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Dr. Vinay Prasad, a prominent critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the Food and Drug Administration, has been named to oversee the health agency’s program for vaccines and biotech drugs.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary announced the appointment Tuesday in a message to agency staff, praising Prasad’s “long and distinguished history in medicine.”
Prasad is the latest in a series of medical contrarians and critics of COVID-19 measures to join the federal government under President Donald Trump.
Unlike political roles such as FDA commissioner, the job Prasad is stepping into has traditionally been held by an FDA career scientist. His appointment raises new questions about whether vaccines and other new therapies will face additional scrutiny from regulators.
Prasad replaces Dr. Peter Marks, FDA’s longtime vaccine chief who resigned in March after clashing with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over concerns about the safety of vaccinations.
A professor at the University of California San Francisco, Prasad’s medical training is in cancer and blood disorders. He first came to prominence among academics for a series of papers scrutinizing the evidence behind new cancer therapies.
Research by Prasad and his colleagues showed that many cancer drugs fast-tracked by the FDA have never been shown to improve or extend patient lives. Instead, the drugs are often approved based on alternate measures, such as the ability to shrink tumors, which are thought to predict their long-term benefits.
The FDA has long defended this practice as a way of accelerating approval of medicines for desperately ill patients. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photograph: Hyungwon Kang/Reuters |
A proponent of using the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 despite scant evidence of its efficacy has been named to a top pandemic prevention role at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Washington Post reports.
Steven J Hatfill is a virologist who served in Donald Trump’s first administration, during which he promoted hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus in the early months of the pandemic, when vaccines and treatments were not yet available. He recently started as a special adviser in the office of the director of the administration for strategic preparedness and response, which prepares the country to respond to pandemics, as well as chemical and biological attacks.
The Trump administration embraced using the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, along with other drugs such as ivermectin and chloroquine, as treatments against Covid-19, despite concerns over both their efficacy and potentially serious side-effects. In June 2020, just months after the pandemic started, the Food and Drug Administration warned against using hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat Covid-19 over “reports of serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues”, even after Trump approved the ordering of millions of doses of the drug from Brazil for US patients.
Last year, a study released at the onset of the pandemic that promoted hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 was withdrawn by the publisher of the medical journal.
In an interview with the Post, Hatfill defended his support of hydroxychloroquine, which remains in use to treat diseases including lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. “There is no ambiguity there. It is a safe drug,” Hatfill said, noting that “they gave the drug to the president” in 2020.
In his new job, Hatfill said he would “help get us ready for the next pandemic” and work with his agency’s scientists on achieving “complete awareness of the scientific literature, not just for influenza, bird flu or Covid but other global diseases that could represent a threat to the US”. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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