Sacrificing Science
Career health officials despair
THE calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the National Institutes for Health, Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.
“It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch, ” one senior FDA official lamented. “People are getting bad advice, and we can’t say anything.”
That doctor was referring to two recent developments: First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized COVID vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had COVID. And second, the fact that, just months before, the FDA bypassed its external experts to authorize booster shots for young children.
That doctor is hardly alone. At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.)
The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high-level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political.” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”
Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science. The longer answer: The heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important publichealth decisions driven by what’s politically palatable to people in DC or the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.
Nowhere has this problem been clearer — or the stakes higher — than on official public-health policy regarding children and COVID.
First, they demanded that young children be masked in schools. On this score, the agencies were wrong. Compelling studies later found schools that masked children had no different rates of transmission. And for social and linguistic development, children need to see the faces of others.
Next came school closures. Poor and minority children suffered learning loss with an 11-point drop in math scores alone and a 20% drop in math pass rates.
Then they ignored natural immunity. The vast majority of children have already had COVID, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust.
One CDC scientist told us about her shame and frustration about what happened to American children during the pandemic: “CDC failed to balance the risks of COVID with other risks that come from closing schools,” she said.
An official at the FDA put it this way: “I can’t tell you how many people at the FDA have told me, ‘I don’t like any of this, but I just need to make it to my retirement.’ ”
Right now, internal critics of these agencies are focused on one issue above all: Why did the FDA and the CDC issue strong blanket recommendations for COVID vaccines in children?
Three weeks ago, the CDC vigorously recommended mRNA COVID vaccines for 20 million children under five years of age. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, declared that the mRNA COVID vaccines should be given to everyone six months or older
because they are safe and effective.
The trouble is that this sweeping recommendation was based on extremely weak, inconclusive data provided by Pfizer and Moderna.
Then there’s the matter of how long a vaccine gives protection. We know from data in adults that it’s generally a matter of months. But we have no such data for young children. “It seems criminal that we put out the recommendation to give mRNA COVID vaccines to babies without good data,” a CDC physician added.
The FDA’s two top vaccine regulators — Dr. Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s vaccine office, and her deputy director, Dr. Philip Krause — quit the agency last year over political pressure to authorize vaccine boosters in young people. After their departure, they wrote scathing commentaries explaining why the data did not support a broad booster authorization, arguing in The Washington Post that “the push for boosters for everyone could actually prolong the pandemic.”
As one NIH scientist told us: “There’s a silence, an unwillingness for agency scientists to say anything.” That was a theme we heard over and over again: “If you talk about it, you will suffer, I’m convinced,” an FDA staffer told us.
It is statistically impossible for everyone who works inside of our health agencies to have 100% agreement about such a new and knotty subject. The fact that there is no public dissent or debate can only be explained by the fact that they are — or at least feel that they are — being muzzled.