Dramatic HHS cuts leave US ‘weaker as a nation,’ says top FDA vaccine official forced out under Kennedy
CNN
By Katherine Dillinger, CNN
(CNN) — Sweeping job cuts and reorganizations taking place at the US Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leave the United States “weaker as a nation,” Dr. Peter Marks told CNN on Friday.
Marks, the former director of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, had been instrumental in carrying out “Operation Warp Speed,” the federal government’s Covid-19 vaccine program. He also oversaw the regulation of innovative biologic products like gene therapies.
Given the choice to resign or be fired, Marks stepped down and wrote in his resignation letter last week that “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.”
An HHS official told CNN at the time, “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.”
Marks told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Friday that he doesn’t fully understand his ouster, but “I suspect it has to do with a devotion to science and to the public health of this nation, the people.”
He noted that he leaves behind “a group, now gutted, that was ready to respond to natural and manmade threats. At any given time, there are many, many viruses that could come, things like Ebola and others, that could be very dangerous to our country. … I can’t go into all the details, but there are manmade threats that we were prepared to deal with.”
The dramatic changes to that office at HHS “means that today, I believe we are weaker as a nation, and I believe our adversaries know that we are weaker as a nation, because we don’t have that capacity,” he said.
Marks declined to address Kennedy about false claims he has made about vaccines, such as saying they can increase a person’s risk of illness or death.
“I’m not going to directly confront Mr. Kennedy. He’ll have to confront his maker for those lies,” Marks told Burnett. “I just need to say to you, as if I was under oath, the vaccines that make it through the vaccine approval process in the United States are – Not every vaccine is safe, but those that make it through the approval process are safe, effective and are high-quality. No one at FDA would ever let a vaccine out that they would not give to their own children.”
As a measles outbreak continues to spread in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, Marks also urged parents to consider vaccinating their children if they haven’t done so. “It’s easy to ignore measles because we haven’t seen it,” he noted. “It is not just an innocent disease, a benign disease. It kills 1 in 1,000 children in a developed country like the United States.”
Among 100,000 children who get the measles vaccine, there are “very few adverse events,” he said. “Unfortunately, if 100,000 children in the United States get measles, we will end up with at least about 100 dead up front. And then there’s a complication whereby measles infection persists in the brain, and about 10 or 20 will then die in the next several years.”
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