David Lim, Politico, February 24, 2025
Pfizer has tapped the FDA’s former top drug regulator, Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, as its chief medical officer, the pharmaceutical company announced on Monday.
Allies of the new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., seized on the news, pointing to Cavazzoni’s hire as proof of the revolving door with industry that Kennedy has long alleged is corrupting the FDA’s priorities and preventing it from taking a more skeptical view toward vaccines and other drugs.
“This is the core rot in American regulation,” Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco who is in the running for a job in Kennedy’s department, wrote in a blog post. “I find this behavior abhorrent, and it should be criminal. Mr. Kennedy has vowed to stop this, and I welcome that.”
The hire also drew criticism from public health advocacy groups that aren’t aligned with Kennedy.
“Cavazzoni’s move demonstrates that the revolving door between the FDA and the industries it regulates is alive and well,” said Dr. Robert Steinbrook, the director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.
Before joining the FDA in January 2018 as the deputy director of operations in the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Cavazzoni worked at Pfizer leading clinical sciences and development operations.
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Cavazzoni will formally start the new role on March 1, according to Pfizer spokesperson Amy Rose. She will report to Dr. Chris Boshoff, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer and president of its research and development arm. Endpoints News and STAT first reported news of Cavazzoni’s new job.
Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Center for Health Research, a nonprofit, said she’s watching to see who chooses Cavazzoni’s permanent replacement as the nation’s top drug regulator: Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, the as-yet-unconfirmed Johns Hopkins University surgeon Dr. Marty Makary, or Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, or someone else in the administration.
“This is the problem with this revolving door at FDA, people go from industry to FDA and then while they are at FDA they still seem to be strongly aligned with industry and then when they leave FDA they go back to industry,” Zuckerman said. “It raises a lot of questions about how objective they are when they are supposed to be working for the public at the FDA.”
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