The BOMB Squad’s war on public health rages on

2+2=5...conflicts of interest...censorship...and much more

There are so many bombshell disclosures about our federal health agencies each week that my occasional BOMB Squad reports about Bobby-Oz-Makary-Bhattacharya can barely scratch the surface of what’s going on.

“Bobby” - Health & Human Services Secretary

Fact-checking Kennedy is a full-time job. And he does not do well in such tests.

• He claimed, “There are no cuts to Medicaid.” Expert view: “It’s absurd.”

• He claimed, “We've done better under my leadership than any country in the world in limiting (measles outbreaks).” The Associated Press: “The U.S. is getting worse, not better, at protecting people against the spread of measles, because vaccination rates have been falling.”

• Kennedy rushed to defend Trump, who made the ridiculous claim that he had lowered drug prices by 600%. The New York Times challenged the “impossible” claims.

But Kennedy multiplied the misinformation, saying his boss “has a different way of calculating…If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600 percent reduction,” he said during a congressional hearing.

Wrong. Go back to math class. A friend of mine quoted George Orwell from “1984”:

“In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”

New conflicts of interest under RFK Jr.

The CommonDreams.org site published this piece:

It cited a Financial Times story that Kennedy’s son, Finn, “is reportedly seeking to raise $100 million for a new healthcare industry investment fund that will seek to capitalize on ‘policy initiatives in government’—including RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. … Kennedy’s foray into healthcare investing marks the latest example of the cozy relationship between the Trump administration and close associates who have sought to capitalize on it.”

STAT News reported another questionable ethics conundrum:

A former CDC Office of Smoking & Health chief said this appointment “is also “completely inconsistent” with Kennedy’s previous pledges to “shut the revolving door” between industry and government.

Also see this editorial in The BMJ’s Tobacco Control journal:

All this under RFK Jr.’s leadership.

Mehmet Oz - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator

USA Today published an opinion piece on Oz by Tyler Evans, MD, an infectious diseases & addiction medicine public health physician.

Excerpts:

The personal care services Oz attacked in New York are the clinical alternative to nursing home placement. Recipients … are people who need help bathing, dressing, eating and transferring from a bed to a wheelchair. The average annual cost of personal care in New York is $32,951 per person. The average cost of nursing home care is $56,082. The program saves money and keeps people in their communities.

When Oz described it as helping patients "do something that our families would normally do for us, like carrying groceries," he was constructing a caricature to make the public comfortable with cutting their care.

Dr. Evans reminded readers that:

• Oz was called before Congress in 2014 for promoting deceptive weight loss products on his TV show;

• In 2015, 10 physicians called for Columbia University to fire Oz, accusing him of having "manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

But Oz didn’t ignore Trump’s folly. He joked about it, as MS Now reported. Appearing on Trump’s son’s podcast, Oz said:

“Your dad argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass, if poured on grass, so therefore it must kill cancer cells inside the body.”

Oz also talked about seeing the president drinking an orange-flavored soft drink. Oz quoted Trump: “You know this stuff’s good for me. It kills cancer cells. It’s fresh squeezed, so how bad can it be for you?”

Marty Makary - FDA commissioner

Under that headline, Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) wrote that:

For the last year, my goal has been to replace Dr. Marty Makary with someone competent. …Over months, I have laid out how the commissioner has:

• enabled RFK, Jr.’s dangerous anti-vax crusade

• short-circuited safety & efficacy standards by

  • creating an illegal program through which political appointees overrule scientists to generate wins for the White House

  • announcing half-baked policy changes outside of the rule-making channels that allow for feedback, rigor, and clarity

  • moving the goalposts on drug reviews by changing endpoints and biomarkers after years of clinical trials

• installed incompetent and self-aggrandizing leadership that has demoralized career staff, leading to an exodus of experienced regulators and a culture of fear & retaliation.

Jay Bhattacharya - NIH director & acting head of CDC (or is he?)

Bhattacharya refused to publish a study that showed how the COVID vaccine reduced the chance of hospitalization and emergency visits last winter. It was scheduled to appear in the March 19 issue of The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the CDC.

The New York Times reported:

Some former C.D.C. officials said it was unusual for the head of the agency to cancel a scientific publication that had already been cleared by the agency’s staff scientists and had been scheduled for publication.

“I’ve never seen a case where an article that got to that stage was not published,” said one. Another said, “It is really surprising that Jay Bhattacharya is now having issues with this methodology, since it has been a well-accepted standard for a long time.”

Jeremy Faust, MD, published the paper that Bhattacharya censored.

As a reminder of what has become of the CDC, The Lancet published this editorial last week:

“80% of the CDC’s highest positions are vacant, with directors of 20 out of 25 centres having left. An estimated 2000 staff, almost one in five, have been fired, and about 300 are on administrative leave.”

Previous BOMB Squad reports: February 12, 2026 March 25, 2026 April 13, 2026

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