Is the FDA's Vinay Prasad a "one-man death panel"?

The FDA’s Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, the hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad, entered and exited and came back to Trump’s FDA with Scaramucci-esque swiftness in recent months, returning to his post on August 9th. As I write in RealClearMarkets, Prasad’s adversarial stance toward the pharmaceutical industry as a whole has alarmed severely ill patients, and his comeback marks a curious moment in the Make America Healthy Again movement.

Prasad has long identified as a progressive, but he found common cause with conservatives over his objections to Covid-19 vaccines. Prasad opposed the Covid-19 vaccines and subsequent boosters primarily because of the government’s lack of nuance in recommending them across the board, in basically equal measure to all populations regardless of age or health condition. It was not clear he opposed the government’s approach on principle. In general though, Prasad is antagonistic to the pharmaceutical industry, in ways that seem to be harming patients. For more on this, please check out my new article, in which I suggest that conservatives ought to break with Prasad’s approach decisively in favor of patient choice.