Life expectancy in the U.S. is between three and five years lower than the average in other high-income countries — and the gap comes in part from misinformation, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said.
“It’s looking worse, not better, over the last several years,” Califf told CNBC in an interview Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
It’s not just the Covid pandemic contributing to the decline, he said, pointing out the gap with peer nations is widening. Califf said a new factor has joined the list of known causes of life-expectancy disparities like race, ethnicity, income and education: living in a rural area, where he noted that people are exposed to different information sources.
“Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influenced their thinking,” Califf said.
The commissioner is just more than a year into his second turn at the top of the agency, one of only two top leaders of the FDA to return to the job for a separate second term. Since he left in January 2017, at the end of the Obama administration, the pandemic and rising political tensions have made combatting misinformation even more complicated — and led Califf to make it one of his top priorities at the agency.
“You think about the impact of a single person reaching a billion people on the internet all over the world, we just weren’t prepared for that,” Califf said. “We don’t have societal rules that are adjudicating it quite right, and I think it’s impacting our health in very detrimental ways.”
He said there’s a need for better regulation, including “specific authorities at FDA, FTC and other areas” to root out misinformation.
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf testifies before a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing to examine an update on the ongoing Federal response to COVID-19,…
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