to safety concerns.
As is so often the case with government bans, it didn’t really work. People now buy those peptides off the black market. But it’s one thing to criticize the 2023 policy as poorly conceived; it’s quite another for the nation’s top-ranking health official to actively promote products that have no scientific evidence to back them up.
Contrast that with Kennedy’s stance on vaccines: He has alleged that federal advisory panels have acted as “rubber stamps” in approving shots, repeatedly demanding better safety data for immunizations, even though the approval process already required extensive reviews. He has required better testing protocols for vaccines, including the use of placebos even when such study designs are impractical or unethical.
That inconsistency is bad for medical innovation. Drug manufacturers should be confident that the government will review their products with the same rigor all others receive. No entrepreneur should need to do business at the whims of a government quack.
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