Donald Trump’s wacky Health and Human Services Secretary allegedly shelved an alarming federal study that undercuts the administration’s advice on alcohol consumption.
President Joe Biden ordered the review to help shape new federal dietary guidelines that were eventually rolled out this January under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in tandem with the Agriculture Department.
Kennedy’s rules scrapped the old benchmark of two drinks daily for men, one for women, and urged Americans only to drink “less alcohol for better overall health.”
The paper commissioned by Biden, which was finally published on Tuesday, in fact called for a ceiling of one drink per day and found no net benefit at any level of consumption.
Co-author Priscilla Martinez-Matyszczyk told the Washington Post that the hazard “increases substantially” with just “one drink or more a day.”
About seven drinks a week works out to one alcohol-linked death for every 1,000 people, the authors calculated. Bump that to 14 weekly and the chance of dying jumps to one in 25. In all, the team tied booze to over 200 ailments, from various cancers to heart disease.
The findings echo a string of studies linking even light drinking to cancer and heart trouble, even as the federal government softened its messaging. Polling has also shown more Americans now view moderate drinking as unhealthy.
The administration denies shelving anything. HHS spokeswoman Emily Hilliard said the claim missed the mark, telling the Washington Post that “any characterization that the study was ‘shelved’ is inaccurate” and that officials weighed it against the full scope of findings on the matter.
The accusation came from Robert Vincent, a former alcohol-policy administrator who steered the project and lost his job last spring in a federal staffing purge. “The evidence is really pretty straightforward,” he wrote in an editorial published alongside the study Tuesday. “There is no safe level of alcohol.”
Vox reported last September that HHS declined to publish the Biden-commissioned study after the alcohol lobby petitioned to block its release. The Daily Beast has contacted the department for further comment on this story.
