Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attends an event on health care affordability in the Oval Office at the White House, Thursday, April 23, 2026, in Washington. AP For all our concerns over Robert Kennedy Jr.’s leadership, his Health and Human Services Department is advancing several reforms that are clear wins for medicine.
Kennedy deserves the heat he’s taken for his broad vaccine skepticism, including one subordinate’s move to block a new flu vaccine, seemingly at RFK’s behest — a decision that, happily, was soon reversed.
But he’s also presiding over a host of innovative developments that should foster miracle cures for numerous hard-to-beat diseases.
Take one of the most promising — the FDA’s National Priority Voucher program: It speeds approvals of new drugs and “biological products” meant to address a series of high-priority national health issues, including inadequate treatment outcomes, public-health crises, supply-chain snags and high-cost factors and to hasten the development of emerging “breakthrough therapies.”
Former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), facing a likely death sentence from pancreatic cancer, credits a drug OK’d via this quick-review process for “a massive 76% reduction in tumor volume” over a four-month period.
Another step to cut down review times: Using artificial intelligence to gather data directly from patients’ health records, rather than have it manually entered over long weeks and even months, needlessly delaying approvals.
The agency is also moving toward a simpler process for OK’ing individualized drugs that treat rare diseases, which will make it economically feasible for companies to research and develop medicines that otherwise would never be profitable because too few patients would ever use them..
“It is our priority to remove barriers and exercise regulatory flexibility to encourage scientific advances and deliver more cures . . . for patients suffering from rare diseases,” says Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Marty Makary.
Even when it comes to vaccines, HHS is pushing to get certain kinds — particularly, those that trigger the immune system to attack cancerous tumors — developed and deployed.
That includes mRNA vaccines, even as the department has cut funding for those aimed at COVID-style upper respiratory diseases.
More good news: HHS is pushing tech that’ll enable doctors to see drug prices before they issue prescriptions, so they can take affordability into consideration.
And it hired Casey Mulligan, a widely respected free-market-oriented economist from the University of Chicago.
COVID exposed enormous structural problems at the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from slower-than-necessary drug approvals to the politicization of public-health mandates and recommendations.
HHS hasn’t fixed all those problems, but its leadership team as a whole is doing a lot to regain the public’s trust; give it credit where credit’s due.
