Facts by Secretary Kennedy:
Overmedication, particularly in children is growing issue, more than 3.4 million American children are currently taking medication for ADD and ADHD and yet the numbers continue to rise. President Trump has asked me to reverse the epidemic disease the way to do that is to bring HHS to its full potential as the steward of the American Healthcare System that is the mission that I want to share with you.
I have a vivid memory of visiting NIH when I was a boy, a woman who worked for my mother had a husband who was an NIH scientist. When I was that age I wanted to be a scientist and he would bring me to NIH to the labs look at the rats and the guinea pigs and to look through the microscopes and for me that was an extraordinary thrill to see scientists were engaged in this existential search for or existential truth and who were working to make our country stronger and to make our people stronger.
I want the agencies under NIH to earn that level of global Trust
Those were different times, America was at the Apex of its power and prestige and all the world looked to us for leadership this was particularly true of HIH, CDC and FDA. They provided the gold standard of science and research trusted the world over. They produced scientific Heroes like Bernice Eddie Sarah and Francis Kelsey. Kelsey was of course the young FDA scientist was through her own stubbornness and integrity saved our country from this urgent thalidomide and left awake of grim birth defects and grotesque mutations and deformities across Europe.
In 1962 my uncle John F Kennedy, honored Stewart with the presence award for distinguished Federal civilian service, the government’s highest civilian honor. The greatness of NIH was rooted and it’s unimpeachable integrity. It truly deserved the reputation for conducting science in the public interest. Countries that didn’t have their own research institutions, for example, the Colonial Africa, trusted in American Science so much that many of them wrote into their own laws: If the FDA approved it, and it’s approved in our country as well. I want the agencies under NIH to earn that level of global Trust
