The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) former vaccine chief has claimed that he was forced out of his role after refusing to allow Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team unrestricted access to a sensitive and influential vaccine safety database.
Speaking to The Associated Press in an interview published Monday, Dr. Peter Marks said that he tried to “make nice” and made every attempt to work with Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic.
Marks said the core of his work for Kennedy involved a “vaccine transparency action plan” that would allow the new health secretary’s team to access and read vaccine-related complaints via the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Marks, however, refused to allow Kennedy’s team to directly edit or interfere with the data.
“Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust (them),” the former director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research told AP. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”
Maintained by the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), VAERS is a compilation of (unconfirmed) reports of adverse effects people may experience following a vaccination. It allows the FDA and CDC to monitor trends and quickly spot arising problems with vaccines—and some of its data can be accessed publicly.
Considering that anyone can submit a report, Marks notes that the agencies’ employees spend hours corroborating what’s submitted to ensure that reports provided are authentic and that symptoms or deaths are actually linked to a vaccine and not caused by something completely unrelated.
Most of the details in those reports are redacted publicly for legal reasons, though Marks claimed to the AP that his office wanted to make more information public in pursuit of transparency while working with Kennedy’s team.
“This is a legitimate thing that I actually was willing to compromise on,” Marks said. “We need to make VAERS more transparent so that people can understand that we actually do the work on the backend.”
He claimed to have sent his proposal for vaccine transparency to the FDA’s acting commissioner, Sara Brenner, in mid-February. Marks and his team, however, hadn’t heard back.
A month later, Trump administration staffers were reportedly requesting full access to VAERS, which Marks and his team pushed back against. He cited the sensitive nature of its data, which includes confidential personal and medical information.
One senior Health and Human Services (HHS) official reportedly later told Marks: “Look, he wants you gone,” referencing Kennedy.
“It was pretty clear that either I was going to resign, or they were going to fire me,” Marks added.
He ultimately resigned toward the end of March, tearing into Kennedy’s “irresponsible” and “detrimental” attitudes toward vaccines in a scathing resignation letter. He also claimed Kennedy was emboldening “misinformation and lies” instead of “truth and transparency.”
“Mr. Kennedy has increased the pace by which he intends to minimize the use of vaccines in this country,” Marks told AP.
An HHS spokesperson told the outlet that it made “perfect sense” for staffers on Kennedy’s team to seek access to VAERS. They added that Kennedy has advocated for vaccines on several occasions, and that the health secretary was “installing scientists committed to reversing the chronic disease crisis” while Marks was a “rubber stamp” for the drug industry.
A White House official disputed Marks’ statements to the Daily Beast and claimed they were false.
While Kennedy said he was not “anti-vaccine” during a Senate confirmation hearing in January, the health secretary has a long, public history questioning vaccines.
In one 2023 interview with Fox News, Kennedy said that he believes “autism does come from vaccines” despite a flood of research suggesting otherwise.
He told podcast host Lex Fridman in 2024: “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”
Kennedy has also has suggested that vitamin A supplements are a suitable treatment for measles amid a deadly outbreak currently raging in Texas, and said that vaccinations are a “personal choice” best left up to parents.
Over the weekend, he did publicly acknowledge in a statement that vaccines are “the most effective way” to prevent the disease from spreading.
