For anyone tempted to suggest that our nation’s top health officials could begin shoring up their badly eroded credibility through public dialogue, the FDA’s new head honcho Robert Califf has a message for ordinary Americans: sit down and shut up.
Asked about complaints from the public at an April 29th journalism conference, Califf declared “I’m 70 years old, I’m relatively impervious to critique.”
After “surviving a harrowing confirmation process,” he mused, “what are they going to do to me now?”
That sort of towering arrogance from federal officials is all too familiar to those of us working in the field of nicotine policy – that is, finding innovative ways to help Americans quit cigarettes which take nearly half a million lives each year. We have been pleading with Califf for months to simply acknowledge the shining fact that millions of Americans have successfully quit smoking by switching to vastly safer nicotine vaping.
That accomplishment, widely proven in the medical literature, makes nicotine vaping the most successful smoking cessation method ever devised – with far higher efficacy than the patches, drugs, and gums made by Califf’s former employers in the pharma industry. But Califf has never responded to us and instead he’s leading FDA on a regulatory warpath that has so far outlawed more than 99 percent of all vaping products.
Amanda Wheeler – The Opinion Pages – 2022-05-13.
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