Manchin says Biden’s reelection is in jeopardy

Sen. Joe Manchin said President Joe Biden has allowed his staff to push him to the left and put his reelection in jeopardy at POLITICO’s Health Care Summit on Wednesday in Washington.

“He’s been pushed so far left it’s unbelievable,” said the West Virginia Democrat, who recently declined a third-party challenge to Biden and his GOP rival for the presidency, Donald Trump. “I have been raising hell from day one. … This is not how you’re going to get reelected.”

Under questioning from POLITICO Congressional Bureau Chief Burgess Everett, Manchin took aim at Biden’s handling of the fentanyl crisis and the border.

On fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that drove a 60 percent increase in fatal drug overdoses during the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to cause most of the record 110,000 drug overdoses annually, Manchin said the Food and Drug Administration is partly to blame.

“The FDA started it. They keep bringing more products,” Manchin said of the agency that approved the prescription opioids that started the opioid addiction crisis.

Manchin also criticized the FDA for failing to remove older opioid drugs from the market when newer, safer ones come online.

The FDA has historically approved opioids as they do any other drug — by evaluating the safety and efficacy of the proposed medication. But lawmakers and others have pushed them to more expansively consider public health concerns, and FDA Commissioner Robert Califf has suggested the agency needs greater authority from Congress.

In a panel discussion directly after Manchin’s at the POLITICO Health Care Summit, FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Namandjé Bumpus defended her agency.

“We make science-based decisions,” said Bumpus. “We leverage our science in our decision-making to make the best decisions we can.”

Manchin also accused Biden of failing to secure the border, which he said was contributing to the fentanyl deaths.

“We know that the precursors are coming from China. We know that they go into Mexico. You can’t stand by and let it continue to kill Americans,” he said.

Manchin on Wednesday also touted his bipartisan LifeBOAT Act, which would establish a 1-cent fee for drugmakers for every milligram of active opioid ingredient in a prescription pain pill. That funding would then go toward expanding access to opioid use disorder treatment.

“Nothing has been as deadly as what we've allowed to happen now,” he said. “And you would think our own government would push back on this.”