Top Vaccine Official’s Departure Is Crucial Step In Restoring Public’s Control Of Health
Now it’s time for Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary to rebalance the nation’s health and medical priorities
Americans’ health outcomes have been worsening over the last thirty years. This has happened despite hundreds of billions of dollars in annual government spending. US life expectancy has fallen compared to peer nations. Our public health and medical institutions are clearly not operating effectively. And much of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding is useless, ideologically motivated, or both.
Thus, reducing how much NIH grants to universities and research centers to 15% in indirect costs, as the Trump administration did, is imminently reasonable. And HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s layoffs of 10,000 government health workers is moderate, given their institutions’ poor track records.
And greater oversight and regulation of health and medical research is required given the evidence suggesting that taxpayers likely financed the creation of the Covid virus in China.
Yet the mainstream news media is still defending an indefensible status quo, including the people who created America’s catastrophic response to Covid. Specifically, over the last few days, the media has claimed that it was somehow outrageous that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is losing its top vaccine “expert,” Dr. Peter Marks.
But Marks should have been let go years ago, before he could cause so much additional harm. “The U.S. response to the pandemic as far as vaccines,” said the interim head of the FDA in 2021, “was largely [Marks’] concept.”
One of the worst abuses of power by the federal government during Covid was to force two top vaccine regulators out of the FDA because they opposed rushing full Covid vaccine authorization to allow for government mandates. That was Marks’ doing.
It was under Marks’ leadership that the FDA ignored and downplayed vaccine-associated myocarditis in young men.
And, had the FDA fired Marks years ago, it’s likely that it would never have approved an experimental gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which medical experts say killed a young man last week.
The lack of benefit and liver toxicity were each “independent grounds not to give full approval,” a regulatory expert told Public. “It’s unheard of for a drug to get a negative confirmatory trial and then be approved anyway. That alone is reason enough to be fired.”
Marks did not respond to Public’s request for comment.
Marks granted accelerated approval of the drug even though its confirmatory clinical trial showed no benefit, and a trial showed that over 14% of the young people who received it experienced liver toxicity.
And Marks backed the approval of an Alzheimer’s drug, despite a lack of good evidence that it slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s. To get around the drug’s lack of efficacy, the FDA approved the drug to reduce brain plaques that some scientists believe cause the disease. The decision was so controversial that an FDA adviser resigned in protest and called the approval “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history.”
But it was Marks’ authoritarianism on Covid vaccines that is most shocking.