High-Level FDA Officials Quit Over Biden Administration Meddling

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Politicization has its costs. That’s the lesson being learned by the Biden administration today as two high-level FDA officials, both involved in the approval and distribution of the vaccines, have announced they are leaving their jobs due to meddling by the White House.

According to Endpoints News, Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, the Director and Deputy Director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccine Research and Review, will be leaving in October and November respectively.

Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research & Review and 32-year veteran of the agency, will leave at the end of October, and OVRR deputy director Phil Krause, who’s been at FDA for more than a decade, will leave in November.

But it’s the reason why they are exiting that has people questioning just how far gone other agencies like the CDC are in regards to their open shilling for the administration while forgoing a normal, scientific approach. According to the report, it was the decision by the White House to ignore the FDA and announce COVID vaccine booster shots that was the last straw here.

A former senior FDA leader told Endpoints that they’re departing because they’re frustrated that CDC and their ACIP committee are involved in decisions that they think should be up to the FDA. The former FDAer also said he’s heard they’re upset with CBER director Peter Marks for not insisting that those decisions should be kept inside FDA. What finally did it for them was the White House getting ahead of FDA on booster shots.

An original announcement had put COVID vaccine booster shots on an eight-month timeline, but Joe Biden decided to jump the gun and announce that officials were considering the shots after just five months. With that revelation came no actual information detailing why boosters are needed so soon, a move that likely only bred more distrust among the public.

Where was that decision coming from? According to the president, his comment arose from a conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is neither at the FDA nor the CDC.

This per Fortune:

Biden nonetheless said he talked with infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci about the possible timeline change earlier in the day, signaling his interest in studying the issue.

Putting all this together, it’s clear these high-level FDA officials left their key roles regarding the vaccines because there are way too many cooks in the kitchen.

In one corner, you have the CDC appearing to be thoroughly compromised by the White House, with guidelines often flying in the face of common sense and data (such as the decision to still not really recognize natural immunity). In another corner, you have Fauci doing his own thing, stepping on the authority of other agencies, and pretending he’s God’s gift to science. Then you have the FDA, which seems to have been mostly sidelined throughout the pandemic.

This is no way to run a country, and on a broader scale, it shows the issues with having these vast bureaucracies hold so much power. When even the World Health Organization is saying pump the brakes on boosters, maybe we should slow down a bit? But those in the White House have decided to chase a ghost in regards to trying to stop the spread. In my view, it’s become obvious that the spread is here to stay. The goal should then be to mitigate bad outcomes. That’s where the vaccines, natural immunity, and therapeutics come into play. But even the latter two of those things have become overtly politicized by the administration.

Given all this chaos, can you blame normal Americans for not trusting anything they are hearing from the government at this point?