Marty Makary, a highly acclaimed surgeon who is an outspoken critic of the U.S. food system, the use of pesticides, and of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, was selected by President-elect Donald Trump on Friday as the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Marty Makary, the Mark Ravitch Chair in Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was featured at a September event in Washington hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other allies of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Makary referred to the U.S. food supply as "poisoned."
In a statement Friday evening, Trump said FDA "has lost the trust of Americans, and has lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator. The Agency needs Dr. Marty Makary, a Highly Respected Johns Hopkins Surgical Oncologist and Health Policy Expert, to course-correct and refocus the Agency. He will work under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to, among other things, properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our Nation’s food supply and drugs and biologics being given to our Nation’s youth, so that we can finally address the Childhood Chronic Disease Epidemic.”
Makary’s webpage describes him as “a public health researcher [who] leads efforts to improve the health of communities and focuses on the ‘re-design of health care’ to make health care more reliable, holistic, and coordinated, especially for vulnerable populations. He leads national efforts to increase medical transparency and lower health care costs for everyday businesses and consumers.”
At the September event with RFK Jr., Makary directly linked pesticides to cancer:
"We have poisoned our food supply, engineered highly addictive chemicals that we put into our food. We spray it with pesticides that kill pests. What do you think they do to our gut lining in our microbiome? And then they come in sick. The GI tract is reacting. It's not an acute inflammatory storm, it's a low grade, chronic inflammation, and it makes people feel sick. And that inflammation permeates and drives so many of our chronic diseases that we didn't see half a century ago."
On Fox Business in September, Makary said that although cancer rates have fallen overall due mainly due to the drop in cigarette smoking, “Certain types of cancers are going way up, the gastrointestinal cancers, colon cancer, colon cancer in young people under age 50. We've got a poisoned food supplies (sic), we've got pesticides, ultraprocessed foods and all sorts of things that have been in the blind spots.”
Asked whether “You put it down to that -- ultraprocessed foods, intestinal cancer in youngsters. Is that it?”
“Yeah, because we've known inflammation drives cancer, and when you take all these chemicals and engineered food additives, the body reacts with a low-grade inflammatory response,” Makary said. “It feels sick. We medicate people, but the microbiome is changing – the lining of the GI tract.”
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Makary will have to be confirmed by the Senate. The incoming chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Bill Cassidy, R-La., said in a post on X:
"The FDA is responsible for ensuring that medical advancements are safe and available to benefit patients, and that our food supply is likewise safe. I’m interested in hearing how Doctor Marty Makary will accomplish this."
Makary co-developed the Surgery Checklist, which was the subject of a best-selling book, ‘The Checklist Manifesto” and is credited with improving surgical outcomes worldwide.
Makary has been vocal about considering the power of natural immunity to COVID-19 in deciding whether to use vaccines or boosters.
“The incorrect hypothesis that natural immunity is unreliable has resulted in the loss of thousands of American lives, avoidable vaccine complications, and damaged the credibility of public health officials,” he wrote in The Washington Post in September 2021.
And in June 2022 in Newsweek, he criticized a CDC recommendation that 5- to 11-year-olds receive COVID boosters.
“It didn't seem to matter to the CDC that 75.2 percent of children under age 11 already have natural immunity, according to a CDC study that concluded in February. Natural immunity is certainly much more prevalent today, given the ubiquity of the Omicron variant since February [2022].”
Makary has been criticized himself for some of his claims, including in 2023 when he said the government had spread misinformation about the effectiveness of masks. The site “Science Feedback” called that claim and two others were “misleading.”
While FDA regulates the safety of 80% of the nation's food supply; meat and poultry are under the purview of USDA. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates the use of pesticides and sets tolerances, effectively limits, for the amount of pesticides that can be found on food. FDA enforces the limits.
USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service each year tests a variety of fresh and processed foods, including baby food, for pesticide residues. The 2023 report found that "over 99 percent of the samples tested had residues below the tolerances established by the EPA with 38.8 percent having no detectable residue."
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