The brain worm ...

Dr. Peter Marks Photo: Stephen Voss for WSJ

The brain worm, aka Robert Kennedy Jr., who runs HHS, is leading his agency into the dark ages with his push against vaccines and science promising to kill people in the months and years ahead, is beginning to happen with the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas. To this writer, it's going to get worse as HHS was the leading light in medical research and the watch dog for the world in terms of whether drugs produced by big pharma were safe for the public to take, something fading away under the auspices of a an individual totally unqualified to run anything as complex and sophisticated as HHS in any way, shape or fashion.

The top vaccine regulator ousted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the health secretary’s team has sought nonexistent data to justify antivaccine narratives and pushed to water down regulation of unproven stem-cell treatments.

“I can never give allegiance to anyone else other than to follow the science as we see it,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration official. “That does not mean that I can just roll over and take conspiracy theories and justify them.” 

Marks, who is leaving his FDA post on Saturday after he was offered the choice to resign or be fired, described Kennedy’s tenure to date as “very scary” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday. 

“They broke something without real plans to fix it, because the people who were doing the breaking didn’t have any idea,” he said. “They took the place apart without having an instruction manual of how to put it back together.”

Marks oversaw the FDA department that evaluated whether immunizations—as well as biotech drugs for cancer and other diseases—worked safely and should go into use. In the first Trump administration, he was central to setting up the Operation Warp Speed effort to speed development of Covid-19 vaccines. A “Star Trek fan,” he helped name the effort.

His expertise and steady hand was prized by the pharmaceutical industry, which has been concerned about Kennedy’s antivaccine rhetoric and had urged the White House to keep Marks.

Kennedy has also hired a researcher beloved by antivaccine activists to study a possible link between vaccines and autism—a link that other studies have concluded doesn’t exist. 

The outgoing FDA official said he had been speaking out and encouraging parents to vaccinate their children against measles as cases mount in Texas, where a child is shown getting an MMR vaccine. 

Photo Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images