The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) top vaccine official resigned Friday as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced his plan to reform and “streamline” the agency to make it “more efficient and more effective” for Americans.
The move to overhaul HHS was announced the day before Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., was, according to a report at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), “forced out” from his post. The report added Marks “submitted his resignation after a Health and Human Services official earlier in the day gave him the choice to resign or be fired, people familiar with the matter said.”
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks reportedly wrote of Kennedy in an apparent huff in his resignation letter.
The WSJ also reported a comment from an unnamed HHS official: “If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy.”
In a frank Substack column, University of California, San Francisco hematologist-oncologist and health researcher Dr. Vinay Prasad observed Saturday the narratives presented by establishment media outlets in their coverage of Marks’ departure.
“In short, Peter Marks was one of the most dangerous, pro-pharma regulators of the 21st century,” Prasad wrote. “He is leaving and crafting a narrative that portrays him as a saint. That’s natural. But what is shocking is that the media is so uncritical, and not honest about his actions. The same media that lied about lab leak, masks, and all things covid is lying about Peter Marks.”
The New York Times, for example, portrayed Marks as a victim of Kennedy’s so-called anti-vaccine stance.
“Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies,” a Times piece stated. “He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.”
The Washington Post also reported that Marks was “pushed out” by the Trump administration, “a move that comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues his overhaul of the nation’s health and science agencies amid a worsening U.S. outbreak of measles.”
Citing Marks’ resignation letter, the Post added “he was particularly worried about the measles outbreak in Texas,” which “reminds us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined.”
Prasad noted, however, that, while in the role of FDA’s top vaccine regulator, Marks “made some of the biggest regulatory errors in the 21st century.”
The medical researcher cited Marks’ continued approval of COVID shots for infants as young as six months “without randomized data regarding clinical outcomes.”
Prasad observed as well former President Joe Biden’s predicament when he wanted to mandate the COVID shot in the military and American companies but was unable to do so legally because the mRNA shot had only been approved under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), and not under Biologic Licensing Agreement (BLA).
Marks, Prasad wrote, then pressured FDA scientists Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause “to grant full BLA.”
“When they did not play ball, Marks pressured them to resign (This was also documented in Krause’s testimony to Congress),” Prasad noted.
In February 2024, the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic posted to X its findings that Gruber and Krause “warned their colleagues about the dangers of rushing COVID-19 vaccine approval.”
“The FDA ignored the warning, dismissed the scientists, and went forward with accelerated approval anyways,” the subcommittee reported. “Days later, the Biden Admin mandated the vaccine.”
@US_FDA scientists warned their colleagues about the dangers of rushing COVID-19 vaccine approval.
The FDA ignored the warning, dismissed the scientists, and went forward with accelerated approval anyways.
Days later, the Biden Admin mandated the vaccine. pic.twitter.com/f2nU2kPGzj
— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) February 15, 2024
An X account called Chief Nerd provided a clip of Marks’ testimony to the Select Subcommittee in which he said FDA received an “avalanche” of vaccine-adverse event reports after the shots were released to the public.
“We tried to be prepared for that but the avalanche of reports was tremendous,” Marks said, “and it again required retasking people on the fly to, I think, for – and I’ll let my CDC colleagues speak to this – we had to, usually, staff up and had many meetings working to increase our ability to go through these reports.”
Health and biomedical research outlet TrialSite News observed Saturday that while Marks was “praised for his leadership in accelerating COVID-19 vaccine development, he has offered little public introspection about the government’s missteps during the pandemic.”
“Under his oversight, the FDA’s CBER [Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research] authorized vaccines under emergency use with limited to no long-term data, and faced criticism over transparency, adverse event monitoring, and handling of post-market safety signals,” TrialSite added.
On Thursday, Kennedy announced he was “streamlining” HHS to achieve the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda.
The secretary observed that the massive bureaucracy of the nation’s health agency had prevented it from being accountable to the American people.
Kennedy cited one example he uncovered in which “defiant bureaucrats impeded the secretary’s office from accessing the closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions.”
With the help of DOGE, he said, the “good news” is that HHS will now become “more efficient and more effective.”
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