Skip to main content

Former FDA chiefs pressure President Biden to nominate a new commissioner—and quickly Fierce Pharma

 



The clock is ticking on an FDA commissioner nomination, with public pressure on President Joe Biden to pick up the pace.

Six former FDA commissioners wrote the White House this week urging Biden to make a choice, according to several media reports.

The letter, signed by Robert Califf, Scott Gottlieb, Margaret Hamburg, Jane Henney, Mark McClellan and Andrew von Eschenbach, pushed Biden to act in the face of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. They noted vaccine, drug and testing issues related to the pandemic, as well as the need to implement new tobacco regulations, according to The Washington Post.


Some prominent voices on social media are asking for the same clarification as the former FDA heads, while others guessed that Biden will name a candidate after his nominee for Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, is confirmed.

Science journalist and author Laurie Garrett wrote recently on Twitter that it’s not a good time for the FDA to be “leaderless,” adding that Biden “desperately needs to name his new Commissioner of the FDA, to guide the agency through #COVID19 #pandemic drug, diagnostics and vaccines approvals.”

It’s not clear who is currently the front runner for the Biden FDA commissioner job.

The ex-commissioners did not endorse any one candidate but did praise current acting chief Janet Woodcock. An FDA veteran, Woodcock has two stints heading up the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research—from 2008 until now and from 1994 to 2005. In between, she served in the FDA commissioner’s office. Most recently she served as part of Operation Warp Speed, overseeing COVID-19 therapy development.

Woodcock proponents—including a doctor who treated the late Beau Biden, the president’s son—sent a letter to Biden in February calling her “uniquely qualified” to be commissioner. The 95 cancer physicians and experts praised her drug approval record with breakthrough medicines in cancer and other diseases.

However, the letter followed public opposition from a group of anti-opioid advocates who spoke out against a Woodcock nomination over past opioid approvals under her watch.

Early favorite Joshua Sharfstein, a deputy commissioner under President Obama, has reportedly dropped out of the running.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can We Make A Vaccine Against Smoking?

  This segment sounds good but we need to be careful here or we end up where we started in 2021 vaccines becoming political. 

Texas governor bans vaccine passports from being required in state ABC News

  Thats Right States like Texas and Florida got the Vaccine Passport Conspiracy from Del Bigtree.  https://abc7.com/politics/texas-governor-bans-vaccine-passport-requirement-in-state/10491161/ AUSTIN, Texas -- Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday morning prohibiting state agencies or political subdivisions in Texas from creating a "vaccine passport" requirement. Conversation has grown around  vaccine passports recently as an option that can be used for travel or even eating out . They are typically described as an app with a code that verifies if someone has been vaccinated or recently tested negative for COVID-19. They're already in use in Israel, and in development in parts of Europe. But Abbott shut that down as an option in the Lone Star State with Executive Order No. GA - 35 also prohibiting "organizations receiving public funds from requiring consumers to provide documentation of vaccine status in order to receive any service or enter any place....

Anti-Vax Conspiracies strike back in the USA July 2021 Original Article

 Thumbnail credit by Jeff Holiday Production In the past few weeks the anti-vax lobby has ratcheted up the ante on their lobbying efforts. The event that kicked off this new wave of anti-vax scares was the "Knock on the Door rants" according to the Washington Post on a July 9th article they cited  rants by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laurent Boebert in a political rally that sparked the scare. "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) got the ball rolling Tuesday by comparing the effort to “ medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations .” Not to be outdone, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took to Twitter the next day to offer her own Nazi comparison, labeling the door-knockers “ needle Nazis .” If anyone should know the folly of such metaphors, it would seem to be Greene, who just three weeks prior conceded in an apology after another wayward Nazi/coronavirus comment that “ there is no comparison to the Holocaust .” And it’s worth emphasizing that there is...