WSJ: Trump's new FDA pick is a disaster

U.S. President Donald Trump salutes, during the annual National Memorial Day Observance in the Memorial Amphitheater, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., May 26, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon who gained international attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for his opposition to vaccine mandates. On paper, Makary seems like a great choice for the job, but a conservative newspaper is reporting “soap opera”-level drama associated with his tenure.

“Has any Trump administration official caused more political headaches for the president than Marty Makary?” wrote Allysia Finley of The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “His Food and Drug Administration has turned into a soap opera, with real lives hanging in the balance.”

To illustrate this point, Finley described how "in public interviews, [Makary] boasts about accelerating access to gene therapies and rare-disease drugs, even as he and his deputies block them." Describing Makary as “slicker than a pharmaceutical salesman,” the Journal reporter observed that “my sources say that patience with Dr. Makary is wearing thin among Republicans in Congress and White House officials."

Since taking office, Makary has rejected rare-disease and cancer drugs, a gene therapy for Huntington’s Disease and various other medicines that had demonstrably improved or even saved lives. He has also been accused of allowing conflicts of interest to override his detached clinical judgment.

“Members of Congress are also investigating whistleblower complaints of retaliation by agency leadership against FDA staff who have recommended approvals of drugs with which Dr. Makary and his left-hand man, Vinay Prasad, disagreed,” Finley reported. “Dr. Prasad is a Bernie Sanders acolyte whom the commissioner tapped to lead the FDA’s biologics and gene-therapy division.”

Finley also quoted a Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as saying that “the stories are so outrageous. It just appears that they're looking for excuses to say no." Johnson also reported rumors that the FDA has kept a “blacklist” of companies that “make too much noise.”

Finely concluded, "It's time for Mr. Trump to pull the plug on the Makary show."

Although not mentioned in her editorial, the FDA is also under fire for seeming to pull back from its responsibilities to protect food. Under Makary’s tenure, the FDA announced it would no longer engage in routine food inspections, describing that job as superfluous and instead arguing federal inspectors should offload all of those responsibilities to local authorities.

"There's so much work to go around. And us duplicating their work just doesn't make sense," a former FDA official explained to CBS News at the time.

The FDA has also been criticized for incorrectly saying that COVID vaccines have caused child deaths, a policy that Dr. Celine Grounder of KFF Health News denounced for allegedly endangering the public.

“What is unfolding inside the FDA is not a narrow dispute over covid vaccines,” Grounder argued. “It is an attempt, according to critics and vaccine scientists, to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. vaccine system — how risks are weighed, how benefits are proved, and how quickly lifesaving shots reach the public.”

Grounder concluded, “Former agency leaders warn that if these changes take hold, the consequences could be lasting: fewer vaccines, slower updates, weakened public trust, and more preventable outbreaks.”

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