The CDC’s Nightmare Interim Director Is a Peter Thiel Pal

The Middle for Illness Management and Prevention is in chaotic disarray, as a slew of resignations and an unprecedented walkout of workers have roiled the company. On the heart of the controversy is the CDC’s weirdo director, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose most up-to-date contribution to public well being dialogue was a weird rant about what passes by way of his thoughts as he stares at children. No marvel longtime company staffers are dropping their minds.

Now, in a growth that’s positive to assist (*sarcasm*), Jim O’Neill, Kennedy’s deputy secretary, has been chosen to take over on the company. Individuals are freaking out about O’Neill’s nomination as a result of, properly, he’s a freak—or, on the very least, he’s anomalous with reference to his espoused beliefs and profession expertise and the way little they appear to match his new job. However, as Stat reports, the sure-fire inform that this man waves a freak flag is his deep connections to PayPal co-founder and all-around weirdo Peter Thiel.

One of many first belongings you discover whenever you take a look at O’Neill’s LinkedIn is simply how a lot time he’s spent working for organizations that have been created by rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel. Between 2008 and 2012, O’Neill served because the managing director of Clarium Capital Administration, one among Thiel’s first hedge funds. After that, O’Neill spent almost a decade because the managing director of Mithril Capital Administration, one among Thiel’s enterprise capital companies, which has been answerable for funding corporations like Thiel’s protection contractor, Palantir (which can also be doing a variety of work for the Trump administration proper now).

O’Neill was additionally beforehand a board member of Thiel’s Seasteading Institute, a company that’s dedicated to the creation of autonomous floating cities which can be ruled by personal entities fairly than conventional (i.e., democratic) governments. An image on the group’s website from 2014 reveals O’Neill hanging out with dead-eyed libertarian operative Grover Norquist at Burning Man. The Seasteading Institute is run by Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri Friedman, who can also be a degree individual for the “Network State” motion, which Thiel can also be all wrapped up in.

Frankly, O’Neill’s dense ties to Thiel are one of many much less worrying issues about him. Way more regarding is the wealth of details about him on-line that may give any sane individual pause when contemplating whether or not to let him run a public well being company. For one factor, there’s an outdated YouTube video of him speaking about how we must always open up organ donation to the “free market” (there’s nothing unsuitable with incentivizing folks to however and promote organs, proper?), and he’s additionally a fan of Silicon Valley’s fashionable new life-extension sciences (he has shared kind words concerning the penis-shocking, teen-blood-transfusing well being guru Bryan Johnson). In the course of the pandemic, he is said to have advocated for using various drugs, like hydroxychloroquine and Joe Rogan’s favourite, ivermectin. The Seasteading Institute is run by Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri Friedman, who can also be a degree individual for the “Network State” movement. O’Neill additionally reportedly advocated for meting out with the FDA’s mandate that medicine be deemed “efficient” earlier than they’re offered to the general public. In 2014, he advised a biotech group: “Let folks begin utilizing them [the drugs], at their very own threat.” And, after all, he desires healthcare to be a “free market” enterprise.

In brief, he seems like a whole and whole nightmare and, additionally, the precise type of person who RFK would wish to run the CDC.

Not like his boss, O’Neill isn’t a whole stranger to authorities, though this could provide little consolation. In the course of the George W. Bush administration, he served in a number of roles on the HHS, even rising as excessive as principal affiliate deputy secretary. In that position, between 2007 and 2008, he’s mentioned to have centered his consideration on food safety regulations. Then, throughout Trump’s first time period in workplace, O’Neill was mulled as a possible selection to move the Meals and Drug Administration. When it initially broke that Trump was contemplating O’Neill for this put up again in 2016, Gizmodo wrote an article entitled: “Trump is Considering an Insane Silicon Valley Libertarian to Head the FDA.” On the time, much controversy was stirred up by the mere suggestion that O’Neill take the FDA position, and ultimately, Trump dropped the thought. Now, sadly, O’Neill goes to be working an company almost twice as giant and considerably extra necessary, no less than in the meanwhile. Gizmodo reached out to the federal government for extra data.