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After Hours: FDA Commissioner Marty Makary on Kids Killed by Covid Vaccine and a Sea Change in Drug Ads
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Foreign.
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Hi everybody. Cheryl Akison here. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure. After Hours. Today, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary on kids killed by COVID vaccine and a sea change in drug advertising. Well, we have a lot of news on the health front impacting probably in some way. Most everybody listening right now. I came away from my interview with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary with the feeling that talk of radical change in our public health system as demanded by so many, particularly after the COVID debacle, isn't just talk, it's happening.
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See if you agree.
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After you hear my extended interview with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, he's going to talk about an unprecedented change in drug advertising. I thought I would never see this day. He's also going to talk about a report coming out about children killed by COVID vaccine and a lot more on full measure. Sunday, September 14, you will see the interview. Plus I'll have an interview with Dr. Robert Malone, co inventor of the MRNA technology that was used for Covid vaccines. And even though he's a huge vaccine inventor and insider, he was against use of this technology for COVID vaccine for reasons that became clear. He's also a new advisor named to a vaccine advisory committee, very important committee that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Entirely cleaned out when he became HHS secretary. And I would say based on the record, rightly so. This committee has a long record of mistakes and missteps, not just when it comes to COVID vaccine recommendations, but for a long time, including, as I've reported on Full Measure, provable dishonesty and misleading of the public in ways that probably harmed people. But for now, here's the full interview with Commissioner Dr. Marty McCary.
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And can you give people just a paragraph, a summarized version of some of your experience so they understand where you came from?
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Yeah, I was a surgical oncologist and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins for 22 years. Before that, I was at Georgetown University, Harvard, Jefferson Medical College and Bucknell. And I spent my career really interested in the entire holistic approach to healthcare. So I spent a lot of time and research in health policy and the common threads in different specialties, implementation science, medical dogma, the blind spots of healthcare. And a lot of the work that I did had to do with drugs and devices and it had a lot to do with how we regulate healthcare. And the one thing that I'd been fixated on is why do we keep throwing good money after bad into this broken system and not talk about the root causes of why our population is.
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So unhealthy so you were thinking about that before. I think so many other people were even pre Covid. I think you were talking about this sort of thing. As someone who had been working on the outside of government. Again, by way of background, what did you see as the biggest problem with the way government was approaching things? Did it have to do with the root cause issue?
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Well, they're just playing whack a mole. The government has been playing whack a mole and only dealing with the last sort of stage of disease, the time when you need an operation or you need a prescription. And no one was really talking about food as medicine. We didn't even learn about it in med school. No one talked about the microbiome. Nobody talked about the root causes and the chemical exposures in our food supply and in the environment. We only talked about the chemotherapy to treat cancers, not why cancers are going up, not why so many kids have a chronic disease. 40% of our kids in the United States have a chronic disease. Is it their fault? Is this a willpower problem or is this something adults are doing to kids?
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Did you think prior to the past year or two, that there was ever a chance you could be called upon to lead a public health agency?
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No, but it's an amazing opportunity. The FDA is not only in charge of food, but we also regulate 20% of the US economy. Everything from fruit, mangoes coming across the border to CAT scans and MRI machines, medical devices and wearables and drugs, of course, which is what many people know the FDA for. We're also very focused on what's happening in vape stores popping up in every corner in America. 85% of the vape products sold there are illegal vape products, mostly from China. We where those same devices are banned for Chinese kids. And we're concerned about a new opioid that's being commonly sold in these vape stores called seven. Oh. So we initiated scheduling as a controlled substance with the dea. And so we have a huge opportunity at the FDA to talk about health in a new way, to talk about things we've never talked about before. Microplastics and contaminants and natural light exposure for kids. We've got to ask, why do we have so many young people on ADHD meds and antidepressants? And do we really fully understand what we are doing? We have got to talk about school lunch programs, not just putting every kid on Ozempic. We've got to talk about things that cause cancer, not just the downstage operations to treat cancer.
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Drug advertising is a huge controversy in this country because I think we're the only ones that allow it this way. And only maybe two countries allow some form of drug ads when we're talking about prescription drugs. This is a big area of focus for you. I think you noted recently that FDA's issuance of enforcement letters for false advertising or claims by drug companies has fallen from 130 a year that was in the late 90s to 3 in 2023.
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And 0 last year. I mean, it's like no one's paying attention. But if you actually watch what's happening, you watch these TV programs now, it's like one non stop 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. This administration is serious about doing what's right. And so with the charge of the fda, 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 to no enforcement.
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So someone's been studying all the ads on TV since you came in office.
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We've been gearing up for this and studying the problem, making sure we're not violating the First Amendment and doing everything we can to address this epidemic of direct to consumer ads that are misleading to everyday Americans. They're insulting to doctors, by the way. Why doesn't your doctor tell you about the options? They're never advertising generic drugs. They're advertising drugs that are super expensive, that are jacked up. 10 times more expensive in the US than other wealthy countries, say in Europe. And we're also cracking down on social media ads. There are social media influencers paid to promote drugs and they're not talking about side effects. We're cracking down on the online pharmacies that are talking about these drugs like they're wonderful, with no mention of side effects. Not one. It's not right. It's not right for one company to do the right thing and explain all the side effects in detail, in long form. And then for other companies to not even have audible words in an ad. And that's a real thing. An ad that's just music and singing and dancing people and the name of the drug and no words that are audible in the ad.
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Does this mean the FDA has made a policy Decision not to move to ban drug advertising.
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We're cracking down on drug ads to the maximum extent of our regulation while preserving first amendment rights because we do believe in the First Amendment. So I wouldn't call it a ban. I would say that we're taking on drug ads. Look back in pre1997, you rarely saw a drug ad and that's because the FDA enforced the regulation that you have to state what the risks are. And I as a doctor didn't want my patients to think a drug is going to solve all their problems. I wanted them to know about the side effects and not in a tiny, small font, you know, that quickly rolls over on a screen. I want them to understand the pros and cons of any medicine. We have an overmedication epidemic in the United States. In some cases, the medical field engages in the over medicalization of ordinary life. And so this idea that, oh, all your problems are going to be fixed with a pill, that is a cultural issue. And we are going to do our part by saying you cannot create a misleading impression. That is the language in the reg and that's the language we're going to enforce.
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How soon before you think we see a different picture of advertising?
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Look, very soon, because we're going at this hard. We don't do things for small, little incremental changes in this administration. We're not interested in small, little tweaks to our broken health care system. We're going big and we're going bold. And that charge comes from President Trump who has said do what's right and don't worry about what the lobbyists and the corporations might tell you.
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Do you think the impact will be some drugs will not be advertised if they have to fully disclose their risks?
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Yes, because look, there are drugs that have serious risks and people are not aware of those risks. They think I'm going to be singing and dancing and swimming and whatever they're doing synchronized swimming at an Olympic level in a pool. And that is something that we have to take a close look at.
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There is angle we've been covering on full measure, which is a loophole under which some drugs, and particularly vaccines seem to take advantage of this with the government's help, advertise a vaccine without any mention of potential risks or side effects. And they call it educational. Maybe they don't mention the brand name. So therefore they escape or they think they escape the obligation to talk about risks. Are you closing that loophole?
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The FDA is going to close the adequate provision loophole that you're referring to that says as long as you list the complications and the downside somewhere on a website, you don't have to talk about them. You can just talk about the pros. You can call it education. Well, when you're advertising directly to consumers, we think that loophole violates the spirit and the letter of the regulation that says you cannot create a misleading impression. So we're going to change the regulation. We're initiating action this week to change that regulation, to close the loophole. Because, look, I'm watching TV now and I'm watching nonstop bombardment with pharmaceutical ads that sometimes make misleading claims. And I want people to know that we are doing our job at the FDA to make sure that claims are not made without supporting data. I'm watching these TV ads nonstop and I want to surrender. I don't even know what some of these drugs might be. And I'm saying, okay, I give up, I'll take it, I'll take it. And that's the kind of scenario that, where people are not getting the full.
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Story on the COVID vaccine in kids. What are you working on in terms of trying to track what's really happened in the population?
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So it's amazing that here in 2025 we don't have the full story on the COVID vaccine in children. For example, how many kids have died from the COVID vaccine? Show me a doctor in the United States who can definitively tell you what that number is.
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I think they would just say none.
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I think there's this feeling that in the absence of data that you can fill that void with whatever political claims or narrative that somebody wants to make. But we have to bring back gold standard science, and that's our charge from Secretary Kennedy. And so you're going to see a report where we have actually investigated the children who have died from the COVID vaccine and made that report to the VAERS database. We are calling those families, 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. Americans have a right to know. They have a right to that information. And when you're trying to decide whether or not your healthy 12 year old girl needs an 8th 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.
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You probably already have some inkling. Is there any chance the number of COVID vaccine related deaths in kids is zero or you know, there are some.
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Kids have died from the COVID vaccine and you're going to see a full report coming out in the coming weeks on that.
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We've also been covering a lot of other health issues such as artificial food dyes or petroleum based dyes in our diet which have been banned in many other places but had not been banned here. And I would like to ask you what's the latest on that? But also the idea that a lot of advocates have been petitioning the FDA for changes for years and not getting an answer when it seems to me these initiatives should be coming from the FDA without citizens having to beg the FDA for answers on these problems.
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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. And so that ended the day we came into office. One of my first actions was to remove all pharma and industry employees from FDA advisory committees wherever statutorily possible. We have talked to the companies and said we'd like you to remove all nine petroleum based food dyes from your products. We've got a tremendous response, enormously popular with the American public. We are now moving on to the next tier of chemicals. We're cataloging those chemicals, listing them on a website. We're doing an inventory. We saw another chemical, titanium dioxide removed by one of the largest candy makers mars in the United States. And Sam's club has just said we are not going to be promoting products that sell any one of the top 40 most concerning chemicals in the food supply. We're making progress for having been there for five months. We're starting to see a movement now to healthier food. We are rewriting the food pyramid which was broken misinformation from the corrupt industry that had its fingers in the government. And we are going to end the 50 year war on natural saturated fat. We're going to talk about ultra processed foods in that report. And yes, we're going to talk about the types of grains that somebody eats. Not just the calories in calories out zero sum game, but the importance of fiber. We have stripped fiber from grains, chop them up and they function like sugar. It has a high glycemic index and so we are poisoning our nation's kids at scale and then drugging them. And so we've got to stop and ask what are we doing? And what we hope to do is to not use the heavy hand of government to start banning things, but to raise awareness, ask companies to make steps towards healthier ingredients and rewrite that food pyramid so that at least the government tax dollars that go to purchase food are not going to purchase the ultra processed and sugary drinks as frequently. So you saw in this administration for the first time, SNAP waivers where states are not required to pay with taxpayer dollars for sugary drinks and ultra processed sugar.
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Food stamps, what we call food stamps. Is red dye banned or going to be banned?
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Red dye is banned and it is banned in a regulation that's set to take place in 2027. Red dye probably has the most evidence around it. But I don't feel comfortable with petroleum based dyes of any color being in the US food supply for children. And so that's why we've asked companies to go all out and make commitments to remove all nine petroleum based food dyes. And we're tracking their commitments.
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So would it be better if they agreed to do it rather than, I guess a next step short of a ban could be you could force warnings, which I don't think they'd want warnings on food that says what these dyes can cause, which is I think everything from brain impacts to ADD and potentially cancer.
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That's right, hormonal disruption, adhd. So look, you win more bees with honey than fire. And so we're starting with a friendly approach, bringing companies to the table. They see the writing on the wall, they see the tremendous movement that Bobby Kennedy and others have been spearheading to say we've got to get to healthier foods. And so they just don't want an unfair playing field with their competitor food companies. And so we're getting to the table to agree on a timeline that's mutually agreeable, agreeable to, and then we'll, we'll use every regulation we have in the toolbox if we need to.
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In the big picture, what's it been like going to into an agency that hasn't seen this kind of attempted change or reform maybe ever. What's, what's that been like in a practical sense for you?
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It's been pretty cool. You know, I meet so many of the scientists at the FDA who say, gosh, we've been dying for this for decades and nobody would actually take action. The previous leaders we had were afraid of the food companies. And so it's fun. An amazing and a milestone moment in American healthcare where you're seeing now the scientists liberated to speak truth, to see what they've always believed in. Get some airtime. We're bringing light to women's health issues that have never gotten the attention they deserve, like hormone replacement therapy and perimenopausal women. We're talking about SSRIs and the side effects and. And in the side effects in pregnancy. We're talking about things that we've needed to talk about that we haven't been talking about. We're talking about baby formula and why it's such a broken regulatory process. We're trying to respond to moms that say they want foods, including baby formula, without seed oils and added sugar. Why are we adding sugar to baby formula? And so we're seeing this incredible awakening in the United States, and it's such an exciting time to be in public health.
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So you're not sensing, are you sensing any pushback? Do people push back to you, to your face?
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You know, I think that you're going to have stakeholders with their own economic interests. But when you talk the language of data as a scientist, as I've been trained to do at Johns Hopkins through my career, and you've got a team. You've got Mehmet Oz, who was a tenured heart surgeon from Columbia. You've got Jay Bhattacharya, a tenured MD, PhD professor from Stanford. And we're going out there together, showing the science, saying how we need to get back to gold standard science and common sense. That's a powerful force.
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Is there anything else you want to add?
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I mean, I could talk about our vision for the fda. Okay, so our focus at the FDA is to deliver more cures for the American people and healthier food for children. And when I talk about cures, the amazing thing in this job is you get to see what's in the pipeline. I think we're going to see a cure or meaningful treatment in the next year or 2 for type 1 diabetes, for neurodegenerative disorders, for certain types of cancer, a universal flu shot so you don't have to come in every year and we guess what the strain is going to be and something for PTSD. My heart goes out to the veterans. We have 8,000 veterans a year that lose their life to suicide. That's more than the entire death toll from the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. So the wars are still over, but our men and women are still dying. The battle is still raging in their brain. And so we have. We owe it to them to look at these potentially promising therapeutics for PTSD and to get a decision out quickly. So we have a new program that is gonna get decisions out in weeks instead of nearly a year. And so that is an exciting program. We're gonna be announcing the first round of drugs to go through that process. If you have the cure for breast cancer, do we really think women should wait 10 years for the drug to go through the full regulatory process? So we're gonna be making decisions in a matter of weeks, and we're going to be doing it in a way that does not cut any corners on safety. And it's an exciting time. We've brought AI into the scientific review process. We've reduced animal testing requirements for the fda. Most drugs don't need animal testing. And we're using real world evidence. Why are we requiring new trials when a drug is already approved overseas? So it's an exciting time at the fda. We're streamlining the process, modernizing the agency and, and trying to bring more cures and meaningful treatments to the American public and healthier food for children.
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My last question is a big picture question. As we learn more as ordinary Americans about what's going on with our toxic exposures. I hear so many people throw up their hands and think they can't do anything because it's too much. They can't change everything about their water and their food and their air and their diet and their medicine. Do you think the changes that you will be able to make in four years can impact the nation's health in a measurable way in a fairly short period of time?
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Well, already people are talking about environmental exposures and the chemicals in food in ways that I've never heard anyone talk my entire lifetime, even as a medical profession. So if we can generate more education, if we can show more data, if we can commission more studies and, and bring attention to downsides of certain exposures, then I think we're going to empower a generation of people. We're already seeing it in young people. We're seeing now people at restaurants ask questions that have never been asked of the restaurant owners about their suppliers. We're seeing people read labels like we've never seen them read before. So I think it's an exciting time in health. And this is really thanks to the Maha movement, the many people who have done deep dives in microplastics and the types of food that you can eat and the way you can exercise and the benefits of wearing a continuous glucose monitor even if you're healthy and you don't have diabetes because you can see how your body's physiology is responding to the foods you eat and that can prevent diabetes. We've got to talk about how to prevent diabetes, not just talk about the price of insulin.
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I thought of one more. What are your views about Ozempic and wegova? Did I say it right? We go.
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Wegovy.
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Wegovy. What are your thoughts about these weight loss drugs that so many people are turning to?
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Look, we have seen a reduction in comorbid conditions as a result of some of these drugs that are mimicking hormones that are naturally occurring in the body. And so I believe the decision whether or not to go on one lives between you and your doctor. What I don't like is when we ignore the fact that we have created a highly addictive ultra processed food system, shoved it in front of kids, watched them develop rates of prediabetes and insulin resistance now in American kids of 31% and then tell them, take this drug. That's immoral. And I think we have to reexamine the entire way that we treat children in this country. We shake up kids in the middle of their deep sleep. Early in the mornings when it's dark, we put them on a school bus, not because it's good for their circadian rhythms, but because it's convenient for adults. They have less natural light exposure in some schools than in a federal penitentiary. We shove ultra processed food in front of them that gives them a high glycemic index. They're tired. We ask them to sit still at a desk for seven hours. They can't do it. We put them on drugs at scale. And then we ask, why are our nation's kids sad and sick? We've got to stop and reexamine everything. And that's what we did in the Maha report. We are talking about issues that have never before been talked about in the mainstream in healthcare. And this is the focus of new NIH funding. In the past, the NIH was funding things like the Wuhan Lab. Now we're funding things like the root causes of the rise of chronic diseases in children.
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Thank you.
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Thanks so much.
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You can watch this interview and a lot more on Sunday, September 14th on the upcoming edition of Full Measure. If you happen to be listening to this after that, you can always go watch the replay by visiting Fullmeasure News. Or you can go to our full measure YouTube channel at any time and watch a replay of the most recent programs or any programs from the past. To find a listing for stations and times. If you want to watch on TV, go to cherylakkeson.com and click the Full Measure tab. I hope you've had a chance to check out my bestseller Follow the Science How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures Yours and Prevails. If not, please think about doing that today. Proceeds support independent reporting causes. Proceeds also support independent reporting. From the Cheryl Atkison store, go to Cheryl Akkeson.com and click the Store tab for some great, exclusive products designed with independent thinkers like you in mind. Products that have clever slogans like I need to find some new conspiracy theories. All my old ones came true. And do your own research. Make up your own mind. Think for yourself.