\n The US Food and Drug Administration\u2019s head of vaccines and biologic medicines will leave the agency at the end of April, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Friday.\n <\/p>\n
\n Dr. Vinay Prasad, who joined the FDA in May, oversaw a series of vaccine decisions that attracted controversy, including a refusal last month<\/a> to review a new flu vaccine using messenger RNA technology, made by Moderna. The agency later accepted the application with adjustments.\n <\/p>\n \n FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has not made a decision on a replacement to lead the agency\u2019s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, he said in a social media post<\/a> Friday.\n <\/p>\n \n Prasad\u2019s departure was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.\n <\/p>\n \n Prasad had previously left the agency<\/a> in July, less than three months into the job, before rejoining weeks later. That departure came amid increasing pressure from White House allies including Laura Loomer, who accused the hematologist-oncologist of being politically aligned with liberals and expressing \u201cdisdain\u201d for President Donald Trump.\n <\/p>\n \n More recently, CBER has been embroiled in controversy over requests for more trial data from a company, UniQure, developing a gene therapy for Huntington\u2019s disease. In a rare move, officials convened a media call<\/a> on Thursday to defend the FDA\u2019s decision and attack critics.\n <\/p>\n \n As a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Prasad was an early \u2013 and harsh \u2013 critic of the government\u2019s Covid-19 response. He also criticized his predecessor in the FDA role, Dr. Peter Marks, for overseeing approvals of new medicines<\/a> that Prasad argued were supported by thin evidence.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US Food and Drug Administration\u2019s head of vaccines and biologic medicines will leave the agency at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-519499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}