On the original sin of Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA's (former) chief vaccine regulator

He promoted the $100 billion Covid jabs he was responsible for overseeing as a neutral regulator - and pushed them on kids. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was right to send him packing.

Dr. Peter Marks still doesn’t get it.

On Friday, facing imminent firing, Marks quit as the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator.¹

Media outlets quickly received Marks’s resignation letter (gee, I wonder who gave it to them?). It blamed the Trump administration for its “assault on scientific truth” and detailed all Marks had done for The Science (TM) in his 13 years at FDA.

What moment of service did Marks recall most fondly? Glad you asked! His work developing mRNA Covid jabs in Operation Warp Speed, of course.

Let’s stop right there.

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(Actually, let’s not stop. Let’s get to the truth. With your help.)

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Pretend, for a moment, the mRNA vaccines had actually ended Covid.

Pretend they hadn’t caused serious short-term side effects in hundreds of millions of people — fevers, headaches and nausea more serious than Covid for many recipients.

Pretend they didn’t cause myocarditis and other cardiovascular problems that killed or hospitalized tens of thousands of young men worldwide. Or autoimmune disorders, including hepatitis, psoriasis, and even Type 1 diabetes.

Pretend mRNA technology had led to many other new vaccines, instead of repeatedly failing in trials. Pretend Moderna stock is not down almost 95 percent since 2021.

Most of all, pretend scientists are not still finding new potential risks from the shots.²

In other words, pretend the mRNA jabs had worked, rather than being among the worst hype jobs in medical history, with dangers we still don’t fully understand.

Even then Dr. Peter Marks would have been wrong to brag about his role in bringing them to market. He would have been wrong to write in his resignation hymn to himself of his “privilege of watching the vision that I conceived for Operation Warp Speed in March 2020 in collaboration with Dr. Robert Kadlec become a reality.”

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Why?

Because it was Marks’s job to regulate the mRNA shots.

More than anyone else in the United States government, he decided whether to approve them. Of course, Marks didn’t have the final say. He reported to the FDA commissioner, who served at the pleasure of the president. But his voice mattered more than anyone else’s.

In fact, in fall 2020, when Democrats raised concerns the Trump administration would rush to approve vaccines (before the Biden Administration took over and mRNA shots became the holy of holies), reporters pointed to Marks as an independent bulwark.

“The decision on whether or not to authorize a vaccine will fall on Marks,” ProPublica wrote on September 26, 2020, in an article titled “How To Tell a Political Stunt From a Real Vaccine.”

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In 2020, the mRNA vaccines were on trial. Marks was the judge, the frontline judge hearing the case.

Only he was judging his own work.

Marks should never - never! - have involved himself with Covid vaccine development.

As soon as he did, he ensured that the FDA would not evaluate the shots independently. The fact that he did so even though Pfizer and Moderna made clear that they intended to profit on the jabs at taxpayer expense only worsened the problem.

His involvement also furthered the perception that Covid was a unique public health emergency where normal rules did not apply. Governments at every level took advantage of that fear to justify lockdowns and school closures and other illegal and unconstitutional measures.

In November 2020, when Pfizer and Moderna reported the initial results from their pivotal clinical trials, Marks’s conflict of interest didn’t seem to matter. The results appeared so positive — 95 percent protection against infection — that any regulator would have authorized them.

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(Those were the days…)

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Everyone knows what happened next.

The honeymoon did not last. By late spring 2021, myocarditis cases had become a concern. By midsummer, Covid cases in vaccinated people were soaring as the protection from the jabs crumbled.

By then, Marks’s own subordinates were demanding more time to consider the mountains of data that Pfizer and Moderna had provided before fully approving, rather than merely authorizing, the vaccines.

But the Biden Administration wanted full approval to pave the way for Covid vaccine mandates. And it wanted boosters available without age restrictions, to calm the middle-aged (and younger) Democratic Karens it had promised an escape from Covid.

Marks agreed. He sidelined the scientists who reported to him and ensured full approval, fast.

Then he went further, pushing the jabs on children.

He did so well into 2022, long after it was clear that Covid posted almost no risk to anyone under 30, much less infants, toddlers, or kids. And he did so after the pediatric Covid vaccine trials had raised questions about whether the mRNA shots worked for kids at all, much less for more than a few weeks.

He was hopelessly compromised, so compromised he couldn’t even imagine how compromised he was.

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(I got your assault on scientific truth right here.)

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He still can’t.

Marks is so deep in the mRNA hole that he still thinks he deserves praise for his conflicts of interest in 2020.

He doesn’t, though.

He deserved to be fired.

Now he has (effectively) been.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

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(I’ll never forget. And I’ll never stop reporting. With your help.)

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Addendum: for more about how Marks pushed through full approval and boosters in the summer of 2021, check out this interview with Dr. Philip Krause, who resigned from the FDA over the issue:

1. Marks oversaw the agency’s “biologics” division. Besides vaccines, biologics include genetic therapies and monoclonal antibodies like Humira, which are complex proteins that can be similar or identical to proteins our own bodies make and are usually injected or infused. A separate FDA unit regulates the simpler chemical compounds that are usually given in pill form and which are what most people think of as “drugs” - from aspirin to oxycodone to statins. Those are generally much cheaper and more commonly used than biologics (with the exception of vaccines, which almost every child gets).

2. The scientists finding these problems are mostly outside the United States, because American researchers seem almost afraid to look.