There are questions that have no wrong answer, and there are questions a witness simply declines to answer. On Thursday, Heidi Overton, the White House adviser President Trump has nominated to lead the Food and Drug Administration, appeared before a Senate committee for her confirmation hearing, and the second category turned out to be the larger one.
Sen. Maggie Hassan, the New Hampshire Democrat, put it plainly. Was the president wrong, yes or no, about his claims concerning vaccines and the measles, mumps and rubella shot? “Senator, the president asks questions and wants the best outcomes for the American people right now,” Overton replied. It was an answer about a man, not an answer about a claim.
Hassan pressed, moving to the president’s assertion that Tylenol taken during pregnancy is linked to autism in children. “Was he wrong when he said that? Yes or no?” Overton answered with a sentence that was accurate and also beside the point: “There is no current evidence of a causal link between Tylenol and autism.” The evidence was not what was being asked. What was being asked was whether the president can be wrong in public, and on that question the woman who would run the agency that judges evidence declined to render a judgment.
I wish it wasn’t so difficult for members of the administration to just plainly say that the president’s wrong. And it’s really concerning to me that you are equivocating on it here.
That was Hassan’s summation, delivered after the exchange had run its course. It is hard to read the record of the hearing, as reported by Ars Technica, without noticing how often the best outcomes for the American people turned out to be the outcomes for one American.
Sen. Lisa Blunt-Rochester of Delaware raised the vaccine claims Trump made in August, noting reports suggesting it was Overton herself who proposed to the president that the combination vaccine could be split into multiple shots. Even if there were reason to think splitting the vaccine would improve safety or efficacy, winning US approval for the individual vaccines would require enormous investment and years of trials. “So obviously,” Blunt-Rochester asked, “you think these were good options, correct?”
Overton replied that, in her current role, her job is to give Trump options. “You wouldn’t have provided bad options, right?” The question hung there. “This is just a simple question,” Blunt-Rochester said. “This, I thought, was the easy question.” She asked whether Overton had reviewed data on splitting the MMR vaccine, and whether the current doses were, as the president had suggested, the size of a soda bottle. The questions went unanswered. The easy question was easy; it was the answering that was hard.
The FDA, it is worth recalling, has been without a commissioner since May. Marty Makary resigned after resisting Trump’s pressure to approve flavored vapes, and the agency issued a policy allowing their sale early that month — despite bipartisan opposition to products widely seen as marketed to young people. The chair Overton would fill remains vacant because the last man in it said no to something.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut laid out that episode as a sequence of dates. The sequence, as he described it, was this:
On April 30th, it’s a Thursday afternoon, Reynolds, one of the biggest tobacco companies in the country, makes an $8 million donation to the president. Two days later on Saturday, because of that donation, they have lunch with the president and they tell him that they want a change in FDA rules, especially regarding flavored vapes. The president calls the FDA commissioner, he calls the secretary of [the health department], and three days later on Tuesday, new guidance is issued that paves the way to the sale of flavored vapes.
Murphy asked Overton whether she saw a connection between the donation and the policy change, and whether that was how she thought the FDA should work. “I reject the framing of that question,” she replied, and offered again that the president is “committed to the best possible outcomes for American.”
Note the shape of the sentence. Not the framing: rejected. The eight million dollars, the Saturday lunch, the Tuesday guidance: framing. What remains, after the framing is rejected, is the calendar. Thursday, Saturday, Tuesday. The American people were not in the room at lunch. According to the senator’s account, Reynolds was.
And so the nominee would not say the president was wrong about Tylenol, would not say the president was wrong about the vaccines, would not say the options she gave him were good or bad, would not say whether an $8 million donation belonged anywhere near a policy decision, and would not say the vapes policy was anything but the best possible outcome. What she would say, more than once, was that the president asks questions. The questions, on Thursday, were someone else’s, and they were the ones that did not get answered.
Somewhere in the hearing room the image lingered of a child’s medicine cupfull of shots, a bottle of soda standing in for a dose of MMR vaccine. Whether the dose was ever really the size of a soda bottle was, like the rest of it, a question the nominee preferred to leave where she found it — among the options.