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Most Oklahoma cases have reported domestic exposure, with only one reporting international exposure potential during their incubation period.
Jay Bhattacharya [00:00:08]
It’s been an education in many ways. It would be normally difficult to lead an agency of 20,000 people and 50 billion, Rob.
But, the main thing for me is we will have to restore gold standard science, to this agency. We have to restore the focus on making America healthy. And we have to make sure that we don’t ever use this agency to conduct research that puts the American people in danger the way that the research on gain function, that the previous sort of leadership of the agency sponsored, we have to make sure that that never happens again.
And with this executive order by the president, that gives me the tools to do that for sure.
…
Jay Bhattacharya [00:04:04]
There’s no more beagles on campus, for experiments. There’s no more dog experiments on the NIH campus.
And we put in a place a new policy that strongly encourages alternatives to animal use, not just here on campus, but all across the country, in the grants we support.
Often what happens is you run an experiments on a mouse, and it’s misleading. We can cure Alzheimer’s in a mouse, but that doesn’t translate over to humans.
We’re going to change that so that we’re focused more on things that actually translate into human health.
Robert F Kennedy Jr [00:04:00]
That is an issue for us. It’s mainly a cost issue. These drugs are very expensive.
Ozempic is sold for about $1,300 a month. And in Europe, by the way, and England, you can get it for $88 or $88 a dose. We pay 1,300 a dose, a weekly dose.
And, if we made that so that Medicaid, Medicare paid for it, it would– and that private insurance companies had to pay for it, we would double the cause of health insurance to most employers in this country. And that would really be destructive.
So these are miracle drugs in many ways, as you point out, if you can reduce obesity, you’re also reducing diabetes and heart disease and a lot of other comorbidities. And it’s something that could be very beneficial to the Amer– to many people in the American population.
And right now the big impediment is really price. And we’re negotiating that with the drug companies and seeing if we can at least launch some pilot programs, or if we can get the price low enough, we can make it available at government cost to everybody.
…
Robert F Kennedy Jr [00:10:24]
And we’re going to have a very, very comprehensible– the dietary guidelines that we got from the Biden administration that we inherited were 453 pages long, and they were incomprehensible and they were really just a template for industry capture for promoting bad foods that people should not be eating.
We’re going to have a very simple– I’ve asked them for a four page guideline that can tell people to eat whole foods, eat meat, eat protein, eat vegetables and fruits, and try to eat locally, try to find local sources of your food.
And then we’re going to make that very comprehensible and that’s going to change the school lunch program. And I think it’s going to have a dramatic impact on public health in this country, particularly for our children.
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to inform you of the appointment of Vinayak “Vinay” Kashyap Prasad, M.D., M.P.H., as the new director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER).
Dr. Prasad, whose specialty is hematology and oncology, has a long and distinguished history in medicine, having worked in a variety of public scientific, medical, and academic institutions at both the federal and state level. He comes to the FDA from The University of California at San Francisco, where he has served since 2020 as a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Before that, Dr. Prasad was a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology and the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University.
Before entering academia, Dr. Prasad worked at the National Cancer Institute, where he completed a Fellowship in Cancer Prevention, and concurrently was a Fellow in Hematology and Oncology at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Prasad has published more than 500 academic articles, done extensive research in the field of oncology and has presented at hundreds of scientific and medical conferences. He is also the author of the books, “Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer” and “Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives.” He also hosted the oncology podcast Plenary Session and ran The Drug Development Letter.
Dr. Prasad graduated from Michigan State University with a B.S. in Physiology and Philosophy. He received his M.D. from the University of Chicago Division of Biological Sciences Pritzker School of Medicine, with an Internship and Residency in Internal Medicine at Northwestern University, and a Masters Degree in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
He brings a great set of skills, energy, and competence to the FDA, and I know that he is eager to begin immersing himself in the important work of CBER and the agency as a whole.
I want to thank Scott Steele for serving as Acting Director of CBER. Scott will continue to work to ensure a smooth transition in leadership and will resume his previous position in CBER as Senior Advisor for Translational Science.
I hope you will join me in congratulating Dr. Prasad on his selection to this important post and thanking Dr. Steele for his excellent work as Acting Director.
Sincerely,
Marty
Martin A. Makary, M.D., M.P.H.
Commissioner of Food and Drugs
Robert F Kennedy Jr [19:29:07]
President Trump has not cut the 9/11 program.
We took that program and we took a lot of OSHA, and there was also a lot of complaints that we ended OSHA, but we’ve just consolidated that in a new sub agency called the Administration for Healthier America.
Those programs were not terminated, as the media has reported. But they’ve simply been consolidated into a place that makes more sense.
…
Robert F Kennedy Jr [19:31:23]
One of the problems that we’ve had at CDC and NIH and FDA has been a kind of data chaos, and particularly around the issue of autism where they don’t even– don’t not only– not only do they not understand and they can’t tell us the etiology, the origins of why are we having an epidemic, but they deny an epidemic exists.
And even though every year the numbers go up, we’ve gone one in 10,000 in 1970, to one in every 31 kids today. In California, which has the best database, it is one in every 20 children. One in every 12.5 boys.
This is an existential disease. Every other disease like this has a registry. So that – and it’s voluntary – so that public health officials can monitor the numbers.
It’s not private information. It’s not information that is going to go out to other agencies.
It’s a voluntary system where your privacy is protected. Just a system for keeping track of a disease that is now becoming debilitating to the American people.
President Trump [00:02:39]
We’re going to have a big announcement next week on some of this kind of thing, but more related to costs, the costs of medicines and drugs. Because we’re being ripped off as you know, very badly, being ripped off compared to the rest of the world.
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Jay Bhattacharya [00:08:10]
This is a historic day, the conduct of this dangerous gain of function research, which aims at taking pathogens and making them more virulent, more transmissible in humans, many scientists believe is responsible for the COVID pandemic.
The conduct of this research does not protect us against pandemics. As some people might say. It doesn’t protect us against other other nations.
What it does is it– there’s always a danger that in doing this research, it might leak out just by accident even, and cause a pandemic.
Any nation that engages in this research endangers their own population, as well as the world, as we saw during the COVID pandemic.
This proclamation makes it so that most science is actually– has poses no threat to human populations. The vast majority of science will go on under this as normal.
But the fraction of this research that has the risk of causing a pandemic, harming every single person on the face of the earth, we’re going to put in – this proclamation, this executive order puts in place a framework to make sure that the public has a say that if such a risk is being taken, that only scientists alone, won’t be able to decide that that in fact, the public can say, no, don’t take this risk.
And I’m really, really proud to be here with President Trump, who has signed this order, ending this research for the first time, putting in place a real regulatory framework to make it go away forever.
…
Robert F Kennedy Jr [00:10:10]
There are, I think, three leaks from BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs, our highest rated laboratories almost every week.
There’s no laboratory that does this, right. There’s no laboratory that’s immune from leaks, and this is going to prevent those kind of inadvertent leaks from happening in the future and endangering humanity.
The COVID outbreak cost 20 million lives and cost the world at least 25 trillion dollars.
And this executive order is a precaution against us being involved in those, that kind of research, in the future.
…
Marty Makary [00:15:47]
We have had this crazy system in the United States where American pharma manufacturers in the United States are put through the ringer with inspections and the foreign sites get off easy with scheduled visits, while we have surprise visits in the United States. While a scheduled visit is no inspection.
So we are at the FDA delivering on this promise in the president’s executive order and switching from announced to surprise inspections overseas.
We’re also not going to have our inspectors hanging out for three or four weeks. They’re going to get in and out, and we’re going do more inspections with the same resources as a result.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) remains fully committed to supporting American families and delivering critical services as part of its reorganization to better serve the nation’s health.
Guided by President Trump’s Executive Order, the Department’s restructuring is focused on cutting wasteful bureaucracy, eliminating duplicative administrative roles, and allowing HHS to redirect resources where they’re most needed—delivering better outcomes for the American people.
As part of the standard union negotiated process, HHS issued specific notice on Friday to approximately 700 employees, who were previously notified of a RIF. These notices provide important details to employees including their full information, giving them important information about their planned offboarding date set for July.
After careful review, less than 250 employees across HHS were notified that they are also impacted by the reduction in force announced in March 2025. […] The savings from these reductions will help redirect resources toward critical programs and strengthen our ability to serve the American people effectively. The goal is clear: reduce waste and maximize the impact of every taxpayer dollar.
The simple fact is that the important work of serving the American people will continue without disruption. Because of the reorganization, HHS will be better positioned to meet the needs of those who count on us most.
However, the same number of employees will be brought back in critical areas
We look at the trends over time and we’d want to see several weeks of decline. New cases sometimes get reported to public health up to a week after someone was tested, especially if the test was done at a commercial lab. We are also watching to see if travel over the long Easter holiday weekend results in an increase in new cases. Cases from travel that weekend would likely start to be reported in the next week or two.
On background to an HHS spox: The CDC continues to recommend measles vaccination as the most effective way to prevent the disease. At the same time, we recognize that some individuals and communities across the U.S. may choose not to vaccinate. Our commitment is to support all families—regardless of their vaccination status—in reducing the risk of hospitalization, serious complications, and death from measles.
Secretary Kennedy will be enlisting the entire agency to activate a scientific process to treat a host of diseases, including measles, with single or multiple existing drugs in combination with vitamins and other modalities. This effort will involve collaboration with universities nationwide to develop protocols, conduct testing, and pursue approval for new uses of safe and effective therapeutics that meet the highest scientific standards.
Generation Gold Standard marks a critical step in restoring strategic focus and radical transparency to America’s pandemic preparedness. Developed entirely by government scientists—free from industry influence—the BPL vaccine platform could provide broad, long-lasting protection against all influenza viral pathogens, including influenza and coronaviruses, with the added potential to block transmission and stop outbreaks at the source.
This initiative realigns BARDA with its core mission: preparing for all flu viral pathogens, not just COVID-19. It delivers a cost-effective, accountable alternative to the Biden administration’s wasteful Project NextGen, which spent $1.63 billion on COVID-19 vaccines and $1.19 billion on therapeutics, neglecting broader pandemic preparedness.
Secretary Kennedy’s HHS has pledged radical transparency to the American public. This means being honest and straightforward about what we know — and what we don’t know — about medical products, including vaccines. The CDC’s former practice of suppressing information about vaccine injuries has badly eroded trust in our public health agencies.
Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, all new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices. Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products.
The CDC’s own research has shown that the post-licensure surveillance system, VAERS, captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries. It’s a system that was designed to fail. The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) — intended as a backup to VAERS — is virtually unusable for serious research. Both systems have become templates of regulatory malpractice.
HHS is now building surveillance systems that will accurately measure vaccine risks as well as benefits — because real science demands both transparency and accountability.