Christina Jewett, The New York Times (and syndicated at many other media outlets), March 6, 2026
Dr. Vinay Prasad, a polarizing figure at the Food and Drug Administration who oversaw vaccines, is leaving the agency at the end of April, according to a Health and Human Services spokesman.
As the agency’s chief science and medical officer, Dr. Prasad had wide-ranging authority over vaccines, drugs and gene therapies. He issued several controversial decisions, including overruling career scientists on some vaccine approvals and cracking down on a biotech company linked to two teenagers’s deaths.
In one of the most highly publicized moves, Dr. Prasad refused to accept Moderna’s application for a new mRNA flu vaccine, causing an uproar among companies and some experts who complained he was too often moving the goal posts on studies that had been OK’d by the agency. Within days, Dr. Marty Makary, the agency’s commissioner, reversed the decision after the company agreed to conduct another study.
And in recent months, he had issued a series of rejections for treatments of rare diseases, increasingly upsetting patients who have few options and biotech companies invested in developing cures.
Many of those decisions were made with little warning. He shied way from public advisory panel meetings on drugs under review, rebuffing calls for greater transparency. Dr. Prasad has criticized those forums, saying that the drug industry manipulated public opinion.
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“[His]reforms represented a tremendous body of work achieved in a remarkably short period of time,” Dr. Makary wrote. “They are substantive, durable changes that will shape the agency’s approach for years to come and stand as part of Vinay’s lasting legacy here.”
Leaders in the biotech and investor communities had long pressed the White House for his ouster.
However, Diana Zuckerman, a close observer of the F.D.A. and president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, said Dr. Prasad’s decision to leave was a loss to independent researchers who had “hoped he would help strengthen the public health mission of the F.D.A.”
“F.D.A.’s ‘flexible’ standards for approving products that are not proven to work are resulting in an unsustainable health care system,” she said, noting the cost of failed therapies to Medicare and to patients.
Before joining the agency, Dr. Prasad was an academic at the University of California, San Francisco. He was known for criticizing the F.D.A., saying its drug review officials were too permissive in issuing approvals.
He has also been described as a Covid contrarian after complaining on podcasts and on his YouTube channel about public health measures that he deemed ill-informed by medical evidence.
But he and Dr. Makary broke with Mr. Kennedy on whether pregnant women should get the vaccine, including pregnancy as a condition warranting vaccination, in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine.
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Last summer, after a second teenager died from liver-related complications from a therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Dr. Prasad demanded that the manufacturer, Sarepta, stop distributing the drug. The company pushed back, and the agency settled on keeping the drug from older children who were more likely to be harmed by it.
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The Department of Health and Human Services held a background briefing on Thursday about the latest controversial decision, against a treatment for Huntington’s disease.
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In a social media post Friday evening, Dr. Makary said that Dr. Prasad would be resuming his work in California and that a successor would be announced before he leaves.
To read the entire article, click https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/health/fda-prasad-resigns.html?nl=breaking-news&segment_id=216275