Calley Means: Get corruption out of the medical guidelines.

"Get corruption out of the medical guidelines. Americans listen to their doctors. When the Surgeon General too late in the 1980s said smoking was bad, smoking rates plummeted. We followed the food pyramid. We followed the vaccine schedule by and large, for better or worse. We listen to medical authorities, and institutions that want to profit off sick kids have learned that and completely co-opted our medical institutions, as a simple statement of economic fact, the pharmaceutical industry is the largest funder of news. They are the largest funder of medical research. They are the largest funder of medical schools. They're the largest funder of civil rights groups, believe it or not. They are the largest funder of politicians themselves. They spend five times more on political donations and public affairs and lobbying than the oil industry.
So the pharmaceutical industry, just as a simple statement of economic fact, has co-opted our institutions of trust. What do we need to do? We need to not get into complex policy debates because that is where evil hides. We need to have simple actions one by one. We need to not, to disallow USDA officials who make nutrition guidelines for our children to take money from food companies, period.
Every American listening would assume that's already the case. It's not. And it's a huge problem. And that is why added sugar is part of a healthy diet for a two-year-old, according to the USDA guidelines. We need to reset the NIH's founding mission to do foundational research on why we're getting sick, not be an outsourced R&D lab for the pharmaceutical industry.
Everyone would expect this is already the case. The NIH, 90% of the funding is on incremental cures. They're not studying why we're getting Alzheimer's. They're studying marginal ineffective drugs for Alzheimer's. We have to have population-wide studies to understand why we're getting sick. That should be the full focus of the NIH. Why is the FDA funded by the pharmaceutical industry?
I've spoken to member after member who are very concerned about that in this building, but they slide it in. Why is pharma lobbying to pay billions of dollars out of pocket to fund their own regulatory agency? I've talked to healthcare staffers who support this for whatever reason and said, well, it's a money saver. It's $3 billion. $3 billion, as if this building cares about $3 billion. That's $3 billion that we could have the taxpayer pay to not allow the agency that regulates drugs to be co-opted by the agency, by the industry that's trying to regulate. That would be $3 billion well spent. The FDA should not be funded by the pharmaceutical industry. I've been in DC long enough to know that institutions are built to grow and that the incentives of a bureaucracy is to grow as the pharmaceutical industry goes and there's zero conflicts of interest rules about the FDA commissioner going straight to the board of Pfizer.
It creates really bad incentives. We have to just untangle the FDA from the pharmaceutical industry. And number two, we need to disaggregate the F and the D. Y is the pharmaceutical industry funding the institution that oversees our food. We need to do these simple things."