Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s FDA Pick

Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary has spent years promoting fringe pandemic views and attacking the U.S. government.

This piece has been updated from its original email version. Last update 11/22/24.

Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is a prominent medical contrarian who has cast doubt on the COVID-19 vaccines. Wednesday evening, Bloomberg reported that Johns Hopkins professor, pancreatic surgeon, and author Marty Makary was seen as the “leading candidate” for the role. The nomination was made official on Friday.

Trump’s public health picks have been controversial. Last Thursday, he named anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. to head up his Department of Health and Human Services. With the appointment, it was all but guaranteed that top public health agencies would be run by fringe medical figures. Sure enough, on Saturday, The Washington Post reported that Stanford Professor and co-author of the pro-COVID infection Great Barrington Declaration Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was a top contender for director of the National Institutes of Health. Then, on Tuesday, Trump named television personality and former GOP Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The choice of Dr. Marty Makary to head up the FDA, with its $7.2 billion budget and role overseeing the safety of the U.S. food supply, medical devices and technology, and tobacco products, continues the trend. The résumé on Makary’s website shows no experience in government or managing bureaucracy, and the surgeon has spent years working to undermine confidence in the very agency he is reportedly a top contender to lead.

Right-Wing Attention

Makary, who serves as the chief medical adviser of a health benefits brokerage company Nava, has long been a critic of American healthcare, positioning himself as a sober voice for reform. He has authored multiple books on the subject including 2019’s “The Price We Pay,” which argued that costs were simply too high.

With the pandemic, he has emerged as a popular figure on the political right for his particular brand of contrarianism, which has included falsely asserting in a February 2021 op-ed that the U.S. would achieve COVID herd immunity by April of that year.

Even before COVID, Makary was controversial. In 2016, he was behind a widely rebuked study in the British Medical Journal purporting to find that medical error was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Shortly after publication, the editors-in chief of BMJ Quality and Safety debunked the findings.

Makary’s pandemic advocacy has alienated him from the mainstream of public health, but it has been a boon to him in other ways. For example, he has made influential allies like Bhattacharya and become a favorite of right-wing media. In 2021, he was included on a list of “The dishonest doctors who were Fox News’ most frequent medical guests in 2021” by watchdog group Media Matters. 

The surgeon has similarly been embraced by right-wing dark money groups. He is an adviser to the Paragon Health Institute, a health policy-focused conservative think tank that has received millions in grant funding from the Stand Together Trust, a funding vehicle affiliated with billionaire Charles Koch. His most recent book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health,” which blames doctors for various problems—from peanut allergies to the opioid epidemic and drug-resistant bacteria—was promoted by the Koch-backed Cato Institute.

Makary has also ties to the Brownstone Institute, a right-wing dark money outfit founded to oppose government interventions amid the COVID pandemic. The group, which was founded by an anarcho-capitalist child labor advocate and supporter of youth tobacco use, has become a central hub for public health-related misinformation, including vaccine misinformation. Makary served as a member of Brownstone’s so-called Norfolk Group, a team of contrarian medical voices organized to compile a roadmap for a congressional inquiry into the U.S. pandemic response to assist the incoming GOP-controlled House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP). The group’s recommendations echoed those from a Heritage Foundation report released weeks earlier, namely focusing on the harms of mitigation measures.

Then, of course, there are speaking engagements. Makary’s rising profile has afforded him the ability to charge significant fees for appearances—both in-person and virtual.

His profile on the booking website Big Speak reveals that he charges $20,000 to $30,000 per engagement. The site Key Speakers, meanwhile, estimates $12,000-$15,000 per appearance with the low-end representing his virtual fee. AAE Speakers has his range as $10,000 to $20,000.

Makary has also found allies in Republican politicians. He was was one the three panelists chosen to by GOP representatives to speak at the inaugural hearing of the HSSCP in February 2023. He has also participated in the wellness roundtable organized by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that featured right-wing psychologist and anti-woke activist Dr. Jordan Peterson as well as chronic disease entrepreneurs Calley and Dr. Casey Means, who are part of Kennedy’s pro-Trump Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.

The Means siblings are prolific anti-vaxxers but reject the label—both for themselves and for Kennedy, preferring vaccine safety advocates instead. However, Calley Means has called COVID vaccine mandates a “war crime” while his sister, who was also reportedly under consideration for the top FDA role, has called vaccine mandates “criminal.”

Undermining Government

Like other medical contrarians promoted by the political right, the professor has spent years sowing doubt in America’s leading public health institutions and casting COVID mitigation efforts as grievous wrongs against the public. For example, Makary has asserted that the COVID pandemic was the result of a lab leak and accused public health authorities of engaging in an “extensive” cover-up. Evidence points to natural spillover, the explanation favored by most virologists and epidemiologists. Earlier this month, Makary joined the advisory board of the controversial, lab leak-promoting group BioSafety Now, which Bhattacharya is also affiliated with.

In his opening remarks, testifying before the HSSCP, Makary alleged that "public health officials have made many tragic mistakes during the pandemic.” His examples included “ignoring natural immunity”—a common talking point among advocates of the mass infection-based herd immunity strategy outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration, which was co-authored by Bhattacharya, Makary’s fellow panelist at the hearing. Vaccines are a significantly safer way to acquire protection from COVID than contracting the disease.

Other examples Makary cited in his opening statement included dismissing the unsupported lab leak claim about COVID origins as a conspiracy theory, closing schools, masking children, boosting young people with the COVID-vaccines, and authorizing the bivalent boosters, which he claimed were insufficiently tested.

Makary called the U.S. government “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation” of the pandemic, citing as evidence its promotion of masking as a means of cutting down infection, wrongly claiming that they were ineffective. Later in his testimony, he referred to Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as “King Fauci.”

In recent months, Makary has cozied up to Kennedy. When the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist was named as the pick for HHS secretary, the surgeon retweeted a post on X, formerly Twitter, saying, “God Bless America & the new Secretary of Health & Human Services! #MAHA.” As Important Context previously reported, Makary has also been using the “MAHA” hashtag in posts promoting “Blind Spots.”

Makary’s critiques of public health officials and government have echoed Kennedy’s. For example, speaking at the October Stanford health policy symposium Bhattacharya organized with a wide range of fringe panelists, including anti-vaxxers, he blamed the U.S.’s poor pandemic performance on obesity and food quality.

“We are running the largest uncontrolled clinical trial in world history,” he said. “We have poisoned the food supply with ultra processed foods and thousands of chemicals in the American food supply that are banned in Europe and Canada and then we’ve added toxins and chemicals and pesticides.”

He went on to say that the U.S. had a one-size fits all approach to COVID risk that treated the elderly the same as children—again echoing the Great Barrington Declaration.

Stoking Vaccine Fears

Makary’s focus on vaccination as a harmful act of the federal government and public health authorities during the HSSCP hearing was unsurprising. He had long been promoting fear toward the mRNA COVID shots, which have saved millions of lives to date, overhyping concerns about rare, often self-resolving side effects while advocating for infection-acquired immunity as stronger and preferable.

In his testimony, Makary falsely suggested that no healthy children had died from COVID in the U.S. and argued that the vaccines posed a greater risk to that age group than the virus itself. It was a familiar drum beat for the surgeon, who had tweeted a month earlier that “After myocarditis comes the risk of perm scaring & poss arrhythmias.” He followed up by asking his followers, “Anyone know how many HEALTHY teens have died of Covid, if any? The CDC director didn't when asked by Senators, so I doubt any 'expert' does.”

In a June 2022 op-ed for Fox News, meanwhile, Makary had challenged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that children ages 6 months to five-years-old be vaccinated against COVID, arguing, among other things, that the guidance “lacked humility.” He claimed most children had “natural immunity.” That fall, he argued the bivalent boosters were unnecessary and declared the White House had “gone rogue” in approving them without adequate testing.

“A Terrible Pick”

Public health experts told Important Context that they were alarmed at the prospect of Makary serving in such a prominent government role, where he could go after the vaccines he has cast doubt on.

“Marty Makary, like his prospective future boss, claims that he is pro-vaccine and yet has repeatedly spread disinformation about vaccine safety and effectiveness,” said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist who teaches at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and Stony Brook University in New York. “He has opposed vaccines for some vulnerable populations and advocated for so-called ‘natural immunity,’ which is a euphemism for mass infection. Anyone who opposes essential medicines and evidence-based public health policy has no business regulating them.”

Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist and surgery professor at Wayne State University who runs the New England Skeptical Society’s blog, Science-Based Medicine, called Makary “a terrible pick for FDA,” explaining that “he’s never shown evidence that he understands the drug approval process, and thinking of him in charge of approving new vaccines is terrifying.”

“In 2016, Dr. Makary was the originator of a factoid that is not true, specifically the claim that medical errors are responsible for 250K deaths per year, making them the third leading cause of death in the US,” Gorski said. “It was an estimate based on overly broad definitions and unjustifiable extrapolation from small studies. Four years later, he continued promoting dubious science with his claims about COVID-19 and then later COVID-19 vaccines, in particular his minimizing how dangerous COVID-19 is, attacking public health interventions such as masks, and then exaggerating the risks of the vaccines while downplaying their effectiveness.”