The Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it had selected a new director for the centre, who was charged with vaccine approvals and other biological products. Dr Vinai Prasad is a voice critic of the agency’s move to greenlight COVID-19 vaccine boosters.
Prasad will replace it Dr. Peter MarksHe was director of the FDA’s Center for Biological Assessment and Research, where he played an important role in starting the operating speed. This is the Trump administration’s efforts to speed up vaccine development during the Covid-19 pandemic. The center has been running alongside the acting director since Marks left the FDA in March.
“Dr. Prasad brings the kind of scientific rigor, independence and transparency needed in CBER. This is a huge step forward,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Martin McCurry posted on X on Tuesday.
Prasad has long criticised the FDA for granting emergency use permits for the Covid-19 vaccine booster. Last year, Mark said he was “incompetent or corrupt to allow boosters without clinical randomised data.”
After the mark I was kicked out By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, Prasad called “one of the most dangerous professional pharma regulators of the 21st century” and “an ordinary scholar” Marks before joining the government.
“You can replace Peter Marks with a bobblehead doll that just engraves it on approval, and the FDA will have the same results as lowering your management fees,” Prasad posted on March 20, before Marks was expelled.
Prasad is a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. At this point you will be joining the agency The FDA says it’s watching Whether or not they approve an annual renewal of the Covid-19 vaccine this fall as part of a routine process scheduled to begin next month. The authorities have raised the possibility of requesting a new randomized trial before approving future updates of the Covid shot.
A week ago, Prasad supported the idea of ​​a new randomized clinical trial before approving the update of Covid Shot, calling the US offering covid vaccinations to young children “absurd,” and warned that changes in strain could lead to changes in efficacy and safety.
“Without a trial, it’s only a matter of time before the FDA approves a vaccine that causes bad results, such as vaccine-induced narcolepsy. If this happens, you can see the reluctance of the vaccine like you’ve never seen before,” he writes.
Prasad has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic as he criticized measures like the vaccine mandate and urged men under the age of 40 to ban the Moderna vaccine.
During the pandemic, he, along with McArie and Dr. Tracy Whaeg, was accused of being a prominent provider of misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine.
Høeg currently works for the FDA as a special assistant to Makary, replacing the agency representative for the Disease Control and Prevention Advisory Committee on Vaccination.
In an email to employees sharing with CBS News, Makary knows that Prasad is “a keen to bring great skills, energy and capabilities to the FDA and start immersing themselves in the critical work of Cber and the agency as a whole.”
McCurry also praised Prasad’s “long and prominent history in medicine.”
