What If the FDA Vaccine Chief Was Required to Be Someone with a Background in Vaccines?
Wouldn't that be nice? If the person responsible for evaluating vaccines was an expert in that field?
Photo via Unsplash, Diana Polekhina Splinter vaccines
Imagine, for just a moment, if the prerequisite to possessing a critical job in the Trump administration was having some kind of background or relevant experience in that field. This is perhaps an under-discussed element of how the Trump-era patronage system has affected us all, by so often thrusting inexperienced randos with obvious political mandates into important positions that have previously always been occupied by career civil servants or specialized leaders with extremely specific (and boringly competent) backgrounds and qualifications. Look, for instance, at the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been run in the second Trump administration, cycling through three directors so far, two of whom have had zero background in emergency management or disaster response, leaving the most ardent defender of the agency as the same senior official who claims he has experienced “teleportation” and had conversations with Satan. Given that state of affairs, is it any surprise to read that the supposed frontrunner to become the FDA’s new vaccine chief is an ophthalmologist with no relevant background in vaccines? It would be almost more surprising if he was specifically qualified.
The man in question is Dr. Houman Hemmati, a medical professional and regular FOX News guest who I’m sure knows quite a lot about the human eye given his specialization in retina therapeutics. Why he would be the front-runner for the role of the nation’s vaccine chief at the Food and Drug Administration, on the other hand, is an open question, but he’s currently in exactly that position according to “people familiar with the matter” speaking confidentially with reporters from NBC News. Perhaps it could have something to do with the fact that Hemmati also has an RFK Jr.-approved history of criticizing the U.S. government’s COVID-19 vaccine response? Aha, now we’re getting to the true potential qualifications, like the praise that Hemmati offered up on Twitter last year for the FDA’s decision to stop recommending the COVID-19 vaccine for children and pregnant women, or his many appearances offering pseudoscientific health advice or criticizing Trump enemies on Fox News. For as we all know, there are few routes more effective in securing employment within the Trump administration than blind, servile praise of those in power.
That said, no appointment has yet been made official, with Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon saying the following to NBC: “No decision has been made on the selection of the next CBER director. We continue to vet highly qualified candidates.”
What this headline doesn’t tell ya is this eye doctor is a Fox News regular.
They seriously can’t stop proving the Fox News Contributor To Trump Admin Official Pipeline allegations.
CBER is the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which is the division responsible for vetting and ensuring the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and gene therapies currently being developed–the director of that division is frequently just referred to as the FDA’s “vaccine chief.” The outgoing director is Dr. Vinay Prasad, who had quite the drama-tinged double tour of duty at HHS in his year or so on the job, stepping down for a few weeks last July after disputes and controversy centered on the FDA’s decision to stop shipments of a gene therapy drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Since leaving the job and then returning to it, Prasad’s tenure has been a lightning rod for controversy as he embraced various RFK Jr.-style vaccine skeptic positions and had a hand in causing the FDA to delay or reject specific treatments for diseases, such as a new treatment for a rare blood cancer, or the rejection of Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine from review. On the latter, the FDA then reversed course and said it would review the new flu vaccine after all, seemingly caving to public outcry. Because that’s also what you want from the Food and Drug Administration: For it to ultimately reflect the will of an angry and easily influenced Facebook commentariat, rather than that of scientific consensus.
Perhaps most infamously, Dr. Vinay Prasad authored a memo in November claiming–without bothering to cite the specific examples or explain what the fuck he was talking about–that the COVID vaccine had killed at least 10 children, and that “we do not have reliable data” on whether the vaccine is safe for healthy children. In doing so, he conveniently ignored the Centers for Disease Control’s own research indicating that yes, the vaccine was effective at protecting against serious illness in children. Prasad, meanwhile, used his own memo as justification for narrowing the approval of COVID-19 vaccine boosters to exclusively adults 65 and older, or “people at risk of severe illness.” At the same time, both the FDA and CDC have stepped in to delay the publishing of more studies that demonstrate the same vaccine’s protective effects.
Vinay Prasad, another MAHA censor, did the same thing.
— Jonathan Howard (@joho.bsky.social) Apr 9, 2026 at 10:00 AM
At least Prasad, however, hailed from a background in epidemiology as a professor at the University of California, San Francisco–he could claim to have worked in a relevant field to approving vaccines. That made him far more qualified to comment on the future of American medicine than so many of the others in the orbit of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the saddest and most defeated man in the entire Trump administration. Lest we forget, RFJ Jr. kicked off his tenure as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services by completely remaking the CDC’s critical Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, firing all 17 existing members of the committee when he took office and then filling it with all his own hand-picked lackeys. Anyone who objected, Kennedy fired, including the first CDC director he appointed, Susan Monarez, who went on the record saying that she had been fired by Kennedy “for refusing to approve any changes to vaccine recommendations without first seeing the scientific evidence behind them.” The newly assembled committee, meanwhile, was made up almost entirely by people with no background in vaccine science, but that didn’t stop them from immediately attempting to reduce the slate of recommended childhood vaccines on the schedule from 17 to 11, cutting out protection against illnesses such as hepatitis B and measles. A federal judge was eventually forced to step in, completely reversing everything that the committee had done over the course of the last year, observing that the changes they had made to the childhood vaccine schedule in particular had been “arbitrary and capricious,” and not based on science.
RFK Jr.’s goals at the CDC, in fact, have been so thoroughly defeated by the courts that he’s reportedly struggling to get anyone to even consider taking the CDC director job.
It Appears RFK Jr. Is Having Trouble Finding Anyone To Take The CDC Director Job
All the way back in August of 2025, RFK Jr. made the extraordinary decision to fire his own CDC Director, Susan Monarez, after only a few weeks on the job. Kennedy claimed at the time that he fired Monarez because she…
— Techdirt (@techdirt.com) Mar 30, 2026 at 11:09 PM
In fact, the most constantly repeating aspect of the various health agencies under the HHS banner is that they’ve all been thrown into a permanent state of chaos in the RFK Jr. era, almost always bereft of stable leadership. The CDC has cycled through three directors and more deputy directors, with some lasting less than a month. The National Institutes of Health have been similarly rocked by endless waves of terminations, resignations, retirements and “temporary” leaders. Even Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ follow-up to Dr. Anthony Fauci, found herself suing the government after saying that RFK Jr. had wrongfully fired her for daring to defend the existing vaccine schedule.
“I spoke up because the decisions by HHS leadership have put the public’s health at risk and wasted billions of dollars –actions that will have devastating consequences for Americans’ safety and wellbeing for decades to come,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo in her statement. “I was fired for calling this out, but I will not stay silent. This lawsuit is about protecting not just my right to expose abuse and fraud by our government, but those rights for all federal employees, so we can safeguard essential public health priorities and the integrity of scientific research.”
So yeah, the news that the FDA is potentially preparing to put yet another unqualified “vaccine skeptic” and RFK Jr. stooge into the agency’s single most important vaccine-related role at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research is probably something to be met with a healthy dose of derision. Not that I can blame a guy for taking advantage of the benefits of lackeyhood–when opportunity knocks, you clearly must answer, even if in doing so you risk making the health of millions upon millions of Americans measurably worse in the process.
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