Dumb and Dumber

O’Neill served in HHS in the George W. Bush administration, eventually becoming principal associate deputy secretary.[1] Since then, O’Neill has primarily spent his career running investment funds with and for Peter Thiel. From 2012 to 2019, he served as managing director of Mithril Capital Management,[2] a venture capital fund co-founded by Thiel that funds businesses like Palantir and Helion Energy.[3] Before that, he was the managing director of Clarium Capital, a Thiel-led hedge fund.[4]
.......
During Donald Trump’s first administration, O’Neill was rumored to be under consideration to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This set off warning bells among health care watchdogs, as O’Neill had given a talk in 2014 in which he advocated for pushing drugs onto the market without assessing whether or not they worked.[5] “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he argued, “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”[6] At the time, Public Citizen compared O’Neill’s proposal to 19th century “snake oil salesmen” who fooled people into purchasing ineffective products.[7] The idea of regulating medicines based only on safety is even worse than it sounds. It’s common sense that Big Pharma should not be permitted to sell drugs and devices that don’t work. But when it comes to drugs, there’s no such thing as a “safe” product divorced from efficacy. Drug products all have side effects and the relevant issue is their risk profile: do the benefits justify the risks? What does it mean to talk about a “safe” chemotherapy, for example? Whether it should be granted marketing approval, and the scope of that approval, can only be understood in the context of both its dangers and the benefits it offers.

In his previous stint at HHS during the George W. Bush administration, O’Neill opposed FDA regulation of companies that use algorithms to perform laboratory tests, such as 23 and Me DNA testing.[8] A decade after he made this remark, it’s clear how dangerous such a concept is: With the development and proliferation of artificial intelligence, algorithms are omnipresent in the practice of medicine, including in diagnostic tools, medical devices, AI assistants to doctors and personalized medicine. This is not to mention AI’s use throughout the health care system, including potentially pernicious uses by private insurers to make medical authorization decisions. If the FDA and other parts of HHS do not regulate AI and algorithms, or do so with a light touch, rampant consumer abuses and preventable injuries, death and suffering are certain to follow.
.......

O’Neill has served on the board of an organization that seeks to set up floating cities in the ocean to escape democratic governance.[16] The Seasteading Institute is a Thiel-backed organization founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri Friedman.[17] Friedman has said of the Institute’s goal, “I envision tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country” where the people would not vote, but rather the companies would govern in what Friedman called “a successful dictatorship.”[18] O’Neill once introduced Patri Friedman at a Thiel Foundation event, saying “if I want to predict what I will be thinking a year from now, I just ask Patri what he’s thinking today.”[19]

https://www.citizen.org/article/jim-oneill-unfit/