The life expectancy for Americans has been dropping steadily in recent years — and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration claims he knows why.
In a recent CNBC interview, Dr. Robert Califf asserted that so-called misinformation posted online is causing people to make health decisions that shorten their lives.
In a single interview, the Commissioner of the FDA, the organization who brought you disasters like processed food, seed oils, Fen Phen, the Standard American Diet, worries about health misinformation and has high hopes for the next $100B obesity drug. https://t.co/PE4zO7i7eG
— TimOnPoint (@TimOnPoint) April 11, 2023
“Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries?” he asked. “A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influenced their thinking.”
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, skeptics of face mask mandates and the vaccines that were rushed through the research and development process were often dismissed or demonized as purveyors of medical misinformation.
In recent months, however, many of the concerns expressed by such skeptics have been revealed to be legitimate. Nevertheless, Califf seems to believe that those who do not toe the line of supposed experts should essentially be silenced.
“You think about the impact of a single person reaching a billion people on the internet all over the world, we just weren’t prepared for that,” he said. “We don’t have societal rules that are adjudicating it quite right, and I think it’s impacting our health in very detrimental ways.”
Although he did cite the pandemic as one cause for the nation’s shrinking life expectancy, Califf described a public shift away from “truth” — at least as he sees it — as a bigger factor. He argued that online debate on issues related to health and medicine have led to people being “deluded” into gravitating toward ineffective or even dangerous advice.
Califf notably avoided the opioid epidemic that has been exacerbated by President Joe Biden’s lax border policies and has been cited as possibly the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.
Furthermore, instead of advising Americans to get more exercise and eat nutritious foods, he used his platform to praise a new class of obesity drugs.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy nationwide dipped by nearly three years between 2019 and 2021, reaching the lowest point — 76.4 years — in two decades.
