FDA Continues to Recruit From the Fringes

George Tidmarsh allied himself with medical contrarians. Now he’s the nation’s top drug regulator.

Written By: Walker Bragman

Jul 23, 2025

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has named another public health contrarian to a key role as Commissioner Marty Makary reshapes the agency to embrace the medical fringes.

George Tidmarsh, a former biotech executive with an estimated net worth of nearly $480 million and adjunct professor of pediatrics and neonatology at Stanford University, has been chosen to lead the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), which oversees over-the-counter and prescription drugs. A cancer specialist and physician, Tidmarsh will be the nation’s top drug regulator and in charge of new approvals.

“Dr. Tidmarsh is an accomplished physician-scientist and leader whose experience spans the full arc of drug development—from bench to bedside,” Makary said in a statement. “His appointment to lead CDER brings exceptional scientific, regulatory, and operational expertise to the agency.”

On Makary’s watch, the FDA has staked out a number of positions that run counter to the mainstream of public health and scientific data. A prolific contrarian and anti-vax ally, the commissioner has stacked the agency with acolytes, including physical medicine doctor Tracy Beth Høeg, his special assistant, and Vinay Prasad, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), both of whom have promoted misinformation about mRNA vaccines and their supposed risks.

Tidmarsh is no stranger to drug approval. Throughout his time as a biotech executive, he also has experience bringing drugs to market. But like Prasad, Hoeg, and Makary himself, Tidmarsh has been active in the COVID contrarian movement—which may have helped pave the way to his new FDA position.

Last October, he helped organize and fund—and even participated in—a controversial pandemic policy conference at Stanford University that brought together anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and future Trump administration public health appointees. The gathering was the brainchild of then-Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya, a prolific COVID misinformation spreader who is now the director of the National Institutes of Health. Makary and Prasad both participated as well.

To hear Tidmarsh tell it, it was at this event that he first connected with Makary.

The conference was planned for the four-year anniversary of the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Bhattacharya, which called to reopen America at the height of the COVID pandemic in order to pursue herd immunity through mass infection of the healthy population. Besides Tidmarsh, the other funder of the event was a UK-based nonprofit Bhattacharya was involved with called Collateral Global, which advocated for so-called harms from the “lockdowns” argued against in the Declaration. Funding was not initially disclosed by the university, but was later added to the event website.

At the conference, Tidmarsh moderated a panel called “Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic freedom,” which featured prominent anti-vax writer Alex Berenson, former Trump COVID advisor and proponent of the mass infection herd immunity strategy Scott Atlas, and attorney Jenin Younes of the corporate-aligned lawfare group New Civil Liberties Alliance.

“The debate that should occur around scientific and medical ideas is the essence of the scientific process,” Tidmarsh opined, opening the discussion. “We have a tendency to vilify incredibly important ideas that are fringe.”

The comment echoed a gripe of Bhattacharya’s who was once called a “fringe epidemiologist” by former NIH Director Francis Collins in an email about the Great Barrington Declaration—which was criticized as dangerously unscientific by the broader public health community.

Tidmarsh worked with Bhattacharya to fend off criticism of the Stanford conference from public health experts and media. For example, after pediatrician, vaccine scientist, and renowned global health advocate Peter Hotez spoke out about the conference and its “full on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history),” Tidmarsh emailed him to invite him to participate in the anti-vaxxer heavy event. Tidmarsh apparently shared his emails with Bhattacharya, who posted screenshots of them on X and attacked Hotez—at one point quote tweeting him to his hundreds of thousands of followers and accusing him (and others) of having “favored destructive policies like school closures, mandates, and gain-of-function work that, in retrospect, look like they caused disaster.”

”They fear an honest appraisal of these ideas,” Bhattacharya wrote.

Tidmarsh also apparently shared the press inquiry he received from Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Bhattacharya posted a screenshot of Hiltzik’s email, describing him as a journalist only in scare quotes.

According to screenshots obtained by Important Context, Hotez was not the only public health expert to criticize the event and receive combative emails from Tidmarsh.

Tidmarsh’s connection with Makary grew after the Stanford conference. In a podcast interview with the commissioner on Tuesday, Tidmarsh revealed that he had flown out to Washington, D.C., to help Bhattacharya prepare for his confirmation hearing and ended up out at dinner with him and Makary. At this dinner, Tidmarsh expressed his desire to work at the FDA.

Tidmarsh also served as board chair for a new contrarian medical journal founded by Bhattacharya last year through the right-wing RealClear Foundation’s Academy of Public Health, according to the publication’s bylaws. The journal featured the FDA commissioner and NIH director on its editorial board. Tidmarsh’s son, a contributing writer to various RealClear properties, was executive editor—a fact not disclosed on the journal’s website or in any of the elder Tidmarsh’s articles for the publication as a potential conflict of interest.

One of those articles, from April, dealt with talc as a food and drug additive. The following month, he participated in an FDA panel on the subject as an expert. According to STAT News, he had not published studies on the subject before the event.

Unsurprisingly, Tidmarsh has been a staunch defender of Makary’s FDA leading up to his appointment. Amid the backlash to the commissioner’s ouster of former CBER head Peter Marks, Tidmarsh joined a chorus of right-wing contrarian voices justifying the move. In an April op-ed for RealClear, he wrote that Marks was “not a hero of the resistance” and had been “subverting the scientific process at FDA for years.” More recently, he attacked Endpoints News after it reported that Makary had lobbied for the FDA to issue a Complete Response Letter to KalVista Pharmaceuticals, rejecting its rare disease drug, sebetralstat, known as Ekterly, to treat hereditary angioedema.

“Endpoint News is terrible,” Tidmarsh wrote in a post on his LinkedIn. “They wrote ‘Makary’s KalVista rejection bid sparks concerns’. Someone should tell them that even if Makary did suggest FDA issue a [Complete Response Letter] (there is no evidence for this), a CRL is not a rejection. One would think that a ‘journalist’ would have some basic knowledge of the industry they cover. Endpoint News should be ashamed.”

The FDA ultimately approved KalVista’s drug.