Do you have time for a few questions, sir?
Christian's a good guy, if you want [Inaudible] Yeah.
Oh, thanks. I just have two for you. Do you mind staying at the microphone, sir? Hilary Perkins, now that you're through and confirmed and fully booted up, do you think there's any chance she might rejoin you at FDA?
I don't know. She chose to resign.
Yeah. OK. But I understand she wants to work for the administration. Do you think you'd be interested in welcoming her back or --
I'm open to any ideas. We're staffing up the agency with some amazing talent. As you know, we brought on board Vinay Prasad, who is a prodigy. This guy is a hematologist oncologist from UCSF, has published 500 scientific peer review articles in his career and he's 42 years old. These are the sort of minds and talent that we want at the FDA and there's a lot of excitement.
The culture is good.
I want to switch gears. I understand the administration is being lobbied to do something about counterfeit Chinese vapes that are for sale at retailers across the country. They're targeting young people in particular. Do you have any announcements you could preview on that or are you focused on this issue at all right now?
I'm not aware of any lobbying, but what I am aware of is we have a crisis of young kids starting on vaping products and these are products coming from China, where we have no idea what's in them. They're coming into our ports. And when I came into office, what I learned is that we were just sending them back to the manufacturer who would put them on a ship and they would go to the next US port, something called port shopping.
And they're laughing at us because the FDA can only get through two to five percent of products that come in through our ports. So basically, 100 percent of the stuff was getting in. It was a porous border. So we're taking action to look at confiscating and destroying these products, including video games, electronic video games that are vaping devices.
They have an inhalation port in the device. So they're designed to get children addicted so they can get addicted to the video game and the vaping product at the same time. This is a threat. If another country did this to the United States as is happening right now, we would say this is an attack.
RK Junior has announced a process to phase out some of these dyes in food. So where is this process right now and when could that actually no longer be in our food system?
Well, this is an amazing contribution of RFK to our health care system. People have been talking about this for 35 years. We have this plan to remove all nine petroleum-based food dyes from the US food supply. We're meeting today with the Consumer Brand Association. We've seen tremendous receptivity. We are finding the common ground to come up with a time frame that's feasible for companies.
We want American companies to thrive. They've done nothing wrong. They've focused on mass food production as we ask them to in the 1960s and 70s. But now we have to look at the ingredients given the epidemic of chronic diseases and ADHD.
And what timeline do you think is realistic?
So you may have seen Tyson's food announced that they are going to shoot for a target in the next few months to remove petroleum-based food dyes. Other companies like Pepsi have suggested aggressive time frames, so we're working with all of them and you know what, they want to do this. They just don't want to deal with a patchwork of legislation in 50 different states that they have to tiptoe around and they want to make sure their competitors don't have an unfair advantage.
And that's our role, is to make sure we've got a common standard and a common time frame.
So you're aiming for months here?
Well, some companies have offered to do it in months. We're aiming for the end of next year and we think that's very feasible.
Awesome. Thank you, guys. Have a good one, all right?
Great. Thanks a lot.