In February, as Robert F Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a battle unfolded between entrenched Big Pharma loyalists, including the FDA’s director of its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), Dr. Peter Marks, and the incoming HHS team.
Secretary Kennedy requested data related to vaccine injuries; Marks refused to comply. On the way out the door, Marks maligned Kennedy for allegedly spreading “misinformation and lies,” but it was Marks who employed both.
Marks’ first lie was that he left because he opposed Kennedy, claiming in his resignation letter: “I was willing to work to address the [HHS] Secretary’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency… However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
In truth, Marks was insubordinate and unilaterally sought to manipulate and control the incoming Secretary by withholding data and dictating his own vision for improving vaccine safety.
In a subsequent interview with the Associated Press, Marks related the real reason for his departure:
“Shortly before he was forced to resign, the nation’s top vaccine regulator says he refused to grant Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s team unrestricted access to a tightly held vaccine safety database, fearing that the information might be manipulated or even deleted.
“Marks says he ‘tried everything’ to work with Kennedy. At the center of that effort was a plan to increase publicly available information about vaccine ingredients, safety and side effects.
“Marks and his team had hoped to kick off the initiative with a two-day public ‘listening session,’ followed by an expert report written by an independent organization, such as the National Academies of Sciences.
Marks tried to control the regulatory process instead of acceding to directions from his superiors, “‘Because frankly we don’t trust (them),’ he told the AP, using a profanity. ‘They’d write over it or erase the whole database.’”
In other words, Marks withheld data because he wanted Kennedy to be subservient to him and comply with his diktats, scandalously claiming Kennedy would tamper with evidence of vaccine injury.
This is the opposite of the scientific method Marks claims guides him. The Wall Street Journal reported Marks stating, “I can never give allegiance to anyone else other than to follow the science as we see it…” In an interview with Face the Nation, he professed to be open to scientific inquiry while lambasting anyone who questioned vaccines: “Science, when it's done . . . at its best, is keeping an open mind to all the possibilities… People who don't know science, people who don't know how science works, people who want to control other people by pseudoscience – they talk in absolute terms.”
Continued Marks: “The way you detect a true scientist from a pseudo scientist is because it's very rare for scientists to speak in absolutes. There are some absolutes… Whereas pseudoscientists find it very easy to speak in absolutes because they're not actually looking to use science for the benefit of mankind, they're usually using science for their own benefit.”
Yet, in the same interview, Marks spoke in a telling absolute: "I will . . . put to you that I will not accept as a cause of autism [is]the MMR vaccine – or, for that matter, any of the other vaccines we use because we've studied them in so many millions of children.”
This unscientific, pro-industry bias tainted Marks’ tenure at the FDA. It explains his hostility toward efforts to question vaccine safety and reveals his devotion to the pharmaceutical industry, whose products he has rubber-stamped. It also explains why, following his resignation and according to a report in GenEngNews, two major biopharma trade organizations “rapidly issued statements bemoaning the loss of Marks from the FDA.”
A cultish faith in vaccine safety infused Marks’ decision-making at CBER. He opined in a November 2024 interview that he was “hoping that the second Trump administration ‘would be amenable to the concept of accelerated approvals given initiatives around government efficiency and a desire to lean into the development of medical products.’ ”
The speed of Marks’ vaccine approvals at the FDA, regardless of who they were for, may in fact be one of the things for which he is most remembered.
Dr. Meryl Nass revealed that the FDA approved the use of both Moderna’s and Pfizer’s bivalent COVID-19 boosters for children aged 6 months through age five “after only a 3 day review of Pfizer documents.” The journal Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law reported:
“Marks approve[d] COVID boosters for 6 month olds, while admitting he didn’t know if they worked:
“In an interview, Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, acknowledged the limitations of the available data on the updated boosters.
“‘It’s true, we’re not sure how well these vaccines will do yet against preventing symptomatic disease,’ he said, particularly as the newer variants spread.”
The CDC and FDA employed a similar faith when they pushed COVID-19 vaccinations, even after evidence that people were being injured by vaccines, particularly from myocarditis in young patients.
A 2025 report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, titled “Failure to Warn: How Federal Health Agencies Downplayed the Risk of Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Following COVID-19 Vaccination,” details how the CDC and FDA issued “deceptive and dangerous declarations” about vaccine safety and avoided disclosing risks through the CDC’s V-Safe system.
According to the report: “V-Safe not only omitted cardiac-related symptoms in its checkboxes, it also failed to include the specific 'Averse Events of Special Interest' which CDC identified in its 2021 V-Safe protocol document. [I]t is clear that CDC and FDA officials only relied on the vaccine safety surveillance systems as a means to an end.”
Dr. Marks was at the center of this failure. He repeatedly dismissed claims of profound, life-changing vaccine injuries, as documented a Del Bigtree episide, “Peter Marks Exposed,” on Bigtree’s Rumble podcast, The Highwire.
Yes, Marks heard the words Brianne Dressen, one woman who brought her COVID-19 vaccine injury to Marks’ attention during a zoom with Marks. But what’s apparent in a video of Dressen’s Zoom with Marks is how little the former CBER director was willing to change course and investigate why the vaccine injuries were happening and what the FDA could do about them.
As Aaron Siri, lead attorney for the COVID-19 vaccine injured put it on Del Bigtree’s podcast: “Peter Marks does not view himself as a regulator…He sees himself as a partner with Pfizer.”
Continued Siri, “They think at the end of the day, no matter how many people they kill with these products . . . they believe that they are saving more people than they’re hurting, and therefore it’s OK for them to play God, and to hide the ball, because they’re doing good.”
Siri was perhaps reacting to something Marks said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” about people resisting vaccines for religious reasons. “Let me try to answer all your medical questions, and if you're still left with faith issues that you know that you feel like God will provide for your child,” Marks said. “Well, guess what, God provided me. I know about science. Science has provided us with these vaccines that can save your child's life. God helps those who help themselves."
In another zoom call on the subject of injuries following COVID-19 jabs, Marks toes the party line and appears tone deaf to the empirical data from the vaccine injured: “It’s very hard to find cases of deaths directly related to these vaccines,” he says. “There are perhaps a handful, but in general the number of lives being saved is far, far, far greater.”
But this April, following Marks’ resignation from the FDA, the evidence presented in a Senate Report, tells a different story:
“As of April 25, 2025, VAERS reported 38,607 deaths and 1,663,348 total adverse events worldwide associated with the administration of COVID-19 injections…. This compares to 2,663 deaths reported to VAERS associated with the flu vaccine over a period of 35 years. No other reports of adverse events associated with any other drug or vaccine even come close to these statistics. And yet, those who oversaw the development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines continue to insist it is safe and effective, without providing the data to prove their claims.” (emphasis added.)
Marks seems never to have seen a vaccine he didn’t like.
Even when, as the above makes clear, he wasn’t sure how well specific vaccines would combat COVID variants, and even after he heard testimony about the rising number of people who were injured from the vaccine, Marks would not budge from the script. .
That’s why Big Pharma loved him so much.
Rather than uphold scientific integrity, Marks exhibited favoritism for novel medications – and not just vaccines. In June 2024, he faced strong criticism for approving a new gene therapy:
“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday announced expanded approval for a gene therapy to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD)—despite the fact that it failed a Phase III clinical trial last year and that the approval came over the objections of three of FDA's own expert review teams and two of its directors.
“In fact, the decision to expand the approval of the therapy—called Elevidys (delandistrogene moxeparvovec-rokl)—appears to have been decided almost entirely by Peter Marks, Director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.”
Ironically, Marks’ successor, Vinay Prasad, recently stepped down from his position amid complaints that he curtailed the distribution of Elevidys after two children died of suspected liver failure, a known serious side effect of the drug. These deaths raise further doubts about Marks’ unjustified approvals.
Peter Marks was disloyal to HHS Secretary Kennedy, inconsistent in evaluating novel medications, and beloved by the pharmaceutical industry. In his efforts to sabotage the incoming administration to bolster the Big Pharma status quo, he was dishonest.
This is exactly the kind of corrupt regulatory capture that President Trump and HHS Secretary Kennedy vowed to eradicate. Marks hit himself with the door on his way out, vindicating Kennedy’s decision to send him packing.
Key takeaways:
– Peter Marks was defiant of the incoming HHS Secretary’s interest in improved agency transparency regarding vaccine approvals and safety.
– This may have been motivated by a pervasive pattern under Marks’ stewardship of ignoring alarming evidence of myocarditis and other patient harms in vaccine trials, and in subsequent reports of vaccine injury.
 | A guest post by
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I once believed that many of the vaccine bureaucrats thought of their activities as pursuing some kind of "greater good" strategy. Over time I came to learn that they were just a bunch of self interested pricks who really didn't care about anyone but themselves. From Gerberding to Gottlieb on down, money and "fame" is so powerful that they really don't give a fuck about who gets injured. Like their Phrma masters, people like Marks never really took their "oath" ( Hippocratic) seriously to begin with. I am older than RFK Jr. I knew his father. I'd like to see the same ruthlessness of righteous indignation applied to this battle as I admired in the 1960's. The vaccine injured have waited for justice for far too long.
Excellent quotes pulled in to this article!
WOW "As of April 25, 2025, VAERS reported 38,607 deaths and 1,663,348 total adverse events worldwide associated with the administration of COVID-19 injections"