Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr. war on vaccines just landed another major blow as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services successfully forced one of the nation’s top vaccine officials out of his position.
Dr. Peter Marks, who was given the choice by HHS officials to either be fired or step down as the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced his resignation on Friday.
“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,” Marks reportedly wrote in his letter of resignation. He added that leaving his position was a “weight lifted from me” as working in this environment “was spiraling deeper and deeper into danger.”
For nearly a decade, Marks led the FDA’s regulation of vaccines, including playing an instrumental role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. So it should come as no surprise that his presence would cause conflict with the starkly anti-vaccine head of the HHS.
In response to Marks’ departure, an HHS official said in a statement, “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.”
This news comes as Kennedy plans to lay off thousands of HHS employees, while hiring his own fleet of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. According to several reports, Kennedy recently tapped David Geier, a discredited vaccine skeptic, to look into the long debunked scientific link between vaccines and autism.
As the New York Times reports, experts said appointing Geier to work on a study of vaccine safety is “like having a basketball referee show up in one team’s jersey.”
