Dr. Vinay Prasad, who led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), officially departed on April 30. The division is responsible for reviewing experimental vaccines and other biologic products submitted for federal approval.

    Following his exit, Katherine Szarama, previously the center’s deputy director, has been elevated to serve as acting director, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA.

    Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, who currently leads another FDA center in an acting capacity, publicly thanked Prasad for his work, describing his tenure as “transformational” in a post on X.

    Prasad had originally been brought into FDA leadership in 2025 by Commissioner Marty Makary, following the resignation of former CBER chief Peter Marks amid reported disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr..

    A professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Prasad gained national attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for questioning aspects of federal health policy, including the broad push for vaccinations among younger populations.

    His tenure at the FDA has not been without turbulence. He initially stepped away from the agency shortly after taking the role, following scrutiny over past social media activity. According to Makary, Prasad chose to step aside at the time to avoid becoming a distraction amid media coverage.

    He later returned in August 2025 to lead CBER, with federal officials emphasizing that the agency’s work would continue despite outside criticism.

    CBER plays a central role in evaluating vaccines, gene therapies and other biologic treatments, weighing potential risks and benefits before granting approvals. In recent months, some of its decisions have drawn criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

    Sen. Ron Johnson has publicly questioned the FDA’s handling of treatments for rare diseases, including its decision not to approve ataluren for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

    The agency has also faced pushback over its rejection of a skin cancer treatment developed by Replimune. Speaking to senators in April, Kennedy said the drug appeared ineffective based on internal FDA assessments and discussions with Makary, adding that the decision was made independently by the agency.

    With new leadership now in place at CBER, attention is likely to remain on how the FDA navigates ongoing debates over drug approvals, vaccine oversight and regulatory standards.

The post FDA Vaccine Chief Vinay Prasad Steps Down, New Acting Director Named appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Public and private sector health officials and public policymakers should team up immediately with community leaders to more effectively disseminate accurate narratives regarding the life-saving benefits of vaccines to counter widespread, harmful misinformation from anti-vaccine activists.

Such is the message of a UC Riverside-led viewpoint piece published Thursday, March 2, in the leading international medical journal, The Lancet.

“We need to consistently amplify the best science and find the best ways of communicating so that people are hearing it through multiple channels instead of through one or two sources,” said Richard M. Carpiano, lead author on the paper and a public policy professor at UCR.

“This is a matter of life and death. People don’t always see it that way,” he added. “We’ve forgotten how many people have died, have been sick, or continue to get sick from COVID-19 as well as many other vaccine-preventable diseases.”

The paper comes out just after California marked the grim milestone of more than 100,000 COVID-19 deaths. Nationally, more than 1.1 million people have died, and the worldwide toll is estimated at 6.8 million. The disease continues to spread as vaccines have been found to greatly reduce illnesses that require hospitalization or result in death.

Carpiano and 20 leading public health experts describe in The Lacent paper a perfect storm that still allows anti-vaccine activism, once a fringe subculture, to become a well-organized form of right-wing identity with narratives that associate refusing vaccines with personal liberty. This narrative was consistently repeated and amplified by social media influencers, pro-Donald Trump political operatives, and right-wing blogs, podcasts, and other media as the COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide.

Anti-vaccination activism has existed as long as there have been vaccines, Carpiano said. But the movement picked up steam in 1998 when British physician Andrew Wakefield published a now-discredited study that falsely claimed a link between childhood vaccines and autism.

In more recent years, however, anti-vaccine messaging shifted in large part from health-effect concerns to conservative and libertarian political identity arguments of medical freedom and parental rights. This was prompted in part by legislative efforts in California and other states to eliminate personal belief exemptions from school vaccination requirements in response to falling child vaccination rates and vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks.

Still, these arguments were confined to childhood vaccines and thus were “rather contained,” Carpiano said.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic affected the entire population, it brought on a vast expansion of not only anti-vaccine activism, but more broadly, anti-public health activism as people faced the inconveniences of mask-wearing, social distancing, closed restaurants and bars, and cancelations of concerts and other events that draw crowds.

“Anti-public health activism and sentiments unfortunately became tied up increasingly with right-wing politics,” Carpiano said.

Celebrities, wellness influencers, partisan pundits, and certain scientists and clinicians, among others, joined the fray, often spreading false and misleading claims about vaccinations. The increasing number of voices found larger audiences, which meant more votes for right-wing candidates, and greater monetization of right-leaning social and media outlets.

“Values became important and useful when science wasn’t there to back up certain anti-vaccine claims,” Carpiano said. “And so, people could claim, ‘Well, it’s about personal choice. It’s about me as a parent. It’s about state overreach,’ which are harder things to argue against than things like, ‘Do vaccines cause autism?”

The result was more people becoming ill.

“We start to see where party affiliation and political leaning become strangely and concerningly robust predictors of vaccine uptake and even mortality and hospitalization rates,” he said.

Meanwhile, pro-vaccine messaging has been based on the statements of individual public health experts, such as former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci and director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Rochelle Walensky, who are outgunned.

“Fauci, for example, gets attacked on different fronts by different groups that, instead of focusing on the science issue he is discussing, often use ad hominem or personal attacks about him unrelated to that issue and even conspiracy theories,” Carpiano said. “Such a lone expert model of communicating to the public is very susceptible to being discredited, but not necessarily through legitimate points.”

Carpiano was part of a 21-member Commission on Vaccine Refusal, Acceptance, and Demand in the USA put together by The Lancet to examine issues surrounding COVID-19 vaccine acceptance uptake, acceptance, and hesitancy. The membership is composed of national experts from public health, vaccine science, law, ethics, public policy, and the social and behavioral sciences.

The group recommends the development of networked communities that simultaneously share information with different audiences about the health and economic benefits of vaccines. This would preempt the well-funded messaging of the antivaccine movement.

“Without concerted efforts to counter the anti-vaccine movement, the USA faces an ever-growing burden of morbidity and mortality from an increasingly under-vaccinated, vaccine hesitant society,” the paper concludes.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Health policy experts call for confronting anti-vaccine activism with life-saving counter narratives appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, put “building a modern, functional and real-time information technology infrastructure for the public health system” at the top of his list. He explained that the current public health technology infrastructure has been underfunded and is “terribly antiquated.” A new such a system would allow public health care data systems to talk to each other and share information. Benjamin noted that today data systems are not interoperable and disease surveillance systems are spotty and often incomplete. As an example, he pointed out many local health departments often still rely on paper-based recording systems and fax machines to exchange information. He called a new system a “best buy” that would “do the most to improve informed decision-making.”

Dr. Robert Berenson, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, noted that “financially enticing or requiring the states that haven’t done so to expand their Medicaid programs would be the most important.” A dozen states have yet to adopt the Medicaid expansion, including massive population centers such as Texas and Florida. On the delivery side, he said, “the federal government needs to develop price regulation models and incentives for states to limit prices that hospitals negotiate with commercial insurers. In the past 20 years hospital prices have increased from 110% of Medicare to 24% of Medicare, producing “unconscionably high levels of cash and investments maintained by nonprofit hospitals.”

Dr. Michael Carome, director of the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, suggests that to better ensure the safety and effectiveness of drugs and devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Congress should enact a firewall between the FDA staff who interact with industry reps seeking FDA approvals and FDA staffers who will be involved in actual reviews of drugs and devices. “The current system of interactions with sponsors has the potential to undermine the integrity of the agency reviews,” Carome said.

Lanhee Chen, the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution, hopes the Biden administration will make permanent some of the telehealth changes begun in the Trump era by executive action. Such changes made it easier for providers to furnish telehealth services such as diagnosing mental illness across state lines, and to provide such services at federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics. The Trump changes also increased the range of health services covered by Medicare. “Without further action, these reforms will go away,” Chen said. “They would garner bipartisan support and be pretty easy to do, in my mind.”

Timothy Jost, emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University, said his top recommendation for the Biden administration would be to rescind the Medicaid waivers granted by the Trump administration, some of which impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. The legality of such work requirements is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear the case later this year. Jost would also like to see Tennessee’s Medicaid block grant rescinded as well. Under a block grant arrangement, the government gives the state a set amount of money to use for health benefits. When the money runs out, low-income residents get no more benefits. Compare that with Medicare, in which all residents who qualify are entitled to a benefit. Block grants are likely to result in fewer people receiving benefits and reduced federal spending, which is why they are popular with some politicians. They save money.

Gerald Kominski, professor of health policy and management at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, says the most important reform would be to expand the Medicare program to Americans age 60 and older instead of using age 65, the current age for eligibility. “This is the step the original architects of Medicare expected to happen in the 1970s. Fifty years later I think it’s time to take the next step in that original design and to start expanding Medicare to the rest of the population.” President Biden has voiced support for such a plan, which faces strong opposition from hospitals.

Jonathan Oberlander, professor of health policy and management, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says the list of needs “is so long — there is so much they need to do.” He said if the administration had a magic wand he would “want them to wave it and achieve universal health insurance. It’s hardly magic. Every other rich democracy, after all, has it.” In a category Oberlander called “aspirational,” he would entice the “hold-out” states to expand Medicaid. And in the category he labeled “possible legislatively,” he suggested making the Affordable Care Act more affordable through enhanced premium subsidies.

Edwin Park, research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, says one of the country’s top health priorities should be to reverse the losses in children’s health insurance coverage, citing some alarming stats. Between 2016 and 2019, the children’s uninsured rate climbed from 4.7% to 5.7%. Those numbers translate into an increase of about 700,000 children without coverage and presumably without regular access to care. Park believes that number has probably gone up over the past year because of job losses and loss of health coverage during the pandemic. He noted a number of policy options that could reverse this trend. They include making it easier to enroll kids and families in public coverage, increasing the federal Medicaid matching rate to avert state budget cuts, increasing outreach and enrollment efforts, and reversing federal policies such as the public charge rule, which have had a “chilling effect” on Medicaid participation among children eligible for the program in immigrant families.

This health policy to-do list is long and challenging, and perhaps unachievable in its entirety. But the way I see it, how much of it the nation can accomplish will define the kind of country America will be. We have a long way to go before America can claim it has the best health care system in the world.

Veteran health care journalist Trudy Lieberman is a contributing editor at the Center for Health Journalism Digital and a regular contributor to the Remaking Health Care column.

Trudy Lieberman • Contributed

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Here’s what 8 top health policy voices say Biden should do this year appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.