President Trump just scored another major victory for his administration’s health reform agenda, and the establishment is not taking it well. On Tuesday night, the Senate confirmed two of Trump’s top health nominees—Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dr. Marty Makary for Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Both confirmations passed largely along party lines, cementing the next phase of the “Make America Healthy Again” revolution.

Bhattacharya was confirmed with a 53-47 vote, while Makary earned a slightly more bipartisan nod, sailing through at 56-44. A few moderate Democrats, including Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, and Dick Durbin, broke from the party line to back Makary. That didn’t sit well with the usual defenders of the bloated health bureaucracy, but it sent a clear message: the winds are changing.

These two appointments aren’t just routine political wins—they represent a seismic shift in the country’s approach to public health. Bhattacharya and Makary will serve directly under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man Trump handpicked to lead the charge against the broken, pharma-dominated health establishment. Together, this trio plans to tear down the rotten structures left over from the COVID years and rebuild something sane in their place.

Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor who became a household name among Americans skeptical of pandemic lockdowns, laid out a five-point plan at his confirmation hearing: focus on chronic illness, fix the science reproducibility crisis, restore academic freedom, stop funding status-quo science from entrenched bureaucrats, and regulate dangerous research like the kind that likely unleashed COVID in the first place.

“I love the NIH,” Bhattacharya said, “but post-pandemic, American biomedical sciences are at a crossroads.” He pointed to a 2024 Pew study that found only 26% of Americans still trust scientists to act in the public’s best interest. Another 23% said they had little to no trust at all. That trust collapse didn’t happen in a vacuum—it was earned through years of dishonest messaging, political manipulation, and arrogant mandates from people who were dead wrong, again and again.

Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which opposed mass lockdowns and called for protecting the vulnerable while keeping society open. Naturally, that got him labeled a heretic by the “experts” who told you to triple-mask alone in your car. But now, he’s heading the very institution that helped fuel that madness—and he’s promising to clean house.

Senator Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate HELP Committee, praised the move, saying, “The NIH needs a leader that will restore Americans’ trust in public health institutions and find unbiased solutions to Americans’ most challenging health problems. Dr. Bhattacharya is ready to take on this responsibility and implement President Trump’s vision to Make America Healthy Again.”

And he’ll have his work cut out for him. Despite President Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs from the federal government, the NIH continues to pour more than a billion dollars into DEI schemes. If Bhattacharya follows through on his promises, that gravy train may soon come to a screeching halt.

Dr. Marty Makary, meanwhile, will bring new leadership to the FDA—a bureaucracy that, under Joe Biden, operated more like a political weapon than a public health agency. Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and medical professor, slammed the FDA’s COVID-era performance in a 2021 op-ed, calling for a complete cultural overhaul. During his confirmation hearing, he declared the moment “a generational opportunity in American health care.”

He didn’t hold back. “President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s focus on healthy foods has galvanized a grassroots movement in America,” Makary said. “Childhood obesity is not a willpower problem, and the rise of early-onset Alzheimer’s is not genetic — we should be and we will be assessing the foods impacting our health.”

He’s already made headlines for pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the obvious origin of COVID-19, telling a House panel in 2023 it was a “no-brainer.” That kind of plain talk is precisely why the Washington medical elite despises him—and why the American people are thrilled to have someone like him in charge.

Even former Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen, no conservative herself, urged Democrats not to reflexively oppose either man. That should tell you how serious this transformation is.

This isn’t just about two nominations. It’s a clean break from the era of politicized health policy, lockdown fanatics, and bureaucrats who thought “follow the science” meant “obey the party line.” Trump’s health policy team now looks like it’s ready to do what no one in Washington’s medical-industrial complex has dared—tell the truth and put patients before politics. And for the American people, that’s the kind of change we’ve been waiting for.