Why We Should Care About Dr. Peter Marks' Ouster from the FDA

Louis Conte, Health Freedom Editor, The Kennedy Beacon

Peter Marks, the former top FDA vaccine regulator, is out – and with his exit comes a swarm of questions.

You won’t read this in legacy media, but Dr. Marks denied his boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., access to the database of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is supposed to be open to anyone.

What was Mark trying to hide before he was forced to resign for what can only be described as insubordination?

In a recent Associated Press article, Marks said that he denied Kennedy access to the database because he feared Kennedy and his team would edit the VAERS data. “Why wouldn’t we [allow Kennedy to the database]? Because frankly we don’t trust (them),” Marks told the AP. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”

Wow! Talk about a conspiracy theorist.

Why did Marks believe Kennedy would alter government data? Doesn’t he know doing so is a federal crime and that any attempt to do so would leave a “fingerprint” that said data had been tampered with?

The AP did not ask such questions, so I contacted someone I know with a computer forensics background. My friend, who asked to remain anonymous because he “does work for the government sometimes” stated, “One can edit a database, but one can easily figure out when the changes were made and, about 90% of the time, who made them.”

The AP allowed Marks’ statement about a criminal conspiracy at HHS without any follow up or contrary point of view. To the AP and other legacy media, Mark is an heroic champion of science and Kennedy and his team, they imply, are charlatans or worse.

But who are the real charlatans? Read the fine print below the article. “The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from…the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,” I noticed printed below the body of the piece. “The AP is solely responsible for all content.”

So much for the AP as a neutral reporter of news, as The Kennedy Beacon has noted previously in a three-part series that questioned other big pharma funders of “journalism” for the news service.

For those who don’t know, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) was started by pharmaceutical giant, Johnson & Johnson, and has a long history of ties to big pharma. And RWJF’s recent advocacy posts just happen to align with Democratic Party talking points.

The one-sided news coverage of Marks’ ouster also reflects his cozy relationship to big pharma. Marks appears to have been beloved by the industry he was tasked to regulate. In Biopharmadive, for example, a website that tracks the pharmaceutical industry, Senior Editor Ben Fidler writes that Marks’ exit “leaves cell and gene therapy developers without their biggest proponent at the FDA.” The article also notes the financial implication of Marks’ departure on one segment of the industry.

Marks was supposed to be an FDA regulator – not a pharma industry shill. It appears that his work at the agency was an example of what Kennedy has many times called “corporate capture” – when a federal employee, tasked with regulating companies within an industry, quietly becomes more beholden to those companies than to the federal agency that hired him.

The hallmark of all of Marks’ tenure at the FDA was ensuring approval of expensive, new pharmaceutical products which delivered windfalls to the industry. Patient safety was secondary.

Dr. Meryl Nass, an MD who has carefully observed the federal vaccine approval process for years, told the Beacon, “His goal seems to have been to approve every biologic for Big Pharma, despite concerns by FDA scientists and independent experts on his advisory committees.”

Former FDA chief scientist, Dr. Luciana Borio, similarly stated, "Peter Marks makes a mockery of scientific reasoning and approval standards that have served patients well over decades…This type of action also promotes the growing mistrust in scientific institutions like the FDA."

Marks repeatedly ran amok at the FDA.

As Dr. Vinay Prasad noted, the same media that lied about all things COVID is lying about Marks' departure from FDA. “When Biden wanted to mandate the COVID 19 vaccine via OSHA and to military members and to pressure companies to do the same, he faced a challenge,” writes Prasad. “The vaccine was authorized only under Emergency use authorization and not full biologic licensing agreement (BLA). Legal experts disagreed if a vaccine could be mandated without BLA…Peter Marks then pressured (Dr. Marion) Gruber and (Dr. Peter) Krause (two experts) at FDA to grant full BLA. When they did not play ball, Marks pressured them to resign.”

Parsad added, “In short, Peter Marks was one of the most dangerous, pro-pharma regulators of the 21st century. He is leaving and crafting a narrative that portrays him as a saint…But what is shocking is that the media is so uncritical, and not honest about his actions. The same media that lied about lab leaks, masks, and all things covid is lying about Peter Marks.”

In a blog post entitled “The Curious Case of FDA's Dr. Peter Marks,” Dr. Robert Malone wrote, “After his initial selection as Deputy Director CBER, Dr. Marks rapidly rose to prominence in the ranks of the FDA, and was rewarded with a plum high-status appointment to the National Academy of Science – not on the basis of his intellect, scientific achievements, mastery of regulatory science or technical excellence – but because he advocated for reduced regulation of the pharmaceutical industry where he had worked prior to his initial FDA appointment.”

The legacy media, too often an arm of what I like to call pharma-crat power, is promoting the apotheosis of Marks when in reality he made reckless, unscientific decisions.

Marks has become the new Anthony Fauci, the man who once claimed that he was the science (“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science”), and later received a suspiciously implicating presidential pardon for any possible charges regarding his conduct dating back to 2014.

The pharma-crats have launched a Marks narrative to derail Secretary Kennedy’s drive to make America healthy again, and to promote independent science that serves the public’s interest, not Big Pharma’s.

As the hostile and inaccurate treatment of Kennedy continues, we should keep in mind that the independent science our new HHS Secretary seeks to deliver to the public will transparently provide Americans accurate information they can rely on.

Dr. Marks, beholden to the industry he was tasked to regulate, was not transparent — and now he is out. That’s a good thing.