Our entire public health complex is being challenged, examined and upended like never before under U.S. President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A key component of this transformation is the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. I spoke with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary about how he’s navigating changes amid an entrenched and recalcitrant bureaucracy and a public that’s grown mistrustful of government health advice.
“The FDA has a history of being a broken agency that, at times, has been captured by the same industry it’s supposed to regulate,” Makary said. “And so that ended the day we came into office.”
Makary is foreshadowing radical change to America’s drug advertising landscape, promising to enforce laws that he says the old FDA ignored for decades.
The FDA’s issuance of enforcement letters for false advertising or claims by drug companies has fallen from 130 a year in the late 1990s to three in 2023, to zero last year, Makary said.
“I mean, it’s like no one’s paying attention,” he said. “But if you actually watch what’s happening, you watch these TV programs now, it’s like one nonstop-running drug ad, and they’re always singing and dancing. And so we have a law that says you cannot create a misleading impression.
“So we are going to enforce that regulation,” Makary continued. “We are in charge of making sure that claims by pharmaceutical companies match the data — that you’re not misleading Americans with these ads. And so we’re going to crack down. And so we have got thousands of letters that are going out. We have enforcement letters that are going out, after the entire world of enforcing these ads had dwindled.”
Makary is also working on getting more information about the effects of the COVID-19 vaccine in children.
“It’s amazing that here in 2025, we don’t have the full story on the COVID vaccine in children,” he said. “How many kids have died from the COVID vaccine? We are reaching out to the doctors. We are reviewing autopsy reports. We’re making our own conclusions from our own investigation to find out whether or not the association was causal and what the degree of certainty is.
“And so you’re going to see a report coming out in the coming weeks that is going to … make transparent the investigation that we conducted from families who have said, ‘We lost our child from the COVID vaccine.’ And when you’re trying to decide whether or not your healthy 12-year-old girl needs an eighth COVID shot this year — which, to be clear, I don’t recommend; I don’t think the data supports it — don’t you think it would be helpful to have the data on COVID vaccine deaths in that public academic discourse? I think so.”
“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” airs at 10 a.m. Sunday, WJLA (Channel 7) and WBFF (Channel 45).
