Health secretary claims Biden officials ‘twisted the data’ despite research showing mifepristone is safe and effective
The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has suggested that Biden-era regulations expanding access to abortion pills could be rolled back because the Biden administration had “twisted the data” behind the pills.
Kennedy made the remark more than an hour into a tense interrogation by members of the US Senate judiciary committee over his chaotic tenure at the health department, which has been marked by thousands of layoffs and the promotion of leaders with little background in public health and medicine.
Kennedy did not back up the accusation, which runs counter to more than three decades of research. More than 100 studies, conducted across dozens of countries, have found that mifepristone and misoprostol, the abortion pills typically used in the United States, are a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy.
The comment came when James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, asked Kennedy whether the Trump administration intended to reverse the Biden-era changes to access to mifepristone. In 2016 and 2021, the FDA rewrote its regulations of the drug to allow healthcare providers other than doctors to prescribe it and to make it easier for patients to receive mifepristone through telemedicine.
