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RFK Jr. will ‘end the war’ against alternative medicine at the FDA, from stem cell therapy to chelation. Here’s what to know

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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. doubled down on his support for non-pharmaceutical health treatments during a recent podcast appearance, saying, “We’re going to end the war at the FDA against alternative medicine.”

Speaking on the Ultimate Human podcast with host Gary Brecka, a “renowned Human Biologist, biohacker, and longevity expert,” according to the website, Kennedy said he would fix the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s bias against the following: stem cell treatments, chelating drugs, vitamins and minerals, amino acids, peptides, and hyperbaric chambers.

“Our position is that the FDA has a job: Just do the science on these kinds of issues and then tell the public what they’ve learned from the science … but don’t tell physicians what they can and cannot prescribe,” he said. And as far as the patients go, he said, “If you want to take an experimental drug … you ought to be able to do that.”

RFK Jr. added, “We don’t want to have the Wild West. We want to make sure that information is out there. But we also want to respect the intelligence of the American people” to decide what treatments will benefit them the most.

He acknowledged that, with this approach, there will be “charlatans” as well as “people who have bad results” from various alternative treatments. 

“But ultimately,” he said, “you can’t prevent that either way, and leaving the whole thing in the hands of pharma is not working for us.”

Brecka called Kennedy’s pronouncements “music to my ears.”

Below, what you need to know about the alternative therapies RFK Jr. is advocating for.

Stem cell therapy

What is it: It’s a way to repair diseased or injured tissue in the body using stem cells—cells that can self-renew or become other types of tissues—typically grown in a lab, manipulated, and then be implanted into the patient. 

What it does: Though it’s considered to be largely experimental, the FDA does permit stem cell therapies for blood and immune disorders. Leukemia, lymphoma, neuroblastoma, and multiple myeloma, for example, are also often treated this way, with bone marrow treatments, which are backed by decades of science. Other types of the treatment are still in clinical trials, while more and more wellness centers are offering the treatment for unapproved reasons, using cells drawn from the patient’s body and injected back in without manipulation for everything from autism and ALS to Parkinson’s and better skin, according to the New York Times

Kennedy told Brecka that he received the treatment for his voice disorder, spasmodic dysphonia, and that it helped him “enormously,” but that he had to go to Antigua to access it. 

Risks: For starters, wellness clinic treatments cannot guarantee they are using actual stem cell, reported the Times. And improper injections can lead to a host of terrible consequences—clots, infections, blindness, and even the formation of tumors, which the FDA warned of in 2021.

Chelating drugs

What it is: Chelation involves the use of certain chemicals to remove toxic heavy metals, such as mercury and lead, from the body; all FDA-approved chelation therapy products require a prescription and can only be used safely under the supervision of a healthcare practitioner. 

What it does: Some alternative medicine practitioners offer chelation therapy, through pill or injection, as a way to treat Alzheimer’s, autism, diabetes, high blood pressure, or Parkinson’s disease, all of which are unapproved and risky. 

Children’s Health Defense, founded by Kennedy, has written about chelation as a way to treat autism, which compares “autism with mercury poisoning” due to childhood vaccines that contained the preservative thimerosal (largely mercury) before it was removed in 2001. Some flu shots still contain the preservative, but, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “There is no evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines.” 

Risks: The FDA warns specifically about using chelation therapy for autism, and notes, “Chelating important minerals needed by the body can lead to serious and life-threatening outcomes.” While minor risks may include fever, headache, muscle pain, and nausea or vomiting, severe reactions range from heart failure and kidney damage to respiratory failure and seizures, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Vitamins and minerals

What they are: Dietary supplements in almost every letter of the alphabet, from A to zinc, are over-the-counter pills or liquids that contain nutritional boosts of vitamins and minerals. 

What they aim to help: Vitamin and mineral supplements aim to fill in with necessary nutrients that a person is not getting through food—though nutritionists believe that healthy food is the best source of such vitamins and minerals. Studies have found supplements may help with practically any issue under the sun—energy, heart issues, cognitive function, gut health, sleep, and more. 

Risks: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates supplements, but doesn’t approve them for safety or effectiveness before they are sold to the public. Some may cause liver damage and toxicity, while others may just be a waste of money.

Amino Acids and Peptides

What it is: Amino acids are often referred to as the “building blocks of proteins,” needed for building proteins, hormones, and neurotransmitters.  are compounds that play many critical roles in your body. You need them for vital processes such as building proteins, hormones, and neurotransmitters. Amino acids are concentrated in protein-rich foods such as meat, fish, and soybeans, and foods that contain all nine essential amino acids are called complete proteins. 

Peptides are short proteins, and come in the form of hormones such as follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), and creatine and collagen.

What they aim to help: Amino acid supplements may help with various issues—such as L-arginine for blood flow and inflammation; tryptophan for mood and sleep; and valine, leucine, and isoleucine to help with energy and athletic performance. 

Taking collagen supplements may help strengthen nails and bones, while people take creatine for boosting workouts and building muscle growth. 

Risks: Side effects of taking either can range from toxicity and gastrointestinal issues to effects on brain function muscle protein balance. Creatine may cause muscle cramps and digestive problems (and may not have many benefits), while tryptophan may cause dizziness, headache, or nausea. And again, as with all supplements, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates them, but doesn’t approve them for safety or effectiveness before they are sold to the public.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT)

What it is: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy in a medical-grade, FDA-approved chamber lets you breathe pure oxygen—as opposed to everyday air, which is just 21% oxygen mixed with nitrogen. Hyperbaric oxygen is also highly pressurized, thereby allowing the lungs to take more in. Home chambers (used by folks including Lebron James, LeAnn Rimes, and Mayim Bialik), as well as those offered in many wellness clinics, do not deliver 100% oxygen. Instead, they use regular air that is 30% more pressurized than normal for what’s known as “mild hyperbarics.”

What it aims to help: The FDA has been regulating HBOT chambers since 1976, and has officially cleared 13 medical conditions—such as decompression sickness, burns, radiation injury, and certain wounds—for such treatment. But it’s used off-label for many other reasons, including concussions, traumatic brain injury, long COVID, age reversal, stroke recovery, fibromyalgia, and improved brain function, many of which are being looked at in ongoing clinical trials.

Risks: For medical-grade chambers, risks include ear and sinus pain, middle ear injuries, temporary vision changes, and lung collapse, which is rare, according to the FDA. For mild hyperbarics, risks include potential exposure to toxic oils from some compressors, carbon dioxide buildup that brings a risk of hypoxia inside the chamber—or, according to some experts and a body of inconclusive evidence, that the treatment may simply be ineffective.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com





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CBO digs further into ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ and now says it will raise deficit by $2.8 trillion

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The report, produced by the nonpartisan CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, factors in expected debt service costs and finds that the bill would increase interest rates and boost interest payments on the baseline projection of federal debt by $441 billion.

The analysis comes at a crucial moment as Trump is pushing the GOP-led Congress to act on what he calls his “big, beautiful bill.” It passed the House last month on a party-line vote, and now faces revisions in the Senate. Vice President JD Vance urged Senate Republicans during a private lunch meeting Tuesday to send the final package to the president’s desk.

“We’re excited to get this bill out,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune afterward.

Tuesday’s report uses dynamic analysis by estimating the budgetary impact of the tax bill by considering how changes in the economy might affect revenues and spending. This is in contrast to static scoring, which presumes all other economic factors stay constant.

The CBO released its static scoring analysis earlier this month, estimating that Trump’s bill would unleash trillions in tax cuts and slash spending, but also increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade and leave some 10.9 million more people without health insurance.

Republicans have repeatedly argued that a more dynamic scoring model would more accurately show how cutting taxes would spur economic growth — essentially overcoming any lost revenue to the federal government.

But the larger deficit numbers in the new analysis gave Democrats, who are unified against the big bill, fresh arguments for challenging the GOP position that the tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves.

“The Republican claim that this bill does not add to the debt or deficit is laughable, and the proof is in the numbers,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

“The cost of these tax giveaways for billionaires, even when considering economic growth, will add even more to the debt than we previously expected,” he said.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Tuesday on social media that considering the new dynamic analysis, “It’s not only not paying for all of itself, it’s not paying for any of itself.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Republicans have sought to discredit the CBO, saying the organization isn’t giving enough credit to the economic growth the bill will create.

At the Capitol, Mehmet Oz, who heads up the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and joined Vance at the GOP Senate lunch, challenged CBO’s findings when asked about its estimate that the bill would leave 10.9 million more people without health care, largely from new work requirements.

“What will an American do if they’re given the option of trying to get a job or an education or volunteering their community — having some engagement — or losing their Medicaid insurance coverage?” Oz asked. “I have more confidence in the American people than has been given to them by some of these analyzing organizations.”

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee unveiled their proposal Monday for deeper Medicaid cuts, including new work requirements for parents of teens, as a way to offset the costs of making Trump’s tax breaks more permanent in their draft for the big bill.

The Senate’s version of the package also enhances Trump’s proposed new tax break for seniors, with a bigger $6,000 deduction for low- to moderate-income senior households earning no more than $75,000 a year for singles, $150,000 for couples.

The proposals from Senate Republicans keep in place the current $10,000 deduction of state and local taxes, called SALT, drawing quick blowback from GOP lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states, who fought for a $40,000 cap in the House-passed bill. Senators insisted negotiations continue.

Bessent said Tuesday that the Senate Republican proposal for the tax cuts bill “will deliver the permanence and certainty both individual taxpayers and businesses alike are looking for, driving growth and unleashing the American economy.”

“We look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the House to further refine this bill and get it to President Trump’s desk,” he said in a news release.

While the House-passed bill exempted parents with dependents from the new Medicaid work requirements, the Senate’s version broadened the requirement to include parents of children older than 14, as part of their effort to combat waste in the program and push personal responsibility.

The work requirements “demonstrate that you are trying your hardest to help this country be greater,” Oz said. “By doing that, you earn the right to be on Medicaid.”

The CBO separately released another analysis on the tax bill last week, including a look at how the measure would affect households based on income distribution. It estimates the bill would cost the poorest Americans roughly $1,600 a year while increasing the income of the wealthiest households by an average of $12,000 annually.



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Legal experts and economists sound the alarm over the EU’s sustainability rules rollback

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Dozens of legal scholars and economists have issued stark warnings over attempts by the European Commission (EC) to weaken corporate accountability laws, saying the action will wreck corporate accountability commitments, slash human rights and environmental protections, and lead to higher costs for companies and society.

Under pressure from corporate lobbyists, the EC has been discussing reshaping rules that govern how companies monitor and report their activity. Last month, both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz escalated their campaign against the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which covers firms’ supply chains, claiming that the regulations threatened to make European businesses uncompetitive. In a speech, Macron told business executives the CSDDD should be “put off the table” entirely, expressing support for an EC “Omnibus Simplification Package” that would eliminate requirements for companies to monitor their supply chains for violations, remove mandatory climate transition plans, and significantly weaken enforcement mechanisms including civil liability provisions.

But legal and economics scholars, environmental organizations and businesses, along with countries such as Sweden and Denmark, have united to defend the regulations.

“The members of the European Parliament shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that if they remove this article that that’s going to somehow amount to a reduction in regulatory burden,” said Thom Wetzer, associate professor of law and finance at the University of Oxford, and the founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. “What will come in its place is a very litigious landscape and differential implementation of national requirements. You will have replaced a nicely uniform obligation with a patchwork of a variety of different and uncertain obligations.”

In May, Wetzer and more than 30 other legal scholars sent a letter to the EC warning that, far from reducing costs, scrapping the regulations would create a range of new financial and legal risks for companies, as well as making it harder for them to achieve their sustainability and climate goals. The scholars warn that, “Without guiding regulations, corporate climate transitions will be more disorderly and costly.”

Furthermore, Wetzer notes, many European companies have already taken steps to comply with the regulations. Indeed, towards the beginning of the year, 11 major brands, including the likes of IKEA [F500E #85, as Ingka], Maersk [F500E #70] and Unilever [F500E #49] came out in support of the CSDDD, signing and open letter that stated: “Investment and competitiveness are founded on policy certainty and legal predictability. The announcement that the European Commission will bring forward an ‘omnibus’ initiative that could include revisiting existing legislation risks undermining both of these.”

“Businesses have already started to put in place reporting frameworks to be able to align with the regulatory package,” Wetzer told Fortune. “There has been a lot of investment in the regulatory architecture on the assumption that this would stay in place for a long time. If you change this regulation and you go beyond simplification, you run the risk that all of those investments go down the drain.”

Legal scholars aren’t the only experts to have sounded the alarm on the EC’s plans. Also in May, more than 90 prominent economists criticized Omnibus proposals, strongly refuting claims that the sustainability regulations harm European competitiveness. Instead, they point to other factors behind Europe’s economic challenges, including the energy price crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, declining global demand, wage stagnation, and chronic underinvestment in public infrastructure.

The economists’ statement emphasizes that implementation costs for sustainability regulations are minimal, citing a London School of Economics study that estimated compliance costs for large companies at just 0.009% of revenue. They argue that the benefits of the regulations far outweigh such modest expenses, and further note that, with an estimated €750 billion investment gap in sustainable initiatives, the weakening of sustainability reporting requirements could undermine crucial programs like the Clean Industrial Deal and discourage private investment in sustainable projects.

“Economic choices are political choices,” said Johannes Jäger, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences BFi Vienna. “With the Omnibus proposal, the European Commission is choosing to reward short-sighted corporate lobbying at the expense of people, planet, and long-term economic resilience.”

To this point, many critics of the Omnibus package have framed it as opportunistic, saying it is an attempt to both mimic and placate U.S. President Donald Trump who, whilst threatening Europe with tariffs, is carrying out a program of sweeping deregulation across America. U.S. companies have been at the forefront of lobbying efforts to undermine the CSDDD, with watchdogs claiming that investment giant BlackRock helped carve out exemptions from the directive for large financial firms. 

“With the Omnibus proposal, the European Commission is choosing to reward short-sighted corporate lobbying at the expense of people, planet, and long-term economic resilience.”Johannes Jäger, professor, University of Applied Sciences BFi Vienna

Such actions have motivated other European finance leaders to rally around the CSDDD. In February, more than 200 financial institutions, representing $7.6 trillion in assets under management, urged the EC to maintain strong sustainability standards. Aleksandra Palinska, executive director at the European Sustainable Investment Forum, warned that the Omnibus would “limit investor access to comparable and reliable sustainability data and impair their ability to scale-up investments for industrial decarbonisation.”

Rather than following Trump and doubling down on deregulation, European finance experts have urged the EU to maintain its resolve, along with its reputation for probity. In January, François Gemenne, a professor at HEC Paris and a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, said that “the best response to the policies implemented in the U.S. is to beef up the EU green agenda, not to weaken it. Rather than follow Trump’s way, we should design our own path.”

Wetzer agreed, saying that the Omnibus proposals harm the European Union’s standing as a rational actor. “The European Union is proving itself not to be a reliable regulator because they’re flip-flopping in the face of changing political winds,” he said. In turbulent times, he suggested, a strong stabilizing influence is required. “We should chart our own course based on our assessment of the fundamentals.”

But beyond the legal and economic impacts, it is the environmental and human rights implications of the EC’s proposed changes that have drawn the most fire. In March, more than 360 global NGOs and civil society groups issued a joint statement against the Omnibus, stating that EC President Ursula von der Leyen was “deprioritizing human rights, workers’ rights and environmental protections for the sake of dangerous deregulation.” 

“The European Union is proving itself not to be a reliable regulator because they’re flip-flopping in the face of changing political winds…”Thom Wetzer, associate professor of law and finance, University of Oxford and founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme

In comments accompanying the letter, Marion Lupin, policy officer for the European Coalition for Corporate Justice, said: “The message from Brussels couldn’t be clearer: industry interests come first, while people and the planet are left behind … hundreds of civil society organisations around the world are standing up—no to deregulation, no to greenwashing, and no to this reckless rollback of corporate accountability.”

As the Omnibus proposal moves through the European Parliament, the key question is whether EU institutions will preserve their original ambition to guide Europe through its sustainability transition, or acquiesce to corporate lobbying power. The outcome will likely have far-reaching implications for corporate accountability, human rights, and the fight against climate change.



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Wilmar hands over $729M as ‘security deposit’ over Indonesia palm oil corruption case

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Wilmar International, the Singapore-based agrifood giant, has handed over 11.9 trillion Indonesian rupiah ($729 million) to Indonesia as a “security deposit,” related to misconduct allegations over palm oil export permits. Wilmar’s shares dropped by 3% on the news, reaching their lowest point in a decade.

Wilmar generated $67.4 billion in revenue last year, a 0.3% increase year-on-year. The agrifood giant earned $1.2 billion in annual profit, meaning its $729 million “security deposit” is equal to about 60% of Wilmar’s entire 2024 net income. 

Indonesian prosecutors accuse Wilmar of bribing officials to obtain the permits in 2022, during a national cooking oil shortage. While an Indonesian court cleared Wilmar and two other companies in March, the three judges behind the ruling were arrested on graft charges a month later. 

Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office claims that corruption tied to these export permits cost the state 12.3 trillion rupiah ($755 million). 

On Tuesday, Wilmar claimed that “all acts carried out by [Wilmar] during this period in relation to the export of cooking oil was done in compliance with prevailing regulations.” Wilmar will get its “security deposit” back if Indonesia’s Supreme Court upholds the acquittal–but will forfeit the money if it loses the case.  

“Wilmar paid for the state losses they caused,” a senior official from Indonesia’s AGO said at a Tuesday press conference

Indonesia accounts for about 60% of global palm oil supply. Crude palm oil is a major ingredient in food products and household goods. In response to a cooking oil shortage in late 2021 and early 2022, Indonesia imposed strict export restrictions on palm oil, including a three-week-long export ban, in order to preserve local supply and rein in rising prices. 

Wilmar is one of the world’s largest owners of oil palm plantations, with a total planted area of over 230,000 hectares. It’s one of the region’s largest companies, ranked No. 4 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500; it’s also one of the few companies in the region to make it onto the Global 500, Fortune’s ranking of the world’s largest companies by revenue.

Two-thirds of Wilmar’s oil palm plantations are in Indonesia. Besides palm oil and cooking oil, Wilmar also produces other food products like rice, noodles and margarine for global markets. 



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