Five years ago, working in Portland, Dr. Vinay Prasad was throwing stones from the side of the road. Now he is behind the wheel — heading a pivotal science program for the Trump administration.
Prasad, a former Oregon Health & Science University assistant professor, has been a vocal critic of the medical establishment as well as public health officials’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Tuesday, he was named director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. That means he oversees the agency’s vaccines division.
The oncologist left Oregon to take a job with the University of California-San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, where he’s continued to be a prolific writer, blogger, podcaster and YouTube host. (His bio says he joined the California university in 2020, but OHSU says his last day as an employee was in 2021.)
He’s published two well-received books, one with a coauthor, that take aim at questionable science and profit motives in cancer care.
Once a darling of the left and of health care journalists for his critiques of bad science employed by the pharmaceutical industry, his skepticism of vaccines and masking have made him popular on the other end of the spectrum, as well as a polarizing figure in the scientific community.
In his most recent YouTube episode, from April 17, he described Harvard University as “completely deranged,” and “far, far left, woke.” He also applauded the administration’s aim of cutting 50 percent of the budget for the federal Centers for Disease Control, which oversaw the nation’s response to the pandemic.
FDA commissioner Marty Makary told FDA staff in an email that Prasad, “brings a great set of skills, energy, and competence to the FDA,” Axios reported.
Rose to prominence in Oregon
Prasad was recruited to OHSU in 2015 by researcher Dr. Brian Druker, then the head of OHSU’s Knight Cancer Institute, and Dr. Tomasz Beer, then deputy chief, according to a 2017 article in The Oregonian. He was described in the story as a researcher who was making waves with his criticisms of the industry. At the time, he had launched a private grant-funded research project into ineffectual medical practices. He said at the time he estimates that 40 percent of what doctors do doesn't work or causes harm.
On his website, Prasad said he has published 500 studies. The Lund Report has highlighted a few of them, including one in 2015 that challenged the media’s frequent use of superlative terms to describe new cancer drugs. Another in 2018 decried the lack of supporting evidence when regulators approve off-label drugs to treat cancer.
In a story published on the OHSU website in 2016, Prasad told the writer “medical students definitely should graduate knowing how to think critically, evaluate a paper, and how to interpret statistics. The more you practice medicine, it becomes less about memorization and more about critical thinking.”
His prominence was fueled by his embrace of social media to criticize people he disagreed with. On Substack he says many of the journalists today are “illiterate” or “idiots.”
At the FDA, Prasad replaces Dr. Peter Marks, who resigned in March after saying Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” according to NPR, which obtained his letter of resignation. Kennedy, whose skepticism about vaccines has made him controversial, narrowly won confirmation in the Senate in February.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, last summer, Prasad retweeted an FDA announcement about an emergency authorization of an updated COVID-19 vaccine by saying “The only 'emergency' America still faces with covid-19 is that regulators like Peter Marks are either incompetent or corrupt to authorize a booster without clinical, randomized data.”
