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nit sure he was fired?

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MAHA influencers voice support for FDA's Makary as his job floats in limbo | Media Matters for America 5 26

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MSNBC 4/25 SAID NO DR OR RESEARCHERS FIRED

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AN 5 26

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon who gained international attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for his opposition to vaccine mandates. On paper, Makary seems like a great choice for the job, but a conservative newspaper is reporting “soap opera”-level drama associated with his tenure.

“Has any Trump administration official caused more political headaches for the president than Marty Makary?” wrote Allysia Finley of The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “His Food and Drug Administration has turned into a soap opera, with real lives hanging in the balance.”

To illustrate this point, Finley described how "in public interviews, [Makary] boasts about accelerating access to gene therapies and rare-disease drugs, even as he and his deputies block them." Describing Makary as “slicker than a pharmaceutical salesman,” the Journal reporter observed that “my sources say that patience with Dr. Makary is wearing thin among Republicans in Congress and White House officials."

Since taking office, Makary has rejected rare-disease and cancer drugs, a gene therapy for Huntington’s Disease and various other medicines that had demonstrably improved or even saved lives. He has also been accused of allowing conflicts of interest to override his detached clinical judgment.

“Members of Congress are also investigating whistleblower complaints of retaliation by agency leadership against FDA staff who have recommended approvals of drugs with which Dr. Makary and his left-hand man, Vinay Prasad, disagreed,” Finley reported. “Dr. Prasad is a Bernie Sanders acolyte whom the commissioner tapped to lead the FDA’s biologics and gene-therapy division.”

Finley also quoted a Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as saying that “the stories are so outrageous. It just appears that they're looking for excuses to say no." Johnson also reported rumors that the FDA has kept a “blacklist” of companies that “make too much noise.”

Finely concluded, "It's time for Mr. Trump to pull the plug on the Makary show."

Although not mentioned in her editorial, the FDA is also under fire for seeming to pull back from its responsibilities to protect food. Under Makary’s tenure, the FDA announced it would no longer engage in routine food inspections, describing that job as superfluous and instead arguing federal inspectors should offload all of those responsibilities to local authorities.

"There's so much work to go around. And us duplicating their work just doesn't make sense," a former FDA official explained to CBS News at the time.

The FDA has also been criticized for incorrectly saying that COVID vaccines have caused child deaths, a policy that Dr. Celine Grounder of KFF Health News denounced for allegedly endangering the public.

“What is unfolding inside the FDA is not a narrow dispute over covid vaccines,” Grounder argued. “It is an attempt, according to critics and vaccine scientists, to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. vaccine system — how risks are weighed, how benefits are proved, and how quickly lifesaving shots reach the public.”

Grounder concluded, “Former agency leaders warn that if these changes take hold, the consequences could be lasting: fewer vaccines, slower updates, weakened public trust, and more preventable outbreaks.”

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MMA

National news media outlets nearly silent on potential Trump family self-dealing pharmaceutical scheme

Each of the major cable and broadcast networks buried the potential TrumpRx-BlinkRx conflict of interest

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Rob Savillo & Tyler Monroe

Published 10/16/25

Major cable and broadcast news outlets seem to have largely ignored a Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump Jr. stands to potentially benefit financially from a deal between BlinkRx and the government-run TrumpRx pharmaceutical program. Apparently, neither The New York Times or The Washington Post covered the Journal’s findings either.

According to the Journal, BlinkRx has also organized a summit in December which will facilitate meetings between the country's top drugmakers, feature "'small group meetings' with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary", and “conclude with a dinner at the Executive Branch, an exclusive new club founded by Trump Jr. and his close friends.”

Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, explained of the announcement:

After derailing serious initiatives in place to finally let Medicare negotiate cheaper drug prices on some of the most expensive life-saving medicines, the President wants praise for pushing a mail-order scheme that experts say won’t significantly lower costs for patients — but will put more money in his son’s pocket. This is presidential self-dealing at its most craven.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post also seem to have ignored the revelation during the study period.

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AN 4 25

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Targeting Medical Journals

On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”

Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.

ref1

no lnx nyt

Edward Martin wears a gray suit and blue tie as he speaks at a desk with a microphone at the Capitol.

Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., sent letters to science and medical journals, accusing them of bias.Credit...Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press

Teddy RosenbluthRebecca Robbins

By Teddy Rosenbluth and Rebecca Robbins

April 18, 2025

A federal prosecutor has sent letters to at least three medical journals accusing them of political bias and asking a series of probing questions suggesting that the journals mislead readers, suppress opposing viewpoints and are inappropriately swayed by their funders.

The letters were signed by Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has been criticized for using his office to target opponents of President Trump.

Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.

One of the letters was sent to the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter.

The Times confirmed that at least two other publishers had received nearly identically worded letters, but those publishers would not speak publicly because they feared retribution from the Trump administration.

In the letter to Chest, dated Monday, Mr. Martin wrote, “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”

He demanded that the journal’s publishers answer a series of questions by May 2. Do they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints?” What do they do if the authors they published “may have misled their readers?” Are they transparent about influence from “supporters, funders, advertisers and others?”

And he specifically singled out the National Institutes of Health, which funds some of the research the journals publish, asking about the agency’s role “in the development of submitted articles.”

The prosecutor’s inquiry amounts to “blatant political intimidation of our medical journals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and researcher in Massachusetts whose articles have been published in Chest, wrote on X.

It was not clear how many journals had been targeted. Several prominent medical and science publishers said they had not received letters. Others declined requests for comment. News of the letters was earlier reported by MedPage Today, a medical news website.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington also declined to comment. Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, declined to comment on whether Mr. Kennedy had any involvement.

Laura DiMasi, a spokeswoman for the American College of Chest Physicians, confirmed that the organization had received the letter but declined an interview request.

Most of what medical journals publish is highly technical, aimed at an audience of specialists. But they and the organizations that publish them have increasingly come under attack. Right-leaning sites like Breitbart have derided them as “woke medical journals.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, has been attacking the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which publishes a journal and runs a variety of reproductive health programs. It has received federal funding for an effort to promote maternal health. The alliance recently urged the Trump administration to cut funding and investigate the group, saying it was pushing liberal ideas about diversity and gender.

Several journals or their publishers have publicly opposed Mr. Trump.

In January, the American Public Health Association, which publishes a journal, was among several groups that sued the Trump administration over a memo freezing federal funding. That policy that has now been rescinded, though the administration has since halted other funds.

In March, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called mass layoffs at H.H.S. an “attack on public health.”

In 2020, The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial condemning Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic — the first time the journal had taken a position in an election in its 208-year history. The journal Nature endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. for president in the 2020 election and spoke out against a second Trump term during the 2024 election.

Medical journals are afforded the same First Amendment protections as any other news media outlet.

Kent Anderson, a consultant for scientific publishers who has written about conservative attacks on medical journals, said that Mr. Martin’s inquiry could have a chilling effect among publishers.

“This is a fishing expedition from a U.S. attorney, and that makes people nervous,” Mr. Anderson said. “It may make them think twice about an editorial about treating women who have a spontaneous abortion or about transgender teens dealing with a health issue, because it may make them think that somebody is going to knock on the door.”

Mr. Kennedy had been nursing grievances about scientific journals for years. Medical and science publishers have long rejected article submissions that purport to show a link between vaccines and autism. (Dozens of studies have failed to establish such a link.)

He said in a podcast interview last year that he would seek to prosecute medical journals under the federal anti-corruption statute.

“I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries.”

As examples, he pointed to two prominent journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, and the scientific publishing giant, Elsevier.

Other top health officials in the Trump administration have also criticized the big scientific publishers. In a book published last year, Dr. Martin A. Makary, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, accused journal editorial boards of “gate-keeping” and publishing only information that supports a “groupthink narrative.”

Before becoming director of the N.I.H., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya publicly chastised the editor in chief of a prominent journal, Science, claiming he had “publicly denigrated scientists” who opposed Covid-era lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya was widely denounced by mainstream scientists during the pandemic for proposing that the virus should allowed to spread naturally through the population.

Dr. Bhattacharya also co-founded a new journal pitched as an alternative to traditional scientific publishing. It has published contrarian views on Covid.

Christina Jewett contributed reporting.

Teddy Rosenbluth is a health reporter and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.

Rebecca Robbins is a reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.

See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, National Institutes of Health, Health and Human Services Department, Donald Trump

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mma

Fox guests and medical contributors encouraged Trump's worst COVID impulses. Now they're running the show.

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 11/26/24 mma

Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly favored the Fox News hosts and guests he saw on his television screen over federal health policy experts as he managed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it had calamitous consequences. He's going even further as he prepares for his second term, picking familiar faces from the right-wing propaganda network to run the government health bureaucracy.

Trump, a Fox obsessive, staffed his first administration with at least 20 former Fox personalities, and he continues to rely on that method as he stocks his second one. But the network’s dominance among Trump’s announced picks to carry out his second-term health policy is nonetheless striking.

Anti-vaccine activist and Fox hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He will potentially oversee former Fox contributor Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, Fox medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. surgeon general, and frequent Fox guests Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Mehmet Oz at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (Bhattacharya has not been formally announced but is reportedly the top pick for the position.)

These picks, to an extent, show Trump aligning his health policy hires with his own Fox-molded views.

As president during the pandemic, he clashed with his official advisers when they contradicted what he was hearing from Fox personalities. The result was often chaos in decision-making, implementation, and public messaging.

Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and Nesheiwat received regular Fox airtime because on issues like the use of untested drugs such as hydroxychloroquine or nonpharmaceutical interventions like office and school closures, they tended to hew close to the Fox line — which also became the Trump line. If another pandemic hits, it is possible that they will be able to mitigate Trump’s worst impulses; they have real medical credentials, and Trump is likely to have greater confidence in them due to their shared past views.

But while Trump’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed was an unalloyed triumph in his first term, Kennedy is a crank who was openly hostile to the drugs. And other members of the second-term team regularly went on Fox to warn about the purported health impacts of the vaccines and criticize mandates to ensure their use. That does not bode well for the prospect of a successful response should another pandemic hit during the next four years.

RFK Jr. at HHS is a Fox-fueled disaster for health policy

Fox hosts and other right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson spent 18 months irresponsibly championing Kennedy as part of a strategy to return Trump to the White House. The network regularly promoted him as a Democratic candidate, then showered him with praise and vouched for his health views after Carlson ensured that he endorsed Trump.

The result is that Kennedy — who has pushed debunked claims about childhood vaccination causing autism, questioned the well-established science over whether HIV actually causes AIDS, and promoted kooky conspiracy theories about 5G cellular towers and chemtrails — is Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy was among the biggest U.S. sources of anti-vaccine misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, terming the COVID-19 vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Other noted anti-vaccine figures and fringe crackpots claim to be advising him on the transition.

He also suggested that the pandemic may have been “planned,” that public health efforts taken in response constituted “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare,” and that the virus itself had been “ethnically targeted” to afflict “Caucasians and Black people” while sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."

Several other Trump picks for top health posts were heavily featured during the Fox’s coronavirus coverage.

Oz, the television personality and grifter Trump selected to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, became a Fox regular in 2020. He made scores of network appearances at the start of the pandemic, particularly championing hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that right-wing media figures promoted as a treatment for or preventative to COVID.

Oz’s commentary attracted the attention of Trump, who reportedly urged aides to consult with the TV doctor about the outbreak. Oz subsequently ran for the U.S. Senate with the support of Fox star and Trump adviser Sean Hannity, but he came up short in the 2022 midterms.

Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya also seemingly became Fox regulars because of their willingness to contradict COVID-19 guidance from federal public health agencies on its airwaves.

FDA selection Makary — who argued in a February 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. would reach “herd Immunity by April” — used his Fox platform in the months leading up to the emergence of the deadly delta variant to criticize public health officials for warning of new strains of the virus. He also criticized vaccine mandates, particularly for children, citing the vaccine’s purported health risks.

Reported NIH pick Bhattacharya — a signatory of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which called for building up herd immunity through “natural infection” — likewise used his time in Fox’s spotlight to criticize vaccine mandates. He agreed with Fox host Laura Ingraham during an August 2021 segment that the FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines “too fast,” saying, “The FDA approval does not change the fact that we don't have long-term safety data with the vaccine."

And Nesheiwat, the Fox medical contributor Trump selected as surgeon general, promoted the use of supplemental zinc as a COVID-19 treatment and repeatedly highlighted the purported health risks of vaccination for children and young men.

Their commentary was part of a massive and effective effort by Fox to undermine the COVID-19 vaccination program. Now, if confirmed, they will be running major federal health bureaucracies.

Trump regularly leaned on Fox’s programming and personalities for advice, and the network shaped both his worldview and his administration’s actions. No event demonstrated the extent of the network’s influence more than his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump didn’t treat COVID’s initial spread as an emergency because Fox was telling him that the media and Democrats were deliberately exaggerating the danger it posed.

He propped up hydroxychloroquine because the network told him it could be a miracle cure, refused to wear masks or socially distance because its hosts said those interventions didn’t work, and then urged the swift reopening of the economy they demanded.

He cut off support to the World Health Organization because one of Fox's stars suggested it and selected a White House adviser from the network’s green room to implement a “herd immunity” strategy.

The result was mass death.

The saving grace of the Trump pandemic response was Operation Warp Speed, an innovative program that sped the development of safe, effective vaccines against the virus. But Trump was out of office by the time the vaccines were deployed, and Fox responded with a yearslong campaign against the drugs. Fox regulars like Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya pitched in by criticizing the safety of the vaccines or mandates for their use.

The four doctors Trump picked from Fox’s airwaves do have real medical credentials, and their selections have received some praise from public health experts.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist, said Nesheiwat is “a good appointment,” describing her as “very smart, thoughtful, interested in learning.”

Dr. Ashish Jha, who served in President Joe Biden’s White House, called the appointments of Makary, Oz, and Bhattacharya “pretty reasonable,” adding: “I have plenty of policy disagreements with them. They are smart and experienced. We will need them to do well.”

Indeed, they may take office as H5N1 bird flu spreads in American livestock and from livestock to people. If that virus makes the jump to human-to-human transmission, the U.S. health bureaucracy will be forced to grapple with another deadly pandemic.

Focusing specifically on Bhattacharya, Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias offered the best-case scenario for how Trump’s health appointees could impact a pandemic response:

Bhattacharya’s criticisms of nonpharmaceutical intervetions during 2020 went further than I would have, and I don’t agree with him per se. That said, he is well-credentialed and smart and also aligned with Trump on the substantive question.

Four years ago, Trump had a lot of people in place who he didn’t have confidence in and didn’t listen to, and then he had a lot of unqualified people articulating his views.

Bhattacharya can do what an executive branch official is supposed to do and channel Trump-style views in a professional way.

What’s more, precisely because his anti-NPI credentials are unimpeachable, if a much deadlier virus comes around that shifts Trump’s sense of the cost-benefit balance, he would be the right person to deliver that message.

But as he further notes, “the most effective weapon against Covid was pharmaceutical interventions” — and in Kennedy, Trump has selected “an anti-vaccine crank” as Bhattacharya’s boss.

That means things could get bad fast.

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