Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, told Congress that he’s directed the Food and Drug Administration to review regulations around the abortion pill mifepristone, outraging reproductive rights advocates after he cited a flawed study on the widely used medication.
“I’ve asked Marty Makary, who’s the director of the FDA, to do a complete review and report back,” Kennedy, a notorious skeptic and conspiracy theorist on vaccines and other public health matters, said of the medication during a Senate budget hearing Wednesday.
Makary is a former Fox News host known for claiming on national television that fetuses can “resist” an abortion.
Kennedy confirmed that any decision on the drug will be informed by a deeply flawed report published last month by a conservative think tank, even though experts say the so-called study has a clear conflict of interest and wasn’t peer-reviewed ― a baseline expectation for research used to alter access to a medication that’s been used by millions of Americans to manage their reproductive health for a quarter-century.
The health secretary went on to say that the new report, which claims 11% of mifepristone users “experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging” after taking it, is “alarming” and “clearly it indicates that at [the] very least that the label should be changed.”
