Dr. Peter Marks, the Meals and Drug Administration’s high vaccine official who performed an important function within the growth of COVID-19 vaccines in the course of the pandemic, has resigned, with one supply telling ABC Information that he was pushed out of his place by Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Marks, who has served because the FDA’s vaccine chief since 2016, resigned in a letter despatched to appearing FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner. In it, he alleged Kennedy just isn’t excited by “fact and transparency” however relatively in “subservient affirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Marks known as the measles outbreak a reminder of “what occurs when confidence in well-established science underlying public well being and well-being is undermined.”
The measles vaccine “very merely doesn’t trigger autism,” Marks wrote.
“My hope is that in the course of the coming years, the unprecedented assault on scientific fact that has adversely impacted public well being in our nation involves an finish in order that the residents of our nation can absolutely profit from the breadth of advances in medical science,” Marks wrote.
A supply conversant in the state of affairs informed ABC Information that Marks was given the selection by a division official both to resign or be fired.
Requested for remark, an HHS official stated, “If Peter Marks doesn’t wish to get behind restoring science to its golden customary and selling radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA underneath the sturdy management of Secretary Kennedy.”
Marks has been the FDA’s vaccine chief since 2016. His resignation will finish almost a decade of monitoring vaccine growth, evaluating their security and recommending how the general public ought to use them — and maybe doing the function throughout one of the crucial crucial eras in public well being.
His function grew to become extremely excessive profile in the course of the pandemic, when Marks oversaw the approval of the primary coronavirus vaccines — and oversaw the intensely watched course of by the various developments.
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