Weekly Update: More Contrarians at the FDA

Dear Subscriber, 

This week, Dr. George Tidmarsh was added to the ranks of fringe public health contrarians recruited to work in the Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration under Commissioner Marty Makary. 

Tidmarsh’s job will be to lead the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), which oversees over-the-counter and prescription drug regulation and approval. Tidmarsh, a former biotech executive, current professor of pediatrics and neonatology at Stanford University, cancer specialist and physician, has also been a close ally of the medical fringes. Last year, he helped organize and fund, and then participated in a pandemic policy conference at Stanford University that was criticized for featuring a number of contrarian voices including anti-vaxxers. AJI’s investigative newsletter, Important Context, covered the event at the time, which featured a number of future Trump administration public health officials. It was at this event that Tidmarsh first connected with Makary.

Read our full story on Tidmarsh here. 

We are able to cover these figures so thoroughly because we are not new to this subject. Important Context has been aggressively uncovering the lies between COVID contrarianism and the anti-vax movement since 2020. We know that efforts to chip away at public health go hand-in-hand to chip away at democracy. 

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Thank you!

Best, 

Your Friends at AJI