Eugenics Just Hired a Publicist and Started a Wellness Newsletter

A board-certified surgeon on what's actually being built inside HHS — from the Thiel network to AI-rationed Medicare to MAHA reports citing studies that don't exist.

by Eric Lullove, DPM | Board-Certified Podiatric Surgeon, Contributing Medical Editor, Blue Amp Media

The lab coats fade like morning mist, the microscopes are blurred. A thousand years of ‘how’ and ‘why’ are silenced by a word.

— Dr. Eric Lullove, “The Unmaking of the Shield,” March 2026

Let me tell you about a patient I saw not long ago. Diabetic. No insurance—got kicked off the ACA when his restaurant job disappeared. Walked into my office in Coconut Creek with a 3 cm ulcer eating through the plantar surface of his right forefoot. Six other clinics had turned him away. Some wanted $250 to $400 per visit. One didn’t call him back. I put him in a treatment room, debrided the wound, did a full vascular workup, fitted him with a walking boot, and wrote scripts for generic meds he could actually afford.

When he asked how much he owed, my office manager said: zero. He cried. I walked him to the door and told him what I tell everyone: you pay it forward. That’s the medicine I practice. That’s the oath I took.

Now I’m watching a group of men—some in federal office, some on Sand Hill Road, some in both places simultaneously—dismantle the infrastructure that allows any of this to work, all while wrapping themselves in the language of health and wellness. And what they’re building in its place has a name. It’s not a new name. It’s a very old one. I want to talk about it plainly, as a physician and as someone who has spent a career watching what happens when systems decide certain bodies aren’t worth the investment.

What We’re Actually Talking About When We Talk About Eugenics

I’m going to use the word. I know it makes people uncomfortable. Good. It should.

Eugenics is not a slur I’m throwing to score political points. It is a documented historical program—one that began in Victorian England, became mainstream American science by 1910, was enshrined in law across 32 U.S. states, led to the involuntary sterilization of an estimated 60,000 Americans, and provided the intellectual scaffolding that Nazi doctors cited by name at Nuremberg. The word has a precise meaning: the attempt to improve the human species by controlling who reproduces and who receives resources—based on criteria that were never biological, only social, racial, and economic.

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, coined it in 1883. He called it “the science of improving stock.” The stock he had in mind was not ambiguous. It was white, educated, Anglo-Saxon, and economically productive. Everyone else was a liability to be managed, reduced, or eliminated. This was not a fringe idea. It was the consensus of the most credentialed scientists of the era. It was taught at Harvard. It was endorsed by presidents. The Supreme Court upheld it in Buck v. Bell in 1927—Oliver Wendell Holmes, a justice we were taught to revere, writing that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Eugenics wasn’t a science that got corrupted. It started corrupt. The science was always cover for the social hierarchy.

— Dr. Eric Lullove

After World War II, the word died. The logic didn’t. It metastasized into other vocabularies—into race-based clinical algorithms, into who gets experimental treatments and who gets palliative comfort, into which zip codes have dialysis centers and which ones don’t. Harriet Washington documented this in Medical Apartheid. Dorothy Roberts documented it in Fatal Invention. As a wound care specialist who treats the consequences of diabetic neglect every single day, I can tell you this is not history. This is last Tuesday.

What I want to describe now is what happens when that logic gets a tech upgrade, a government appointment, and $70 billion in venture capital.

MAHA: The Parts That Are Real, and the Parts That Should Terrify You

I want to be fair here, because I think intellectual honesty requires it and because my patients deserve analysis, not cheerleading.

The chronic disease crisis in America is real. I see it in my clinic every week—diabetic patients who cannot afford insulin, wound patients whose conditions are the direct consequence of a lifetime of poor nutrition driven by food deserts, environmental toxin exposure, and stress-related inflammation. The processed food system is genuinely harmful. The pharmaceutical industry has genuinely corrupted aspects of the regulatory apparatus. These are not conspiracy theories. They are documented facts that mainstream medicine has been too politically timid to state plainly.

So when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he wants to address those things, part of me—the physician part, the part that has watched patients lose limbs they didn’t have to lose—wants to listen.

But then I look at what MAHA actually does. And what it does is not fix the system. It guts the oversight that constrains the worst impulses of the system, while replacing independent scientific authority with political loyalists and tech-bro ideologues.

The pattern is not incompetence. Incompetent people don’t move this fast. The pattern is deliberate: remove the watchdogs, install the ideologues, and then build the new system while no one is looking at the old one burning down.

The Men Behind the Curtain—And Why Their Worldview Should Alarm You

The Thiel Network

I want to talk about Peter Thiel. Not because he’s a cartoon villain—he’s not. He’s a genuinely intelligent man with a coherent worldview. That’s what makes him dangerous. Stupid people with bad ideas don’t reshape governments. Smart people with bad ideas do.

Thiel is one of the most powerful private citizens in the history of American health policy, and most mainstream health coverage barely mentions him. His fingerprints are all over the current HHS, and I think the public deserves to understand exactly how that happened.

In a 2025 New York Times interview, Thiel was asked directly: “Would you prefer the human race to endure?” He hesitated. At length. Before reluctantly saying yes—and then immediately pivoting to transhumanism. The interviewer, Ross Douthat, noted the hesitation on the record.

This is not a gotcha. It’s a window. What Thiel envisions—and has invested billions in—is not the preservation of human life as most of us understand it. It is the radical transformation of human biology, achievable by those with the means to access it, into something new. He has described wanting to “change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.” He has backed companies offering embryo genetic screening—what bioethicists call a commercial realization of eugenics. He has reportedly paid to have his body cryogenically preserved. He has invested in nearly 12 longevity companies that have collectively raised over $70 billion.

That would all be his personal business—however strange—if his network were not now embedded in the federal agencies that decide what drugs get approved, what research gets funded, and who gets care.

Jim O’Neill: This Is the Person Who Ran Your CDC

I want to pause on Jim O’Neill specifically, because his career trajectory is the clearest picture of what is actually happening inside HHS right now.

O’Neill ran the Thiel Foundation. Then he ran Mithril Capital—a Thiel fund that backed Palantir, the surveillance and data company. Then he ran SENS Research Foundation, an anti-aging nonprofit dedicated to what it calls “rejuvenation medicine”—its stated goals include “rejuvenating the immune system, eliminating senescent cells, rejuvenating the neocortex, and obviating mitochondrial mutations.” That is the language of life-extension science. That is the world this man came from.

In June 2025, he was sworn in as Deputy Secretary of HHS. By August 2025, he was simultaneously the acting director of the CDC. The number-two health official in the United States and the head of the nation’s disease control agency was a man whose career was in Thiel’s longevity-investment ecosystem.

He then proceeded to deploy AI tools across all 65,000 HHS employees. He brought in Clark Minor—an ex-Palantir executive—as HHS Chief Information Officer. He contracted with OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic. And he did all of this while publicly opposing the kind of regulatory framework that would require these AI systems to be audited for bias, accuracy, and demographic equity.

From the Exam Room

Here is what this looks like from inside a wound care clinic. Insurance companies already use AI algorithms to make prior authorization decisions. My diabetic patients—disproportionately Black, Latino, and low-income—are already being scored, tiered, and routed by systems built on data that reflect decades of healthcare inequality. When those algorithms underestimate someone’s health need because Black patients historically used services less (due to systemic barriers, not lesser need), the algorithm doesn’t correct for that. It encodes it. It makes it permanent. It calls it math.

Now imagine that ecosystem—unregulated, unaudited, politically captured—governing Medicare payment decisions, FDA approval timelines, NIH research priorities, and CDC disease surveillance. That is what is being built. Right now. At speed.

Transhumanism Is Eugenics With a Better PR Department

I want to give credit to philosophers Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for naming this clearly. Their TESCREAL framework—Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism—describes the constellation of ideologies that have become, as Torres puts it, “the water Silicon Valley swims in.” I’d go further: it is the ideological operating system of the people now running American health policy.

Torres’s analysis is worth sitting with: transhumanism was literally invented by a eugenicist. Julian Huxley—who coined “transhumanism” in 1957—was one of the leading eugenicists of the twentieth century. He described transhumanism as eugenics freed from the limitation of aiming at mere human improvement, toward the creation of “a new existence.” The lineage is not metaphorical. It is direct.

Transhumanism is eugenics on steroids. The old eugenicists just wanted to improve the species. Transhumanists say: why stop there?

— Émile Torres, Jacobin, November 2025

The critical difference between the old eugenics and the new is the mechanism of sorting. The old kind used state coercion—sterilization laws, immigration restrictions, institutionalization. The new kind uses market selection. You don’t need a government order to deny certain people access to the best healthcare if you price it out of their reach. The outcome is the same. The paperwork is different.

• Algorithmic discrimination in risk scoring: AI care management tools have been documented systematically underrepresenting Black patients at equivalent illness levels because they use past expenditure—not actual need—as a proxy for health risk. This is not a bug. This is training data.

• Diagnostic tool bias: AI dermatology platforms trained primarily on light-skin data perform significantly worse on darker skin tones. Delayed cancer detection. For populations already facing the greatest disparities.

• Embryo selection at scale: Thiel-adjacent capital has backed commercial genetic embryo screening that offers wealthy parents “optimized” offspring. Bioethicists have documented the direct lineage from this technology to classical eugenics.

• Longevity as a class project: The billionaires funding anti-aging research are not doing it for everyone. They are doing it for themselves. The trickle-down theory of immortality has not been road-tested.

The Timeline of an Ideology That Never Really Left

What I’ll Grant Them—And Where I Draw the Line

I’m a physician. I follow the evidence. And the evidence does support some of what MAHA claims to want.

Chronic disease in America is a legitimate crisis. Food additives and dyes deserve scrutiny. Environmental contamination is a real driver of health outcomes—I see the consequences in my patients’ wounds, in their vascular disease, in their impaired healing. The pharmaceutical lobby has corrupted aspects of the FDA. These criticisms are not wrong.

But MAHA is not executing on those goals through evidence-based policy. It is executing on those goals through the destruction of institutional capacity and its replacement with politically captured, ideologically motivated actors who happen to share investment interests in the privatization of American medicine.

You cannot fix a corrupt FDA by removing the scientists who check the corruption. You cannot improve vaccine safety by firing the independent experts who evaluate vaccines and replacing them with vaccine skeptics. You cannot address the root causes of chronic disease by citing studies that don’t exist. And you cannot build an equitable AI healthcare system by putting a Palantir executive in charge of HHS data infrastructure and removing the regulatory framework that would require that system to treat all patients fairly.

The question isn’t whether AI can help American healthcare. It obviously can. The question is: who controls it, whose data trained it, and who gets left out when it decides your body isn’t worth the cost.

— Dr. Eric Lullove, The Wound Report

What Evidence-Based Policy Actually Requires Here

As a physician, I want to be constructive. Criticism without a standard is just noise. Here is what genuine healthcare reform that doesn’t reproduce eugenic logic would require:

• Mandatory algorithmic auditing with demographic disaggregation of outcomes for any AI system used in prior authorization, risk scoring, or care allocation. If your algorithm systematically under-identifies health need in Black patients, that is not an acceptable product.

• Restored FDA authority over AI-based medical devices and diagnostic tools. Jim O’Neill’s career-long opposition to this position is a disqualification for anyone overseeing American health infrastructure, not a qualification.

• Conflict-of-interest prohibitions barring officials with financial stakes in longevity biotech from regulating or overseeing the industries they profit from. The revolving door between Thiel-adjacent venture funds and HHS leadership is a design flaw that needs to be treated as such.

• Reconstitution of independent scientific advisory bodies—genuinely independent, with transparent selection criteria and protection from mass political dismissal. The ACIP should not be the secretary’s personal advisory panel.

• Equity requirements for any longevity or precision medicine research receiving federal funding. If public dollars fund the science, public access must be part of the outcome.

None of these are radical demands. Most existed before 2025. The damage can be reversed. But reversal requires naming what is happening clearly enough that people understand what they’re reversing.

What I See From the Exam Room

I want to end where I started—at the level of the body. Because that is where all of this eventually lands.

When an insurance company AI denies a prior authorization for a diabetic wound patient who needed debridement two weeks ago, they don’t come back with a gangrenous toe. They come back with a gangrenous foot. And then you amputate. And that amputation—the cost of which exceeds every single visit that was denied—is now on Medicare. Which is funded by taxpayers. Which means the system that denied care to save money ended up costing more money, while the patient lost a limb they didn’t have to lose.

That is not an edge case in my practice. That is most Tuesdays.

The people building this new AI healthcare system—the longevity investors, the transhumanist technocrats, the ideological appointees who think the FDA is the problem—do not spend their Tuesdays in wound care clinics. They spend them in board meetings and on private jets and at conferences with names like “Longevity Summit” where they discuss reversing the aging of their own cells.

Their bodies are not the ones in the system they’re designing.

The bodies in the system they’re designing are the bodies I treat. The uninsured line cook with the diabetic ulcer. The elderly Black patient whose prior authorization was denied by an algorithm that underestimated her need because her zip code historically underutilized services. The veteran whose wound won’t close because the systemic factors driving it—the diet, the environmental exposure, the chronic stress—are exactly what MAHA claims to address while building a system that has no intention of addressing them for people who cannot pay.

The word they silenced—the one that names what is actually being built here—is one we have said before. We said it in laboratories in Virginia and Indiana and California before the war. We heard it back in German from Nuremberg. We buried it after a suitable mourning period and told ourselves it was gone.

It wasn’t gone. It just hired a publicist and started a wellness newsletter.

I’m a physician. My job is diagnosis. Consider this a diagnosis.

—Eric Lullove, DPM

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— Cliff

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Sources and Documentation

1. PBS NewsHour, “In a Tumultuous Year, U.S. Health Policy Transforms Under RFK Jr.” January 2026.

2. The Hill, “Vaccines, Autism and MAHA: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s First Year as HHS Secretary.” February 2026.

3. STAT News, “RFK Jr., Unconstrained by Congress, Presses Ahead to Reshape Health Care.” December 2025.

4. Fierce Healthcare, “Deputy Secretary O’Neill Talks Radical Transformation of Government and AI.” December 2025.

5. Public Citizen, “Jim O’Neill: Unfit to Be the #2 Health Care Leader in America.” December 2024.

6. Wikipedia (public records). Jim O’Neill (investor)—confirmed appointments and affiliations.

7. CNN, “Kennedy Names Deputy Jim O’Neill as Acting CDC Director.” August 2025.

8. Tech Policy Press, “Digital Eugenics and the Extinction of Humanity,” Émile Torres. July 2025.

9. Jacobin / Behind the News, “Tech Capitalists Don’t Care About Humans. Literally.” November 2025.

10. Rutgers AI Ethics Lab, “Eugenics and AI.” November 2025.

11. Journal of Young Investigators, “Bias in Medical AI: Algorithmic Fairness and Ethics Challenges.” January 2026.

12. CNN, “How RFK Jr.’s MAHA Agenda Keeps Hitting Roadblocks.” April 2026.

13. Slate, “Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission.” July 2025.

14. Jules Evans, “Peter Thiel Is Betting on the Apocalypse.” March 2025.

15. Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid (2006); Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention (2011).

16. Paul Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (2008).

17. Dr. Eric Lullove, “The Unmaking of the Shield.” Substack, March 2026.

Disclosure. Dr. Eric Lullove, DPM is the Chief Medical Officer of the West Boca Center for Wound Healing in Coconut Creek, Florida. He is the Contributing Medical Editor with Blue Amp Media. The views expressed are his own, based on documented public record, peer-reviewed literature, and clinical experience. Nothing in this article constitutes a statement of established legal fact regarding any named individual’s legal liability. All characterizations are offered as documented critical analysis.