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Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top vaccine and gene therapy regulator, was the target of a right-wing pressure campaign over his handling of drug approvals and past support for Democrats.A top Food and Drug Administration official is getting his job back, a spokesman for health agencies said Saturday, less than two weeks after he was ousted at the direction of the White House.Vinay Prasad will return as the top regulator overseeing vaccines and complex treatments for difficult diseases, a position he lost following a right-wing pressure campaign.“At the FDA’s request, Dr. Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the Center for Biologics...

Vinay Prasad is returning to the Food and Drug Administration to resume his role overseeing vaccine, gene therapy, and blood product regulation. “At the FDA’s request, Dr. Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,” Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon told STAT on Saturday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine official, Vinay Prasad, has left the agency after just three months as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, a government spokesperson said. Prasad, an oncologist who was a fierce critic of U.S. COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates, had been appointed in May by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. Together they had promised to speed regulatory action and pilot new review pathways. In recent days, criticism of Prasad's tenure has intensified around the agency's handling of a gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy from Sarepta Therapeutics (SRPT.O), opens new tab. The...

The far-right activist is continuing to use her close association with President Trump to go after those she deems insufficiently loyal.Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and self-described Trump administration “loyalty enforcer,” has had another busy stretch.Last Friday, April Falcon Doss, the general counsel of the National Security Agency, was fired after Ms. Loomer spotlighted conservative attacks of her previous work, including for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff.Then the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Vinay Prasad, resigned on Tuesday after a post by Ms. Loomer on social media, in which she pointed out his past statements disparaging...

Masking is a divisive issue, however, at the end of the day, it is a scientific question. Pre-pandemic, community masking was discouraged because the pre-existing evidence was negative. This is why Fauci was critical of it in early March 2020 on 60 minutes. In the pandemic, masking has become a marker of politics. Good liberals wear them and bad conservatives don’t. As a scientist stuck in the middle, with my colleagues J. Darrow and I. Liu, we performed an umbrella review of this topic. We found very poor quality data, insufficient to support community masking, particularly for years on end....

Unlike most fact checkers, Glen Pyle actually has legitimate credentials.I first ran into Glen after my friend Professor Byram Bridle was attacked for his views by Professor Pyle and others at the University of Guelph. Pyle and others at the university, when challenged to debate the facts, refused to respond. Apparently, they can dish it out, but won’t defend their position.Pyle is basically on the wrong side of history.Athlete deaths fact checkI thought I would fact check three of the fact checks he wrote, starting with a fact check on the athlete deaths.Dr. Pyle concludes that the vaccines are perfectly...

It is always instructive to highlight differences in the vaccination policies between nations. After all, the clinical trials that guide these decisions are the same across nations.Yet, different experts can view the same risk-benefit decisions differently, or view uncertainty differently. In my mind, there is clearly a problem if one nation advises AGAINST doing something while another location MANDATES it. I think we should all agree that this makes no sense. One should not deploy the brute force power of the mandate if a decision is sufficiently debatable that another nation literally advises against it.This already happened with LA County’s...