Maryland Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D) is sounding the alarm about the risks of allowing bets to be placed on the outcomes of health trials, and asking Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take action.
Joined by Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D), they wrote a joint letter warning of the potential dangers to patients and research integrity.
“We are concerned about a troubling development that prediction markets are now allowing individuals to bet on clinical trials and drug approvals. Clinical trials and approvals are critical processes that rely on scientific integrity to provide a new avenue of care for patients with targeted conditions and advance medical care for everyone,” wrote the lawmakers. “Allowing individuals to bet on the success of these trials and drugs undermines the scientific process, creates perverse incentives for researchers, harms trial participants, and could lead to dangerous medical outcomes for untold numbers of Americans.”
Alsobrooks has been a strong critic of RFK Jr.’s policies on vaccines and public health, openly criticizing him during multiple Senate hearings wherein he made several statements that justified medical racism.
“Researchers and medical professionals have expressed concern that offering bets on clinical trials threatens the integrity of the drug development process. Specifically, experts expressed fears that study results may be compromised by participants dropping out of ongoing studies or administrators altering their behavior due to the public prediction market,” their letter continued. “Troublingly, there are also concerns that this expansion will tempt researchers to place bets on insider knowledge, creating incentives for researchers to tamper with trial data in hopes of a windfall that may have a consequential impact on patient safety and public health.”
Alsobrooks has repeatedly called for RFK Jr. to be fired, and she filed a no-confidence resolution against him in May 2025.
“When I originally filed the resolution of disapproval, there was very little support for it. In fact, only four others signed on. It came about as I was watching all the mayhem and chaos happening inside these agencies,” she said in a February interview. “People inside NIH told me they were rationing gloves. The supplies were so scarce they had to break paper towels in half and were rationing bleach. The mass firings now total about 20,000 from the health agencies, and those are just the numbers we have.”
Both Alsobrooks and Wyden are also seeking to investigate RFK Jr.’s financial ties to an anti-vaccine organization and potentially illegal gifts received by him from a top donor. The pair also detailed decisions made by RFK Jr. that they deemed “costly, chaotic,and corrupt”.
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D), who recently announced his candidacy for Senate Majority Leader, spoke of the dangers of RFK Jr.’s views before he was appointed to the HHS secretary role in early 2025.
“I just want to start by thanking all of you who care about public health, who care about the future of people in our country, for being here now to raise the alarm about… RFK Jr., said Van Hollen before Kennedy Jr.’s appointment, before offering a warning about what could happen under his leadership. “As you’ve heard, and as you know, people will die.”
