Why is Dr. Scott Gottlieb so desperate to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of Trump's cabinet?

Gottlieb - Pfizer director, Biden v Berenson defendant - is openly trying to block RFK from the Dept. of Health and Human Services. His pharma paymasters must be even more worried than I thought.

If I’ve learned anything about Dr. Scott Gottlieb while suing him for his role in making Twitter censor me in 2021, it’s that he thrives in darkness.

Which is why his open attack on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shows how badly Big Pharma wants to keep Kennedy from the federal government’s top healthcare job - Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Gottlieb is a walking, talking conflict of interest who personifies everything wrong with American medicine. In May 2017, he became Food and Drug Administration commissioner. Less than two years later, he quit. Barely three months later, he joined the board of Pfizer, which has paid him about $2 million since then.

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($2 million? That’s a lot of Unreported Truth.)

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It’s not just Pfizer. Gottlieb has worked as an advisor, director, or investor at dozens of other healthcare companies. He regularly appears on CNBC and CBS too, offering independent opinions - independent opinions that almost always benefit Pfizer and his other paymasters. When he last practiced medicine is unclear, though a resume from 2015 suggests he last worked as a hospital internist in 2012.

But Gottlieb’s seamiest turn through the revolving door came earlier, and involved fentanyl, the opioid that has killed almost 1 million Americans.

In 2006, during his first FDA stint, Gottlieb “tried to help a pharmaceutical company secure more fentanyl,” in the words of the Washington Post. The drugmaker, Cephalon, was pushing its Actiq fentanyl lollipops for widespread “off-label” use, though the FDA had approved them only for patients with late-stage cancer.

Gottlieb left the FDA in 2007 - and went on to write a report defending Cephalon in a Pennsylvania lawsuit over Actiq. The judge in the case referred to him as “Cephalon’s regulatory expert” in a March 2015 ruling.

Yet Gottlieb never disclosed receiving payments from Cephalon during his 2017 Senate confirmation hearings to become FDA commissioner, apparently because the law firm that Cephalon hired paid him, not the company itself.

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(Also, in the opinion of Cephalon’s regulatory expert, fentanyl lollies are super-tasty! Especially the grape!¹)

SOURCE

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Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is about to face his own Senate confirmation hearings, to become Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Gottlieb is trying to stop him. Last week, he went on CNBC to claim that Kennedy would “cost lives” in his new job.

As Unreported Truths readers know, I disagree with some of Kennedy’s views, which can be overly conspiratorial.

But I agree with his core premise that the $5-trillion-a-year United States biomedical complex - including everything from basic research to drug development to hospitals to insurers - is out-of-control, too often hurts patients, and costs far more than it should.

Healthcare needs radical overhaul. With the right people working for him, and some of his more worrisome beliefs restrained, Kennedy can push long-overdue change.

On the other hand, Scott Gottlieb’s history suggests he sees government work as nothing more than a way to polish his resume as he moves between industry gigs. If I had to pick between Gottlieb and Kennedy as the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, I’d choose Kennedy in a heartbeat.

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(Choose Unreported Truths! For less than 20 cents a day!)

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So Gottlieb’s opposition to RFK comes as no surprise.

What is surprising is that Gottlieb has announced it publicly.

Like most creatures of the Washington swamp, Gottlieb does his best work behind closed doors, as he did in 2021 when he helped force Twitter to censor and ban me over the objections of its top executives.

Since 2022, thanks in part to Elon Musk, I’ve slowly unearthed Gottlieb’s interactions in the summer of 2021 with Todd O’Boyle, the Twitter White House lobbyist who pushed through my ban.

Even as he targeted me, Gottlieb tried to avoid using my name to O’Boyle. On July 19, 2021, he introduced himself to O’Boyle with a long, unctuous email. Gottlieb complained Twitter was promoting accounts raising questions about Pfizer’s $100 billion mRNA vaccine.

“I am happy to discuss more offline the accounts in question,” he wrote.

Gottlieb went on to send O’Boyle screenshots or copies of tweets of mine he didn’t like. He called O’Boyle to discuss how Twitter was handling me.

Yet he went to almost comical lengths to avoid mentioning my name. And he used his own personal Gmail account - not a corporate account from Pfizer or anyone else - as he campaigned against me.

Gottlieb would have succeeded, too, if not for the help of Musk - and a favorable ruling from federal Judge William Alsup in California. Alsup saw the merits of my initial lawsuit against Twitter over the ban and made a ruling that forced the company to turn over the first batch of documents showing Gottlieb’s involvement.

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(Weird that CNBC always calls him “Former FDA Commissioner” Gottlieb and never “Guy who gets paid by Pfizer” Gottlieb! Such amazing hair, though. So black, so shiny!)

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Gottlieb didn’t invent this playbook. As the famously corrupt Louisiana governor Earl Long said²:

Don't write anything you can phone. Don't phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper. Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink.

Guys like Gottlieb prefer to do keep their fingerprints off the shiv whenever they can. But Kennedy clearly has the momentum to take over HHS, in part because he and Trump have made such good choices to run the National Institutes of Health and the FDA, in part because people are so angry at public health mandarins over Covid, and in part because the system as a whole is clearly so rotten.

Gottlieb has been left with no choice but to go public with his opposition to Kennedy.

After all, Pfizer has profits to protect.

1. I’m funning ya, he didn’t actually say that.

2. Did Earl Long actually warn his underlings this way? Who really knows? As journalists used to say, it falls in the category of “too good to check.” Besides, if he did, how would we know?