Former Planned Parenthood Prez Leana Wen Praises Trump Health Nominees

Former Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen offered robust praise for two of President Trump’s top health agency head picks — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary — in a Washington Post op-ed Tuesday.

Trump nominated Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Both testified in front of the Senate in early March as part of their confirmation processes. Wen said she was “struck by how normal the candidates were.”

Contrasting the pair with newly minted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who she said “refused to disavow anti-vaccine conspiracy theories” in his confirmation hearing, Wen heaped praise onto the two doctors. (RELATED: RFK Jr. Brought Republicans A New Wave Of Voters — Can They Keep Them?)

“These candidates grounded their answers in facts and science,” she wrote. “They were well versed in what their agencies did and had intriguing ideas for how [to] improve them.”

She urged Democrats not to dismiss them “reflexively” and lauded their “stellar credentials.”

Both doctors, Wen notes, were contrarians when it came to Covid policy during the pandemic, earning them a label of “covid deniers,” which she believes is somewhat unfair.

Wen pointed out Bhattacharya’s key role in co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, a paper signed by over 40 medical doctors, epidemiologists and researchers which, among other things, argued for a focus on protecting vulnerable populations rather than mass lockdowns to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic.

She also took note of Makary’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in February 2021 where he argued that Covid would “be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume a normal life.” At the time, he wrote that a lower rate of infection coupled with the vaccine would help fight the virus. He said he based his prediction on available data as well as his observation that many people were likely infected yet never tested and recorded.

Wen acknowledged that Bhattacharya and Makary were correct to highlight “infection-based immunity” and also said they were right to point out that mitigation efforts could have spurred consequences just as damaging as the virus itself.

She did, however, say they were wrong to advocate accepting “mass infection” as a way to reach herd immunity before vaccines were readily available, arguing that “allowing mass infection before the widespread availability of vaccines and treatments would have caused far more deaths than what the country experienced with precautions in place.”

Wen headed Planned Parenthood from November 2018 to July 2019, according to her LinkedIn page. The organization forced her to leave due to an internal disagreement, according to The Washington Post. She cited “philosophical differences” with Planned Parenthood in a New York Times op-ed and claimed the agency was obsessed with “a stridently, political abortion-first philosophy” in a letter written for the organization’s board of directors and obtained by the Times. (RELATED: Wen Ouster Has Planned Parenthood On Its Heels)

She has a record of breaking from the left and holding heterodox views, including admitting that RFK Jr.’s views on fluoride “aren’t as crazy as you might think.”