OPINION:
America’s biotech leadership is the envy of the world, driven by President Trump’s bold vision and a regulatory environment that puts patients and innovation first. That’s all being undermined in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where a self-proclaimed progressive who openly admits to being an “anti-Trumper” has consolidated unprecedented power over America’s vaccine and gene therapy approvals.
While Mr. Trump champions the “Make American Biotech Accelerate” (MABA) initiative to maintain American dominance in biotechnology, Dr. Vinay Prasad is systematically working to dismantle the regulatory pathways that made the United States the world’s biotechnology leader. A liberal California academic and outspoken critic of accelerated drug approvals, he now occupies three of the agency’s most powerful scientific positions.
The evidence of Dr. Prasad’s anti-Trump identity is overwhelming. He has described himself as a “lifelong Democrat” and, unsurprisingly, has opened his wallet to fund Democrats running for office while attacking Trump administration policies at every turn. He called Mr. Trump “the worst president we’ve had in the history of the Republic,” trashed Trump’s supporters, and admitted he disagrees with Trump on “probably 90% of issues.”
Moreover, he openly boasts about voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020, and he supports every radical leftist policy in the book: single-payer health care, wealth taxes, student loan bailouts, open borders, abortion on demand and affirmative action quotas. Now, incredibly, he has managed to gain control of the offices that oversee the programs he spent years trying to dismantle.
Dr. Prasad’s record is a laundry list of liberal sabotage. He has trashed efforts to speed up FDA approvals, saying reviews should be more difficult, not easier. He’s warned that Republican pressure to accelerate cures would worsen the situation. He was one of the only cancer doctors in the country to attack Janet Woodcock, a Trump-era FDA leader who fast-tracked cancer cures for dying patients, calling her “acceptive of lax standards.” He fought against the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act, which was designed to get treatments to patients faster, predicting that “Ten years from now, someone with a cancer diagnosis will be worse off with this bill.”
Dr. Prasad even attacked the Right to Try law, a signature accomplishment of the president’s first term, claiming that Mr. Trump was “incorrect” to say dying patients couldn’t access experimental treatments. If that were not bad enough, he then blamed the pharmaceutical industry, rather than the FDA, for blocking access.
An affinity for central planning is the hallmark of progressive thinking. Dr. Prasad’s FDA is moving away from the America First principle of trusting parents and doctors to make medical decisions back toward the failed Obama-Biden approach, which lets unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats decide who gets a chance at life. He wants the government to define what counts as “effective” or “appropriate” and force families to beg for permission from unelected elites in Washington.
Dr. Prasad’s rise is an example of what Mr. Trump means when he refers to “the deep state.” He is a careerist insider, left-wing ideologue working from within to hollow out the president’s biotech revolution by ceding administrative and regulatory power back to the bureaucrats and the woke elite. Mr. Trump should remove him from his posts before he pushes his personal, anti-MAGA agenda any further, causing irreparable harm to the American biotech industry.
Every day Dr. Prasad remains in office, he’s apt to betray the interests of the millions of Americans who trusted Mr. Trump to populate the federal government with appointees working to advance his policies, not repudiate them. There was enough of that in the first term.
President Trump’s legacy depends on the faithful execution of his vision, not internal subversion by operatives fundamentally opposed to everything MAGA represents, especially the right of patients to choose.
• Peter Roff is a journalist and commentator who has contributed to various media outlets. He is also a political analyst, a former UPI and U.S. News & World Report columnist now affiliated with several public policy organizations. You can reach him at RoffColumns@gmail.com and follow him on social media @TheRoffDraft.
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