Top Vaccine Official Claims ‘Misinformation’ and ‘Lies’ as Disruptors Trump and RFK, Jr. Change the Status Quo

While it’s likely that many American parents have not heard of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., the fact that he resigned this week from his post as FDA’s chief vaccine regulator is significant as yet another sign that President Donald Trump and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are disrupting the status quo in the federal government.

In July 2022, Lumen-News reported FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously in favor of recommending Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the mRNA COVID shots from drug company giants Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech for infants, toddlers, and preschool-age children.

Marks said the vote was on target, claiming the rate of hospitalizations among young children during the Omicron surge was “troubling,” even worse than what is usually seen during the flu season.

He seemed to be echoing the narrative of Biden White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha, who posted to X that “COVID is a far greater threat to kids than flu is,” based on a study by Harvard Medical School instructor Jeremy Faust.

That study, however, had already been debunked by Trump-appointed and now-confirmed National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., who asserted in a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opinion piece that Jha’s claim amounted to “scare-mongering.” Bhattacharya then showed why Faust’s study – cited by Jha – was “flawed.”

In September 2023, the Biden Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) advisory panel recommended that everyone aged six months and older get the updated COVID shot.

"Every year, we update our flu vaccine to match the flu strain that's circulating," Jha stated. "We're starting to do the same thing with the COVID shots. It's just your annual COVID shot at this point."

Marks fell in line with the status quo narrative in the Biden health agencies.

“Vaccination remains critical to public health and continued protection against serious consequences of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death,” he said. “The public can be assured that these updated vaccines have met the agency’s rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality. We very much encourage those who are eligible to consider getting vaccinated.”

On Friday, however, Marks was “pushed out,” the WSJ reported, after having been given “the choice to resign or be fired.”

“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 wrote in his resignation letter, referring to Kennedy in what sounds like an angry snit.

An unnamed HHS official responded to Marks’ tone with the following statement, according to the WSJ:

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.

The X account of @amuse took note of Marks’ lax response to the flood of adverse event reports tied to the COVID shots:

TrialSite News reported on the controversial Marks within the FDA bureaucracy from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to his current resignation:

While Dr. Peter Marks has been praised for his leadership in accelerating COVID-19 vaccine development, he has offered little public introspection about the government’s missteps during the pandemic. Under his oversight, the FDA’s CBER authorized vaccines under emergency use with limited to no long-term data, and faced criticism over transparency, adverse event monitoring, and handling of post-market safety signals.

Hematology, oncology, and epidemiology professor Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH also wrote about Marks at his column Saturday:

At FDA, Peter eventually became director of the Center for Biologics— overseeing vaccines and gene therapies. In this role, he made some of [the] biggest regulatory errors in the 21st century.

Without randomized data regarding clinical outcomes, he repeatedly approved COVID boosters for kids as young as 6 months.

Without randomized data he approved these boosters for individuals who recently had COVID.

Marks’ resignation comes amid Kennedy’s announcement of his intention to reform HHS. In his video post on X, Kennedy said he wanted to share “a paradox that I've encountered here in Washington, DC, as the new Secretary of HHS.”

“Our department is filled, for the most part, with competent, conscientious public servants,” the secretary said, noting that while HHS’ budget and staffing have experienced tremendous increases, “all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans”:

In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically. As our department has grown, our lifespan has dropped. So, Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans. We have the sickest nation in the world, and we have the highest rate of chronic disease. US ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more per capita than those nations. As Secretary, I now understand why all this money is not improving our health: HHS is a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees and other offices.

Kennedy said the massive bureaucracy of the agency has allowed responsibility and accountability to the health of the American people to be pushed to the wayside.

“In one case, defiant bureaucrats impeded the secretary's office from accessing the closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions,” the secretary described one horrific situation.

Nevertheless, the “good news,” that comes “as part of President Trump's DOGE workforce reduction initiative,” Kennedy said, is that HHS will become “more efficient and more effective.”

Eliminating “an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies” and “preserving their core functions” by combining them into the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA) will “save the taxpayer money” and “radically improve our quality of service,” he added.