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It was almost five years ago that the Food and Drug Administration published a curious missive to social media, which may have left some people confused. “You are not a horse,” the FDA said in a now-deleted tweet. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

Ordinarily, the FDA wouldn’t have to remind people that they’re not livestock, but it became necessary for an unfortunate reason: An alarming number of people were trying to treat Covid-19 by voluntarily taking a medicine known as ivermectin, which is generally a deworming medication intended for horses and cows.....

Making matters spectacularly worse, while the Trump administration takes seriously the idea that a livestock deworming medication might cure cancer, the same administration is taking a very different approach to a potential vaccine for influenza. The New York Times reported:

The vaccine maker Moderna said on Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration had notified the company that the agency would not review its mRNA flu vaccine, the latest sign of federal health policy that has become hostile to vaccine development.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, rejected the company’s application for approval over a concern that Moderna’s clinical trial had compared its experimental vaccine against a product the agency did not consider the best on the market. People in the comparison group received Fluarix Quadrivalent, a flu vaccine sold by GSK.

The Times’ report added that Moderna had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars testing its flu vaccine. Evidently, the Trump administration doesn’t care.....

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington wrote online on Tuesday night that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is now blocking an updated flu vaccine for no reason grounded in science. American vaccine policy has been hijacked by a conspiracy theorist — yet most Republicans are happy to just sit on their hands. They are allowing FDA policy to be dictated by DELUSION.”

Murray, in a message directed at Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, added, “If I were the Chair of the Senate HELP Committee, I would have moved to subpoena RFK Jr. a LONG time ago, but the next best time is NOW. [Cassidy], what happened to those quarterly oversight hearings? You and I both know it’s well past time for Congress to step in.”

Cassidy has not yet responded. Watch this space