By Stacy M. Brown
BlackPressUSA.com Senior National Correspondent
Thousands of federal health employees faced sudden job losses Tuesday as mass firings and forced resignations swept through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under a new directive from the Trump administration. According to Endpoints News, some FDA staffers arriving at the agency’s White Oak campus in Maryland discovered their employment had ended when their security badges failed to activate. Guards then escorted them to gather their belongings. Witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described a chaotic atmosphere as longtime employees were abruptly cut loose.
Those escorted out included individuals who had accepted buyouts and retirement packages, leaving them all the more perplexed and concerned about whether the Trump administration will keep its word on the separation agreements. “This is confusing,” said one individual who previously accepted a retirement package and was told their last day would be later in April. “Do I need a lawyer?” the individual wondered. Among the affected was Dr. Peter Stein, director of the Office of New Drugs at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Stein said he was presented with a reassignment to a newly created position in “patient affairs” — or the option to leave. He rejected the offer, calling it “ridiculous,” and was placed on administrative leave.
The sweeping changes will affect roughly 3,500 FDA employees — nearly one-fifth of the agency’s workforce. The Biden-era leadership structure is being dismantled under the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has installed new personnel and removed several high-ranking officials, including those working on cancer therapies and biologics. Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official and longtime director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, also resigned. He cited what he described as a dangerous erosion of public trust in science under Kennedy’s leadership. “If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy,” an HHS spokesperson said.
Marks, who led the FDA’s biologics division since 2016, played a central role in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He oversaw emergency use authorizations for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and was instrumental in Operation Warp Speed — the Trump administration’s public-private partnership to develop and distribute vaccines. In his resignation letter to acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner, Marks condemned what he called the promotion of misinformation from the agency’s top levels. “Undermining confidence in vaccines is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety, and security,” he wrote.
Marks said he had initially hoped to collaborate with Kennedy on efforts to improve vaccine transparency but became disillusioned. “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary,” Marks wrote. “Rather, he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic, has questioned the safety of widely used immunizations and filed a 2021 petition to revoke FDA authorization of COVID-19 vaccines, calling them the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” He has also made misleading claims about the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that it “does cause deaths every year.”
According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, no deaths have been linked to the MMR vaccine in healthy individuals. The vaccine is not recommended for immunocompromised individuals. Marks’ resignation also pointed to the current measles outbreak in the U.S., which is especially severe in Texas, as a direct consequence of the growing distrust in science. “The ongoing multistate measles outbreak that is particularly severe in Texas reminds us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined,” Marks wrote. “Measles, which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia owing to pneumonitis and encephalitis caused by the virus, had been eliminated from our shores.”
