Media observers seem eager to draw distinctions between Donald Trump’s MAGA and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s related MAHA—Make America Healthy Again.
Commentary aside, actual data helps us to see what Republicans want most: freedom. According to a new survey from Plymouth Union Public Research, 90 percent of GOP primary voters agree with the statement, “I prefer transparency in knowing what ingredients are in my food rather than having the government ban it for me.” The survey then asked a questions about enhancing transparency, such as smart labels. The answers were all lopsided: Republicans do want information; they do not want regulation.
To borrow Milton Friedman’s famous formulation, they want freedom to choose.
In the meantime, another freedom issue is emerging from within Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services. On April 17, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, also a Trump appointee, said, “We’re going to be rolling out a new pathway for drugs.”
Makary is referring to pathways for pharma-drug approval—making more room for timely approval—and that’s great news, as the current pathway has been badly constricted for a long time.
Back in 2012, Nature detailed the constriction: “The number of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every nine years since 1950, falling around 80-fold in inflation-adjusted terms.” Nature termed it “Eroom’s Law,” as in, Moore’s Law spelled backwards. Yes, digital tech is zooming upward, and yet biotech productivity is zooming downward—and much of the blame goes to the FDA.
In the 13 years since that report, the FDA’s pathway has been further choked; drug approvals fell from 100 to just 50. In fact, if we look at the years from 1949 to 2024, we see that the real GDP of the U.S. rose 941 percent; yet during that same time, the number of new drugs approved by the FDA fell 86 percent.
What happened? The hinge period was the early 1960s, when Congress carelessly passed the Kefauver-Harris Amendment, requiring the FDA to consider “efficacy,” as well as “safety.” The value of regulating safety is obvious. And efficacy—whether or not a drug is effective—might also seem like a good thing to measure.
Yet in reality, efficacy is often impossible to know, as the general population granulates into individual patients. If personalized medicine means anything, it means that a drug might work for Smith, but not for Jones. Yet as the approval data show, if the FDA can’t figure out efficacy, it shuts down approval—and so Smith, who could have been helped, is out of luck. Why should any bureaucrat have this sort of power over us?
Indeed, there’s the larger question of trusting any federal health bureaucracy. We can all recall, during the time of Covid, when the feds were a font of misinformation, even oppression, on everything from the origins of the Wuhan virus to lockdowns.
Moreover, Joe Biden’s FDA waged a campaign against the generic drug ivermectin. The drug was safe, but FDA paternalists didn’t agree that it could be effective against Covid. So the agency launched a legal jihad against doctors in Texas for prescribing ivermectin. Yet the Lone Star docs fought back—and won in court. “FDA is not a physician,” the judge held.
Those are words to take to heart, because they speak to freedom: the freedom of the individual to make his or her own health choices, even if the administrative state doesn’t like them. Yet of course, free choices are best when they are also informed choices. Happily, plenty of sources provide such information, including the website C-19early, which offers a free “dashboard” of data, drawn from around the world, on Covid treatments—including ivermectin.
This is what the FDA should be for drugs: A monitor of safety, yes, but never a nanny. So it’s great news that Makary, the new FDA chief, is seeking to widen the pathways for new medicines and cures.
As those poll data we saw earlier show, this is also what Republicans want for their food. Once safety is assured, they want information, not regulation.
MAGA and MAHA are best when they advance every American’s health and freedom.
James P. Pinkerton, a former White House domestic policy aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, is a former Fox News contributor.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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