On March 28, 2025, Health and Human Services forced Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and the nation's top vaccine regulator, to resign or be fired, as the Washington Post reported and CIDRAP relayed. Marks had led the center since 2016, including the review of COVID-19 vaccines. He submitted a resignation letter effective April 5 that said: “truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
In an interview with the Associated Press, Marks said that shortly before he was forced out he refused to give Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s team the ability to directly edit the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, though he let them read its reports. “Why wouldn't we? Because frankly we don't trust (them),” he said, explaining the refusal. “They'd write over it or erase the whole database.” Months later Kennedy removed all 17 members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee (see Kennedy Fires All 17 Members of the ACIP Vaccine Panel, a First in Its History, and Brings In Vaccine Skeptics).
Correction (October 2, 2026): this entry said Kennedy fired Marks for refusing to “edit” safety data, and quoted his resignation letter as saying Kennedy's demands would “compromise the scientific integrity of vaccine safety surveillance” and “put American lives at risk.” The letter contains none of those words, and Marks's account is the reverse: he refused to give Kennedy's team edit access. He was forced to resign rather than fired outright. A quotation attributed to unnamed public health experts could not be sourced and was removed, as were citations whose pages no longer exist.