Vinay Prasad. Image: Vinay Prasad website
Vinay Prasad. Image: Vinay Prasad website
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a fanatic who has hired other fanatics such as Vinay Prasad to carry out an ideological assault on the healthcare of more than 300 million Americans.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Most of the shenanigans and just plain idiocy involve this guy, Vinay Prasad, an RFK Jr. acolyte who currently heads up the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. It’s necessary to use the word “currently” in the above sentence, because you just never know what’s going to happen next with him. Earlier this year, Prasad was forced to resign his post after Laura Loomer—you just knew she’d be involved—went after him as a “progressive leftist saboteur” shortly after he placed a hold on a drug to treat muscular dystrophy “for safety reasons.” Prasad is “a Marxist Trojan Horse,” Loomer wrote in one of several posts attacking him.
Prasad stayed out of that job for two weeks, before being welcomed back to the RFK Jr. fold after unnamed “experts” determined that Loomer had been fronting for a drug manufacturer, Serepta Therapeutics, which manufactured the muscular dystrophy drug in question and stood to lose millions in sales because of Prasad’s decision to suspend usage of the drug. Conservative activists who pay attention to the fine-print ins and outs of who is funding who in their sphere of activism went after Loomer with boots on. Ned Ryun, one of the fine-tooth nitpickers on the Right, addressed Loomer directly on X, “The fact of the matter is you got funded by Sarepta Therapeutics to take Vinay out; probably thru a middleman for deniability but still pharma money funding it all.” Antonia Hitchens wrote in the New Yorker about a conversation she had with “a veteran political operative” at Ned’s Club, a members-only “lounge” frequented by Trump administration figures like Karoline Leavitt. Loomer, the right-wing operator, told Hitchens, is a “pay-to-play Tasmanian devil” who creates “total anarchy and a wide blast zone” with her attacks on figures such as Prasad.
It would almost be possible to feel sorry for Prasad until you have a look at his latest moves at the FDA, doubtlessly at the behest of his boss, Kennedy. Yesterday he announced a series of FDA decisions that will seriously affect access to childhood vaccines. Prasad is going to change the way vaccines are approved by requiring pharmaceutical companies to run much larger studies than are required now. The Washington Post reported that Prasad’s announcement will require that “pneumonia vaccine makers must demonstrate that their products reduce pneumonia rather than just generate antibodies to fight infections.”
This is in line with attacks on COVID vaccines that have been made by RFK Jr., that they do not prevent the disease from occurring but only reduce its severity once contracted. Which is like saying that the effectiveness of automobile brakes must be questioned because they don’t prevent crashes, they only serve to make them less likely and not as deadly when they occur.
Prasad has also ordered studies that will question whether multiple vaccines can be given at the same time, the common method for vaccinating children according to schedules that were previously approved by the FDA and pediatric specialists. Older Americans have been encouraged to receive vaccines for COVID, flu, RSV and pneumonia at the same time, cutting down the number of visits the elderly must make to doctor’s offices. That practice will come under scrutiny by the order Prasad issued yesterday.
What all of Prasad’s orders have in common is their connection to the anti-vaccine views long held by his boss, RFK Jr., who has been questioning the efficacy and safety of childhood vaccines for decades, as well as attacking the COVID vaccine as “the most deadly vaccine in history.” Prasad also announced that his office had conducted its own study of COVID vaccines and concluded that they had “contributed” to the deaths of 10 children between the years of 2021 and 2024. During these years, no fewer than one billion COVID shots were administered to Americans, saving millions of lives according to studies that the FDA is now busy questioning. At least 100 million COVID vaccine shots were given to children during that time.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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