FDA’s top vaccine scientist, Dr. Peter Marks, is out

Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, has resigned, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services said Friday.

“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,” a spokesperson at HHS said.

A person familiar with the matter told NBC News that Marks was forced out of his position.

In a resignation letter to acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner, Marks wrote that undermining confidence in vaccines is “irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety, and security.”

He said that he had been willing to work with Kennedy to address any concerns about vaccine safety and transparency.

“However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks wrote.

Marks did not respond to a request for comment.

Marks has led the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, or CBER, since 2016. The division is responsible for assuring the safety and effectiveness of a number of medical products, including vaccines.

Marks helped lead the nation through the Covid pandemic, playing a key role in authorizing the first Covid vaccines in late 2020, from first from Pfizer-BioNTech and then shortly after, Moderna. He helped launch Operation Warp Speed, the first Trump administration’s private-public partnership to quickly develop the vaccines.

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, has been critical of the Covid vaccines, and filed a citizens petition in 2021 requesting that the FDA revoke the authorization of the vaccines. That same year, he called described the Covid vaccine as the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Kennedy has also worked to undermine confidence in the measles vaccine amid the largest outbreak the United States has seen since 2019. While he’s said vaccines protect children from the measles, he’s also said the decision to vaccinate is a “personal” one.

In a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Kennedy said the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine “does cause deaths every year.”

There have been no deaths linked to the MMR vaccine in healthy people, according to the Infectious Disease Society of America. The vaccine is not recommending for immunocompromised people.

“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 in his resignation letter.

“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,” he wrote.