The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, was given the choice of resigning or being fired on Friday. Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, oversaw the approval and monitoring the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies.
Marks’s defenestration shouldn’t surprise anyone, and we shouldn’t shed any tears over his departure. In my view, Marks is way too cozy with Pharma. During COVID, he campaigned to make the COVID vaccine mandatory for young children despite no evidence of benefit and damned little investigation into potential harms. In other notable cases, Marks personally intervened three times to override staff evaluations and authorize the use of a multiple sclerosis drug that failed clinical trials and again overrode scientific…
