Vinay Prasad Out At FDA Amid Right-Wing Push

The departure of the contrarian public health official showcases contradictions in the MAHA movement.

Written By: Walker Bragman

Published: Jul 30, 2025

Vinay Prasad is out at the Food and Drug Administration with fewer than three months on the job and after a meteoric rise inside the agency. His departure comes after weeks of attacks from allies of President Donald Trump over decisions he’d made serving in the administration regarding biologics.

Prasad was tapped to lead the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) in May following the ouster of the former director, Peter Marks, by anti-vax Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and his ally, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. CBER oversees biological products like vaccines, gene and cell therapies, and blood products. Last month, he was also named the agency’s chief medical and science officer, which imbued him with the power to inject himself in regulatory decisions agency-wide.

A hematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco, Prasad had made a name for himself criticizing medical practice in the U.S. He rose to new heights with the COVID-19 pandemic as a contrarian, opposing government efforts to curb the spread of the deadly virus like school closures, shutdowns, and mask and vaccine mandates. His unique tack—arguing that mitigation policies lacked sufficient evidentiary basis for the supposed harms they were causing—earned him a vast social media audience as well as allies on the political right. Among those were Makary and current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya.

Although Prasad sought to present himself as a voice of scientific reason, his rhetoric often betrayed an ideological bent. In one widely criticized blog post, for example, he suggested COVID mitigations were akin to authoritarianism à la Nazi Germany. His vocal skepticism of the mRNA COVID vaccines, hyping up concerns about rare side effects, also ran against the body of research. Then of course, there was his boosting of Robert Kennedy Jr. during the 2024 presidential election cycle. Prasad made a number of posts and videos about the anti-vax conspiracy theorist in which he purported to evaluate his positions objectively.

When Kennedy became Health and Human Services secretary—and Bhattacharya NIH director and Makary FDA commissioner—it was only a matter of time before Prasad’s ship came in. Announcing Prasad’s CBER appointment in May, Makary promised his ally would bring “the kind of scientific rigor, independence, and transparency we need at CBER—a significant step forward.”

But on Tuesday, HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon released a statement explaining that "Dr. Prasad did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA in the Trump administration and has decided to return to California and spend more time with his family."

"We thank him for his service and the many important reforms he was able to achieve in his time at FDA,” the statement read.

Prasad’s abrupt departure, first reported by STAT News, reveals the stark contradiction at the heart of the Make America Healthy Again movement—which purports to merge Trump’s deregulatory fervor with Kennedy’s skepticism toward pharmaceutical and biological products and professed commitment to more rigorous testing.

Prasad leaned heavily into the latter camp and his appointment to CBER reportedly prompted a significant sell-off of biotech stocks. During his brief time at the agency, the FDA’s approval process for new vaccines and therapeutics became less predictable—and less data-driven. The agency took a much more restrictive approach to COVID vaccines than it had previously, alarming public health experts. Prasad and Makary co-authored new stricter guidelines for booster approvals that were widely criticized for their potential to limit access to the lifesaving vaccines. Prasad also thrice overruled agency experts to issue narrower approvals for COVID vaccines from Novavax and Moderna.

But Prasad’s skeptical approach was not limited to just the vaccines. His departure comes on the heels of the FDA cracking down on Sarepta’s Elevidys, a gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), which is a rare but progressive and ultimately fatal disorder. Life expectancy for those afflicted is mid-20s.

On July 17, the agency requested Sarepta halt shipments of the treatment—the company’s biggest revenue source—following the deaths of some recipients. Sarepta refused and the following day, the FDA put out a press release announcing it was placing the company’s “investigational gene therapy clinical trials for limb girdle muscular dystrophy on clinical hold following three deaths potentially related to these products and new safety concerns that the study participants are or would be exposed to an unreasonable and significant risk of illness or injury.”

The company said no new safety signals for the gene therapy had arisen, but four days after the FDA order, it announced it would voluntarily acquiesce, halting shipments to maintain a “positive working relationship” with the agency. A senior FDA official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, reportedly told STAT News that the drug faced an “arduous and treacherous path” back to market. On July 25, the agency announced that it was probing the death of an eight-year-old boy who had received Elevidys. On Monday, however, the FDA abruptly rescinded the suspension and Sarepta would resume selling the treatment for boys who could still walk.

The episode put a target on Prasad’s back as it was CBER that was negotiating with Sarepta. Prasad had also previously attacked his predecessor, Peter Marks, for overruling reviewers to approve Elevidys use for almost all DMD patients.

“This guy…Overturned 3 FDA reviewers to approve gene therapy that seems to be killing kids with Duchesne's & destroying their livers,” Prasad wrote.

Three days after the FDA’s initial request to Sarepta to halt shipments of Elevidys, far-right activist, conspiracy theorist, and “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer penned a blog post on her “Loomered” website calling the Prasad a “progressive leftist saboteur undermining President Trump’s FDA.”

Key to Loomer’s argument were old tweets from Prasad in which the contrarian positioned himself as a heterodox lefty who just so happened to align with the COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, contrarians, and major business interests on the political right on the issue of COVID mitigations. Prasad’s claimed progressivism, which included criticizing Trump, gave him access and credibility in certain corners of the internet that some of his allies could not penetrate by virtue of their longtime, open affiliations with the political right.

“Far from being the reformist ally the Trump administration expected he may be, Prasad’s liberal ideology, outspoken anti-Trump rhetoric, and deliberate actions to obstruct the President’s deregulatory agenda make him a dangerous misfit in this critical position,” Loomer wrote. “His continued presence at the FDA threatens to derail the Trump administration’s mission to streamline regulations and prioritize American health.”

In her piece, which was met with a variety of racist comments about Prasad, who is of Indian descent, Loomer cited the CBER heads’ calls for tougher reviews of biologics products and slow pace of approvals and dubbed his rise in the FDA “a catastrophic vetting failure.” She did not mention Elevidys.

“The FDA has missed multiple Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) deadlines under Prasad,” she wrote. “Examples of these missed deadlines are GSK’s Nucala for COPD (May 7) and Stealth BioTherapeutics’ Barth syndrome treatment (April 29). More recently, Prasad has led arbitrary delays of gene and cell therapies from Ultragenyx and Capricor not based on science, but on his own left-wing agenda. These delays contradict Trump’s push for faster drug approvals, frustrating patients and industry alike.”

Although Loomer reportedly has few allies in the White House, the president is among them. In April, Trump fired top National Security Council officials following a meeting with the far-right activist. The president adamantly denied that the meeting played any role in the firings, but Loomer posted on Twitter that the officials had been fired for being “disloyal.” She subsequently refused to discuss the details of the meeting with the press.

Five days after Prasad got “Loomered,” he was the subject of a piece in RealClearHealth that elaborated on the narrative that he “Stands with Progressive Health Policies” and “Not President Trump.” RealClearHealth falls under the right-wing RealClear Media umbrella, which is also affiliated with the RealClear Foundation that launched an academy of public health and associated medical journal with Bhattacharya and Makary back in February.

The anti-Prasad piece noted how the public health official was holding up potentially game-changing gene and cell therapies in the name of better research, explaining, “This is not a man who sees suffering and responds with urgency. This is a man who sees urgency and responds with contempt.”

The piece cited Elevidys specifically, noting “He has dismissed Elevidys as ‘disgusting’ because of its $3.2 million price tag, decried its ‘unclear benefit,’ and labeled it a ‘useless drug.’”

“He lumped it together with Sarepta’s earlier exon-skipping therapy Exondys 51, calling its approval the result of ‘shenanigans’ and ‘FDA politics’ overriding science,” the piece continues. “To Prasad, the danger isn’t a fatal disease killing your child—it’s the prospect that someone might get a new medicine he doesn’t think is worth using.”

On the day the piece was published, it was shared on X by former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum. Santorum wrote, “More on the man destroying @POTUS legacy for helping patients.” Meanwhile, Emily Kopp, a reporter for right-wing The Daily Caller, tweeted that the blitz against Prasad in right-wing media had been orchestrated by Sarepta.

In an interview with Politico posted Saturday, July 26, Makary responded to the growing right-wing pushback against his top deputy, insisting “there’s not a political bone to his body” and calling Prasad an “impeccable scientist.” On Sunday, however, The Wall Street Journal got involved, publishing an op-ed by editorial board member Allysia Finley, declaring the CBER chief a “Bernie Sanders acolyte in MAHA drag.”

By Tuesday, Prasad was out.

UPDATE 7/30/25: STAT News reports that George Tidmarsh, who Important Context covered last week, is stepping up as acting director of CBER in the wake of Prasad’s departure.