An Anti-Science MAHA Extremist Is Playing a Major Role at the FDA

If there’s anything that Dr. Vinay Prasad, the controversial new appointee to lead the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, or CBER, a top office at the Food and Drug Administration, loves to do, it’s hurl an insult. 

Upon first glance, Prasad seems far more qualified than many other Trump appointees. He is a hematologist-oncologist and University of California at San Francisco professor who has amassed an unbelievable number of publications. But a quick visit to his now inactive Twitter/X page or his YouTube channel—which has almost 200,000 followers—quickly disproves that notion. 

Though he’s always been somewhat iconoclastic, since the beginning of the pandemic, Prasad has become a radical Covid contrarian, amassing a following for his rampant tell-it-like-it-isn’t views. Like a schoolyard bully, Prasad scuttles around the right-wing libertarian techbro corners of the internet, gleefully spreading misinformation in the basest terms possible, blocking many who disagree. 

A few examples: 

• On public health leadership: “These pieces of shit are still lying.… They’re still fucking lying.”
• On the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics: “The CDC lied repeatedly, and all the employees at CDC and AAP who told us to cloth mask 2 year olds should be fired for stupidity.” (AAP did not respond to my request for comment on Prasad’s appointment to CBER.)
• On people who wear masks to protect themselves from smoke inhalation during fires: “Masking without evidence is an untreated mental illness plaguing public health.”
• On long Covid: He has repeatedly downplayed it and called it “overblown.” He claimed that Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ed Yong “invent[ed] long Covid.” 
• On people with long Covid trying to avoid reinfection: “Haha double long covid. Just like double IPA!”
• On Covid testing, in June 2022: “Break every home test.… The testing profiteers are killing us.”
• On his online critics: “When you’re dead, no one will ever think about you ever again.”
• On Covid restrictions: He says they are akin to a path to Naziism. 
• And on the FDA, where he will hold a top role, just last year: “[We’d] probably be better off as a result of not having the FDA.” 

“I am very disappointed with this appointment,” a prominent physician and researcher, who did not give his name for fear of retribution, told me. “Prasad demonstrably got it repeatedly wrong during the pandemic. He is known for his contrarian views—which is not a bad thing if he got it right every once in a while, but he has a perfect record of striking out. What also worries me a great deal is his attitude toward patients and vulnerable populations; he has made multiple disparaging remarks toward patients with chronic illness.”

Prasad has advocated for more trials and testing of new medical treatments before approval, reversing approval for the pediatric Covid vaccination, and a let-it-rip mentality when it comes to kids getting repeatedly infected. As early as 2021, he advocated that kids knowingly get each other sick and that Covid testing be banned. In 2023, he wrote a post titled, “Do not report COVID cases to schools & do not test yourself if you feel ill: Only non-violent resistance can halt irrational public health actors.” He has repeatedly said masks were ineffective, contrary to mountains of evidence.

Though our public health institutions and the pharmaceutical industry certainly do deserve criticism, Prasad’s way of doing business actually undercuts the efforts of legitimate reformers to bring the industry’s bad actors to heel and unwind their worst policies. In this way, people like Prasad actually serve as the brilliant ally of these corporate interests, in that he helps to undermine the credibility of good-faith critics of the industry. More to the point, however, Prasad’s behavior reveals a psychopathic lack of empathy, and his conclusions are almost always shockingly wrong. As he wrote in January 2023:

It’s important to remember that it was likely a lab leak, masks don’t work, mandates didn’t work, vaccines were not needed in people who had COVID, nor children, closing school was a human rights violation, masking kids didn’t work, vaccine mandates were unethical, vaccine passports were useless, boosters don’t have good data, paxlovid doesn’t have good data, long COVID is overblown, et cetera. These are obvious things to those of us who can read.

Many of Prasad’s views that were seen as fringe in the earlier years of the pandemic, particularly around reopening schools, were slowly normalized during the Biden administration and have already informed policy, rather than science. Under the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, that will now go to extremes. 

“A lot of the anti-vax folks use specious arguments to push disinformation,” said Dr. Michael Hoerger, a Ph.D. researcher and top expert in tracking Covid data. “That works well on social media, but they are going to be under much more scrutiny in government positions.”

The fact that biotech stocks fell 5 percent within hours of the announcement of Prasad’s appointment to CBER is telling. As virologist Angela Rasmussen put it in a tweet, he is “seen as a menace to an entire industry.” 

Nicole Paulk, a biotech company CEO, elaborated in Citeline, a trade publication: “Based on [Prasad’s] books that he’s written and the tweets that he has shared, and podcast[s] that he has been on and all of these various public forums, it would seem to be that his position, kind of broadly regardless of modality is pretty anti-FDA, fairly anti-innovation, fairly anti-accelerated anything.” 

Case in point: Prasad has come out against the use of experimental treatments like Elevidys, a gene therapy that could help patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a fatal muscle-wasting disease, despite the fact that patient advocates favor its approval. 

Prasad’s appointment arrives in the context of an unprecedented dismantling of public health and research in this country, under the guise of MAHA.

With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, responsible public health policies as we know them are effectively  dead. Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” has gutted the National Institutes of Health, leaving it unable to carry out even its most basic duties and cutting off critical, lifesaving research. 

Anti-vaccine rhetoric is, of course, central to Kennedy’s MAHA agenda, and future vaccine research and availability is already under threat as kids are already dying of measles, completely unnecessarily. Experts have been pushed out of their posts, and a culture of fear is already pervading health institutions. 

“It is obvious that many doctors and scientists are self-censoring,” said Dr. Jonathan Howard, a neurologist at NYU Langone and author of the book We Want Them Infected, which chronicles how certain doctors came to embrace the anti-vaccine movement. “Given the purges at these agencies and vast canceling of grants, this is no surprise.” Indeed, a number of doctors to whom I reached out about Prasad’s appointment to head CBER either declined to comment or wished to remain anonymous. I did not receive responses from major medical associations I contacted, either.

Health initiatives related to the distinct outcomes for certain groups caught up in Trump’s war against “woke”—such as women—have been axed. Without research and data on future public health risks, such as bird flu, or current and ongoing ones like Covid-19, more people will get sick and die—and there’s only so long that the Trump administration can pretend it isn’t happening. That doesn’t mean it won’t try to hide such outcomes from the public view. Here, Prasad has signaled a willingness to participate in the cover-up: He seems to support the dangerous idea of blacking out critical data on Covid and other diseases. At their core, these policies constitute a basic disregard for human life.

The FDA is being dealt a similar fate. Critical programs ensuring food safety, as well as vaccine research, have been unceremoniously cut. Prasad replaces the former head of CBER at the FDA, Peter Marks, who resigned in March due to RFK Jr.’s spreading of “misinformation and lies.” Prasad, in his signature flippant tone, has compared Marks to “a bobblehead doll that just stamps approval.” Now Prasad serves under FDA director Martin Makary, a Trump lackey, while Jay Bhattacharya, another vociferous Covid critic, heads up NIH. All are part of the same contrarian clown show of dangerous anti-vax, anti-health MAGA bros loudly proclaiming their messages to audiences on X and YouTube—and now, the broader American public.

Though in his initial remarks to the FDA Prasad took on a more measured tone, FDA employees are panicking. STAT News reported that staff “were alarmed by the decision to hire Prasad, who lacks regulatory experience and has more explicitly political views than center directors in the past. ‘It’s very bad,’ one employee said. ‘Another completely unqualified person who has no idea what regulation is running an important center.’”

Under this leadership, Covid booster availability will likely be restricted and approval for vaccines tackling future variants could be limited or halted entirely. Though uptake for boosters was already low, hovering around 23 percent for the 2024–2025 vaccine, it is clear that making it less available and discouraging it will only cause harm to the population. “If boosters are not approved for next year, it’s hard to imagine that Covid’s impact would not disproportionately affect sick, vulnerable populations,” said Howard.

“Given prior comments downplaying the importance of vaccines, I am concerned about delays in vaccine approval,” added Hoerger. “Delays in vaccine approvals will cost lives.”