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FDA vaccines chief hopes for common ground with RFK Jr.
The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccines official says he hopes to find common ground with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was picked Thursday by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
“What I would ask of him is that he keep an open mind. We’re happy to try to show as much of the data as we can. And I think the data are essentially overwhelming, in certain areas, but we’ll just have to engage in the dialogue,” said Dr. Peter Marks, speaking at an event hosted by the Milken Institute in Washington, D.C., this week, ahead of Trump’s decision.
Kennedy has insisted that he is not “anti-vaccine” and has pledged not to ban vaccines under Trump. Instead, Kennedy has promised to “restore the transparency” around vaccine safety data and records that he accuses HHS officials of hiding.
Marks flatly rebuked Kennedy’s claims about the safety data.
“There’s no secret files. I mean, if they’re secret, I hold a security clearance. If they are secret from me then, they must be at some other level of classification,” he said.
Public health experts have objected to Kennedy’s long record of misleading statements questioning vaccine safety and worry he could upend decades’ worth of hard-fought wins in improving vaccination rates against deadly diseases.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a watchdog group that has often clashed with the FDA, likened the pick to “putting a Flat Earther at the head of NASA.”
Marks, a career civil servant who played a key role in launching the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, says he has “sat in the room” across from Kennedy when vaccines were discussed multiple times.
While he said he worries that spending time “re-litigating things that we know work” could undermine other important FDA efforts — and could be potentially deadly during a future pandemic if it further erodes confidence in vaccines — Marks also said that working with RFK Jr. could turn out to have a silver lining.
“Perhaps engaging in that dialogue, especially if it’s in a public venue, it may help. It may help bring some of the rest of the country along because sometimes as somebody is convinced, perhaps, maybe some of the rest of the country will be,” he said.
Greg Nash/The Hill/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Marks rejected Kennedy’s claims that the FDA is filled with corrupt officials who need to be fired, stressing that the staff is dedicated to protecting Americans’ health. Marks said he hopes to keep his job under Trump and Kennedy, and to protect the team at his center.
“They do what they do to protect the American people. Not for any kind of nefarious purpose. And during the COVID pandemic, people worked 14 hours a day,” Marks said of the agency’s staff.
Kennedy has vowed to end what he calls the agency’s “war on public health,” warning workers who are “part of this corrupt system” to “pack your bags.”
He has also specifically pledged to fire all of the nutritional scientists at the FDA and other agencies on his first day, accusing them of being co-opted by corporate interests.
“I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth,” Kennedy posted Thursday on X.
Asked about Kennedy’s scientific expertise, Marks said he thought Kennedy’s understanding is “not as deep as others,” but added, “I know a number of attorneys who know more than most PhDs and MDs about medicine. So it’s not the degree. It’s just a matter of keeping an open mind.”
While Kennedy’s pick for the role was just announced on Thursday, health officials have been bracing for the possibility for a while. During the campaign, Trump vowed he’d let Kennedy to “go wild” on health if he won.
“President Trump wants to see, has told me, he wants to see concrete, measurable diminishment in chronic disease within two years,” Kennedy said on Nov. 9.
Kennedy says he has called on Trump to declare an emergency to counter chronic disease, supercharging his authority to address what he sees as the root causes of the federal government’s failure to address rising rates of a range of ailments from autism to obesity.
“In order to do that, we need to operate very, very quickly. And we need to treat this with the same kind of urgency that we did, the COVID epidemic. This is a thousand times worse than COVID,” Kennedy said.
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President-elect Donald Trump fired another salvo in his long-running effort to have his New York criminal conviction tossed, with his attorneys alleging earlier this month that there was juror misconduct during his trial.
In a previously undisclosed Dec. 3 letter to Justice Juan Merchan that was made public Tuesday, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote that there was “grave juror misconduct” in the proceedings in a Manhattan courtroom earlier this year.
However, heavy redactions in the letter and subsequent exchanges with prosecutors obscured almost all information about the accusations themselves.
“The jury in this case was not anywhere near fair and impartial,” they wrote.
Merchan on Tuesday directed Trump to make the redacted letter public, and instructed prosecutors to publish their own redacted responses. The judge also criticized Trump’s lawyers for making such serious allegations without sworn statements.
Prosecutors called the allegations “vague accusations of juror misconduct” in one of their responses. They claimed Trump’s attorneys did not want to have the allegations subject to investigation or a public hearing.
“Notwithstanding the import of their allegations, counsel do not request and in fact oppose a hearing at which their allegations could be fully examined, referring to such a hearing as ‘invasive fact-finding,'” wrote a prosecutor for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Still, they argued such an investigation wasn’t yet appropriate.
“Counsel’s allegations fall far short of the standard required to request such a hearing in any event,” they wrote.
It is unclear if the allegations relate to a June 7 letter from Merchan that alerted prosecutors and Trump’s attorneys to a comment left on the court’s Facebook page the night before Trump’s conviction.
“My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted,” the user wrote. “Thank you folks for all your hard work!!!!”
The person who made the comment had previously described themselves as a “professional s**tposter.”
Trump was found guilty in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records, connected with a scheme to cover up a “hush money” payment to an adult film star. He pleaded not guilty and is contesting the conviction on multiple fronts.
Japanese automakers Honda Motor and Nissan Motor are reportedly entering merger talks to help them compete against Tesla and other electric vehicle makers, according to the Nikkei financial newspaper.
The two firms are considering operating under a single holding company, and are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding for the new entity, according to the Tokyo-based Nikkei.
The paper also reports that Honda and Nissan are considering bringing in Mitsubishi Motors, of which Nissan is the top shareholder, under the holding company to create one of the world’s largest auto groups.
In a statement to CBS MoneyWatch, Nissan said it has not announced the details in the report, but that the two companies “are exploring various possibilities for future collaboration, leveraging each other’s strengths,” which it announced in March.
Honda did not immediately respond to CBS MoneyWatch’s request for comment.
In March, Japan’s number two and three automakers, after rival Toyota, deepened ties when they agreed to explore a strategic partnership on electric vehicles.
Analysts characterized the move as one that is aimed at helping the automakers catch up with Chinese competitors, including BYD, which have captured more market share, while Japanese firms have lost ground by focusing more on hybrid vehicles.
China overtook Japan as the world’s biggest vehicle exporter in 2023, aided in part by its dominance in the electric car space.
Honda announced plans in May to double its investment in electric vehicles to $65 billion by 2030, as part of a target set three years ago of achieving 100% EV sales by 2040.
Similarly, Nissan in March announced that 16 of the 30 new models it plans to launch over the next three years would be “electrified.”
Climate concerns drive demand
The world’s auto giants are increasingly prioritizing electric and hybrid vehicles, with demand growing for less polluting models as concern about climate change grows.
At the same time, however, consumer demand for EVs has slowed amid high prices, range anxiety and developing infrastructure around charging points.
Hybrids that combine battery power and internal combustion engines have remained popular in Japan, accounting for 40% of sales in 2022.
But Japanese firms’ focus on hybrids has left them in the slow lane in meeting the growing appetite for purely electric vehicles. Just 1.7% of cars sold in Japan in 2022 were electric, compared to 15% in western Europe and 5.3% in the United States.
