Vinay Prasad is returning to his role overseeing vaccine, gene therapy and blood product regulation at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a little more than a week after he left the agency.
“At the FDA’s request, Dr Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,” Department Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement to Reuters.
Prasad left the agency on 30 July after just a few months as director of the center.
Stat News first reported the return of Prasad.
Prasad, an oncologist who was a fierce critic of US Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates, was named the center’s director by the FDA’s commissioner, Marty Makary, in May.
Criticism of Prasad’s tenure intensified around the agency’s handling of a gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) from Sarepta Therapeutics.
The FDA-approved therapy played a role in the death of two teens who had advanced DMD. After a third death in a separate experimental gene therapy from the company, the FDA asked Sarepta on 18 July to stop all shipments of the approved DMD therapy, saying it had safety concerns.
The FDA changed course on Sarepta on 28 July and said shipments to the main group of patients for the drug could restart.
Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist with outsized sway over Donald Trump, had called Prasad a “progressive leftist saboteur” who was undermining the agency’s work.
Two days before Prasad stepped down last month, Loomer had released misleadingly edited audio to suggest that that Prasad had admitted sticking pins in a Trump voodoo doll, when the full audio made it clear that he was talking about the kind of thing an imagined liberal Trump-hater would do.
Loomer reacted to the news of Prasad’s return on Saturday by renewing her attacks on him in a social media post in which she promised to produce “exposes of officials within HHS and FDA” in the weeks ahead. “There are several Senate Confirmation hearings coming up and I have multiple oppo books ready for distribution!” she wrote.
Prasad was a physician who joined the agency from the University of California, San Francisco. He has had stints at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
The FDA and other health agencies have seen multiple shake-ups in recent months under the leadership of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
