659. Can Marty Makary Fix the F.D.A.?

When it comes to public health, the first year of the second Trump administration has been an unusually busy one and unusually controversial. Most of this has run through Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In just the past few weeks, Kennedy overhauled the government's recommendations for childhood vaccines and revised The so-called food pyramid, promoting animal proteins especially, while downgrading ultraprocessed foods, refined carbohydrates, and added sugars.

Kennedy's policies affect several agencies under his purview, including the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has had a busy year of its own, approving new treatments for several rare diseases, including cancers, as well as for rheumatoid arthritis and HIV. The agency also approved a non-opioid pain medicine, the first of its kind in many years. The next few years may be even busier. The FDA today is not going to be an FDA in a receive-only mode.

We're not going to be stingy librarians. We're going to go into the pipeline, find out what sounds promising, and bring that to the forefront. That is Marty McCary. Commissioner of the FDA. He has been on Free Conomics Radio a few times in the past, and he made a brief appearance in last week's episode about brain supplements.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (55 minutes, 8,572 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.