With articles such as Why Marty Makary Was the Worst FDA Commissioner In 25 Years and Paranoia, Turmoil and Backlash: Inside the FDA Under Marty Makary, there’s no shortage of excellent reporting on Dr. Marty Makary’s dismal failure at the FDA and his dramatic downfall. There are several lessons to be salvaged from his train wreck.
No One Should Care About or Trust Anything Dr. Marty Makary Says Ever Again
From his absurd claim that medical errors are the third leading cause of death to his infamous We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April, Dr. Makary has been a fountain of disinformation and vile accusations against other doctors and dedicated public servants for years. Here are some random examples, from before and during his failed tenure at the FDA.
These are Dr. Makary’s words, and this is his track record, though these videos just scratch the surface of his fabrications and allegations. Everything he says in the future should be interpreted with his past words in mind.
Doing this leads to an obvious conclusion- there’s no reason to trust anything he says ever again. When Dr. Makary inevitably resurfaces, bragging about his “accomplishments” at the FDA and whining about the forces that took him down, there’s absolutely no reason to believe him about anything. As the proverb goes “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”.
There’s also no reason for anyone to care about anything Dr. Makary says moving forward. Unless he’s willing to spill the dirt on Kennedy and Trump, he’s totally irrelevant, with no special insights or pearls of wisdom to offer any of us. His opinions, which once flowed freely on Fox News and the WSJ, don’t matter any more. He had his chance to reform the FDA, and he failed. As Dr. Benjamin Mazer put it:
Reforming an institution requires the ability to enact lasting change. Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether Makary or Prasad held the “right” views about medical evidence. Did they create positive changes that will outlast them? Seemingly not many.
He’s right, and while Dr. Makary should be remembered for the videos above, but his only utility is as a cautionary tale for medical students about the importance of humility in medicine.
Journalists Should Not Give Dr. Makary a Safe Space
I’d be very surprised if Dr. Makary did not return to public commentary. As an ex-public official, he should be held accountable for things that happened at the FDA under his watch, all of the politics and all of the drama. Any journalist who interviews him should relentlessly press him about his COVID disinformation and his false claims while leading the FDA- that Tylenol causes autism, that leucovorin was a miracle autism treatment, and that the COVID vaccine killed children, to pick a few. If he can’t answer questions about these topics, they should end the interview. There’s no reason to give Dr. Makary a safe space to disassemble about other issues.
Doctors Who Fluffed Dr. Makary Have No Credibility
While we here at SBM desperately tried to sound the alarm bells about Dr. Makary, other doctors sought to numb people to his in risk in articles such as Trump’s Choice to Lead the FDA Offers a Ray of Hope and Can We Give the New FDA Leadership a Chance. According to that second article by Dr. John Mandrola, Dr. Makary’s Sensible Medicine business partner and fellow disinformation superspreader:
The public town hall conversations are both a huge step in the right direction and a welcome change from the previous FDA leadership
As with all of Dr. Mandrola’s preposterous predictions, things didn’t work out that way. It turns out that the podcasting skills that helped our former FDA leaders obtain power weren’t that useful once they got there. Dr. Mandrola continued:
When Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad became leaders at FDA, many pundits worried they would damage public health. Both had “anti-vax” tendencies, went the narrative. Adam (Cifu) and I knew that was not true…
Again, things didn’t work out that way. Dr. Makary and his sidekick Dr. Vinay Prasad absolutely had “anti-vax” tendencies, and it’s no surprise that today the headlines read FDA Withdrew Studies Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe and FDA Refuses to Review Moderna’s New Flu Shot. Dr. Mandrola continued:
They also “convinced” the company to perform a proper placebo-controlled RCT for the vaccine in patients age 50-65 this year. We have not had a proper COVID therapy RCT in many years. I guess it took new leadership to induce companies to properly study their new vaccine…
Again, things didn’t work out that way. It’s a lot easier to “call for” RCTs than to get them done, and it’s no surprise that today the headlines read Pfizer, BioNTech Halt US COVID Vaccine Study After Recruitment Struggles. Dr. Mandrola concluded his article by saying:
I am excited and optimistic about the new leadership at FDA. They speak with clarity, humility and in a language the general public can understand. The transparency will begin to restore some of the lost trust. Good on them.
Again, things didn’t work out that way. It’s a lot easier to break trust than to rebuild it, and it’s no surprise that today the headlines read Trust in CDC, FDA, NIH Shrinks.
If the doctors who elevated Dr. Makary had any integrity, they would revisit their farcical forecasts and apologize for them. Regardless, like Dr. Makary himself, these doctors have forfeited the right to be taken seriously ever again. Either they didn’t know about Dr. Makary’s atrocious track record, or even worse they didn’t care about it. That’s permanently disqualifying in my book.
With COVID Out of the News, MAGA/MAHA is Cracking UP
MAHA/MAGA coalesced around a shared affinity for COVID disinformation, and Drs. Makary and Prasad foolishly thought the techniques that catapulted them to power would protect them once in office. This shows how badly they misread the moment. They told everyone else to stop talking about COVID, and unfortunately for them, everyone else stopped talking about COVID. It turns out that only they still cared about rare, temporary COVID vaccine side effects.
Without COVID disinformation to unite them, the cracks in the MAHA/MAGA coalition became irreparable fractures. This also shows how poorly Drs. Makary and Prasad understood the forces they legitimized and partnered with. We at SBM could have warned them that teaming up with Trump, Kennedy, and their ilk wasn’t going to end well for them.
To the extent that Drs. Makary and Prasad were victims of Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, and anti-abortion activists, as their few remaining sycophants now claim, they were willing to work for and relentlessly fluff a President beholden to those interests. They chose to work for a President who was eager to do the bidding of a “group of tobacco executives and lobbyists“. They have no one but themselves to blame for this, and they are not off the hook for what Trump and Kennedy do moving forward. The MAHA/MAGA crack-up is just beginning, and things have the potential to get much worse. The FDA under Drs. Makary and Prasad was just one of many story lines in the soap opera they helped unleash on us all.
At least none of it was boring, like every other FDA commissioner in my lifetime.
The Medicial Community Failed
Perhaps the biggest lesson here is that the broader medical community failed to reign in its own bad actors. To say that there were warning signs about Dr. Makary and other MAHA doctors is like calling the Grand Canyon a pothole. Their risks were glaring and obvious. Just watch some of those videos.
Despite this, most doctors, especially medicine’s so-called “leaders”, shrugged and looked away as MAHA doctors spread both anti-vaxx disinformation as well as rage and doubt about the entire medical profession. Today, the FDA and other federal health agencies are shells of their former selves according to respected former employees. Medicine had a duty to warn and protect the public from the men who did this. It failed, and we’ll all be paying the price for years to come.
