Dr. Marty Makary, Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, an epidemiologist affiliated with the Florida Department of Health, have written a disturbing piece in Common Sense about the how the U.S. medicine regulatory agencies, the FDA, CDC and NIH, have been captured by a political narrative, leaving many of their senior doctors and scientists unhappy, frustrated but silenced. Here’s the opening:
The calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.
“It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch and I can’t close my eyes,” one senior FDA official lamented. “People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.”
That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorised Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had Covid. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorise booster shots for young children.
That doctor is hardly alone.
At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the Director, Deputy Director and Chief Medical Officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.)
The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”
Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.
The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.Nowhere has this problem been clearer – or the stakes higher – than on official public health policy regarding children and Covid.
They go on to criticise the decisions to close schools, impose masks on children and, of course, vaccinate them, all driven by politics rather than data.
Worth reading in full.
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