Today Donald Trump released his list of key policy advisers. Among them is a woman named Katy Talento was named his health policy adviser. Rather than regurgitate if for you, let me share her biography with you.

Katy French Talento is the Legislative Director for Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC). She recently returned to the Senate from the private sector, where she was the Vice President for Corporate Affairs at MosquitoZone International, a firm providing malaria protection to the workforce of energy companies in Africa and Asia. Prior to her private sector stint, Katy was the Republican Deputy Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. In this capacity, she helped manage for Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) the functioning of the committee generally and specifically oversaw the Governmental Affairs team that investigated waste, fraud, and ineffectiveness in government programs at every federal agency. She also led the successful effort to win Senate passage for comprehensive postal reform. Prior to this position, Katy took a hiatus from the Senate and served as the Director of Speechwriting at the Republican National Committee during the successful 2010 election cycle.

Katy first came to Capitol Hill in 2001, starting first as a professional staff member for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, the Committee which sets the Senate public health legislative agenda. She advised Chairman/Ranking Member Judd Gregg, on public health issues, including biodefense, HIV/AIDS, malaria and other tropical diseases, cancer, women’s health and public health infrastructure in global and domestic settings, and conducted oversight of NIH, CDC, and other agencies of HHS as well as USAID and State department health programs. She then joined Senator Brownback’s staff as a Senior Policy Advisor, advising the Senator on global and domestic health, foreign assistance, disability and labor issues. In 2005, she helped start up newly elected Senator Coburn’s oversight platform, serving for as the Staff Director for his Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management. In that capacity, she shepherded into enactment Dr. Coburn’s global health priorities on HIV/AIDS (including PEPFAR reauthorization), World Bank health programs, WHO and Global Fund reform, USAID malaria program reform.

Prior to coming to Capitol Hill, Katy evaluated Federal substance abuse treatment and prevention programs for a private consulting firm, Caliber Associates. In addition, she served for several years as the Program Evaluator and Associate Director of Contracts and Grants for Whitman-Walker Clinic, Inc, the largest, community-based HIV/AIDS service and prevention organization in the U.S. Prior to her work at Whitman-Walker, Katy was a Research Instructor on the faculty of Georgetown University School of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine. Her research interests focused on pulmonary disease and the environment, HIV prevention among injection drug users in the U.S. and Russia, dracunculiasis eradication in south Sudan, federal hepatitis C policy, and the association between HIV viral load and metabolic activity.

Katy received a Master of Science degree in Infectious Disease Epidemiology in 1998 from Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, MA, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1994 from the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, VA.

I’m not easily impressed but this is impressive. An impeccable academic background complemented by grunt work in the field and national level policy expertise. And a woman. One would think that the left would be happy with this. But you would be so very, very wrong.

Katy Talento, picked to run health care policy in Trump White House today, has some thoughts on birth control. https://t.co/9YpNKmRKuY pic.twitter.com/errspqT4Ox

— Jason Millman (@JasonMillman) January 5, 2017

I’m not going to go into this chapter and verse but there is nothing esoteric at all about what Talento writes in that story. The side effects of hormonal birth control has been known since the 1950s when The Pill caused women to become as pelted as King Kong and drop dead from strokes and heart attacks. Requiring a doctor’s prescription to get them is not a patriarchal plot. And the reason the left went batsh** crazy when some Republicans advocated making them over-the-counter rather than prescription has nothing to do with price and everything to do with the known health risks of sustained use of oral contraceptives.

There is nothing benign about oral contraception except that in makes sex much more available to unmarried men. So there is that.

So what qualifications does this Jason Millman fellow have to critique an article by Talento. Well, he’s got a B.S. in Journalism (how the f-ing f*** is that even possible? What part of journalism is science?). Ummm… he covered health care as a reporter. And, yep, he’s a man (or at least identifies as one). Does he have a day of formal education in any aspect of health care policy? No. Has he ever worked in health care policy? No. Has he ever taken birth control pills? Probably, but we don’t know for sure.

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/817134440115748864

But all it took for this clown to try to ridicule an actual expert was for him to be a male journalist working at Politico and for her to be a woman in the Trump White House.