Dr. Peter Marks still doesn’t get it.
On Friday, facing imminent firing, Marks quit as the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator.1
Media outlets quickly received Marks’s resignation letter (gee, I wonder who gave it to them?). It blamed the Trump administration for its “assault on scientific truth” and detailed all Marks had done for The Science (TM) in his 13 years at FDA.
What moment of service did Marks recall most fondly? Glad you asked! His work developing mRNA Covid jabs in Operation Warp Speed, of course.
Let’s stop right there.
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(Actually, let’s not stop. Let’s get to the truth. With your help.)
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Pretend, for a moment, the mRNA vaccines had actually ended Covid.
Pretend they hadn’t caused serious short-term side effects in hundreds of millions of people — fevers, headaches and nausea more serious than Covid for many recipients.
Pretend they didn’t cause myocarditis and other cardiovascular problems that killed or hospitalized tens of thousands of young men worldwide. Or autoimmune disorders, including hepatitis, psoriasis, and even Type 1 diabetes.
Pretend mRNA technology had led to many other new vaccines, instead of repeatedly failing in trials. Pretend Moderna stock is not down almost 95 percent since 2021.
Most of all, pretend scientists are not still finding new potential risks from the shots.2
In other words, pretend the mRNA jabs had worked, rather than being among the worst hype jobs in medical history, with dangers we still don’t fully understand.
Even then Dr. Peter Marks would have been wrong to brag about his role in bringing them to market. He would have been wrong to write in his resignation hymn to himself of his “privilege of watching the vision that I conceived for Operation Warp Speed in March 2020 in collaboration with Dr. Robert Kadlec become a reality.”
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Why?
Because it was Marks’s job to regulate the mRNA shots.
More than anyone else in the United States government, he decided whether to approve them. Of course, Marks didn’t have the final say. He reported to the FDA commissioner, who served at the pleasure of the president. But his voice mattered more than anyone else’s.
In fact, in fall 2020, when Democrats raised concerns the Trump administration would rush to approve vaccines (before the Biden Administration took over and mRNA shots became the holy of holies), reporters pointed to Marks as an independent bulwark.
“The decision on whether or not to authorize a vaccine will fall on Marks,” ProPublica wrote on September 26, 2020, in an article titled “How To Tell a Political Stunt From a Real Vaccine.”
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In 2020, the mRNA vaccines were on trial. Marks was the judge, the frontline judge hearing the case.
Only he was judging his own work.
Marks should never - never! - have involved himself with Covid vaccine development.
As soon as he did, he ensured that the FDA would not evaluate the shots independently. The fact that he did so even though Pfizer and Moderna made clear that they intended to profit on the jabs at taxpayer expense only worsened the problem.
His involvement also furthered the perception that Covid was a unique public health emergency where normal rules did not apply. Governments at every level took advantage of that fear to justify lockdowns and school closures and other illegal and unconstitutional measures.
In November 2020, when Pfizer and Moderna reported the initial results from their pivotal clinical trials, Marks’s conflict of interest didn’t seem to matter. The results appeared so positive — 95 percent protection against infection — that any regulator would have authorized them.
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(Those were the days…)
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Everyone knows what happened next.
The honeymoon did not last. By late spring 2021, myocarditis cases had become a concern. By midsummer, Covid cases in vaccinated people were soaring as the protection from the jabs crumbled.
By then, Marks’s own subordinates were demanding more time to consider the mountains of data that Pfizer and Moderna had provided before fully approving, rather than merely authorizing, the vaccines.
But the Biden Administration wanted full approval to pave the way for Covid vaccine mandates. And it wanted boosters available without age restrictions, to calm the middle-aged (and younger) Democratic Karens it had promised an escape from Covid.
Marks agreed. He sidelined the scientists who reported to him and ensured full approval, fast.
Then he went further, pushing the jabs on children.
He did so well into 2022, long after it was clear that Covid posted almost no risk to anyone under 30, much less infants, toddlers, or kids. And he did so after the pediatric Covid vaccine trials had raised questions about whether the mRNA shots worked for kids at all, much less for more than a few weeks.
He was hopelessly compromised, so compromised he couldn’t even imagine how compromised he was.
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(I got your assault on scientific truth right here.)
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He still can’t.
Marks is so deep in the mRNA hole that he still thinks he deserves praise for his conflicts of interest in 2020.
He doesn’t, though.
He deserved to be fired.
Now he has (effectively) been.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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(I’ll never forget. And I’ll never stop reporting. With your help.)
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Addendum: for more about how Marks pushed through full approval and boosters in the summer of 2021, check out this interview with Dr. Philip Krause, who resigned from the FDA over the issue:
Marks oversaw the agency’s “biologics” division. Besides vaccines, biologics include genetic therapies and monoclonal antibodies like Humira, which are complex proteins that can be similar or identical to proteins our own bodies make and are usually injected or infused. A separate FDA unit regulates the simpler chemical compounds that are usually given in pill form and which are what most people think of as “drugs” - from aspirin to oxycodone to statins. Those are generally much cheaper and more commonly used than biologics (with the exception of vaccines, which almost every child gets).
The scientists finding these problems are mostly outside the United States, because American researchers seem almost afraid to look.
Marine Le Pen is easily the most popular politician in France.
On Sunday, a poll found her the clear front-runner for the 2027 Presidential election. On Monday, a French court said she couldn’t run.
A judge in Paris found Le Pen and her right-wing National Rally party had used funds from the European Union to pay party workers. For this sin, the judge sentenced Le Pen to two years of house arrest — and banned her from the 2027 election.
The decision is France’s version of the Democratic efforts to chase Donald Trump from the 2024 Presidential race. It comes as German politicians are considering moving against the AfD, that county’s major right-wing party. When will the left realize these games undercut its claim to stand for democracy and the rule of law?
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(Calling all freethinkers!)
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Legacy media outlets, in Europe and the United States, call the National Rally party “far right.” Almost definitionally, that can’t be true; the most popular party in a democracy can be conservative, liberal, even communist, but it can’t be far anything.
The National Rally was founded in 1972 as the National Front by Le Pen’s father, Jean, who defended French collaboration with the Nazis and downplayed the Holocaust. Marine Le Pen ousted her father from it in 2015 and changed its name in 2018.
She repudiated Jean’s most noxious views and moved the party left economically, promising to protect France’s generous welfare state. At the same time, she kept its core anti-immigration and tough on crime attitudes. In other words, she remade it as populist and nationalist first, conservative second, very much like Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
Her changes have resonated with French voters, who are frustrated with violence and terrorism from poorly integrated Muslim immigrants. Many of the deadliest terror attacks against Western countries have occurred in France, including the Bataclan nightclub massacre and related attacks in November 2015, which killed 131 people.
France also appears to be swinging against expensive decarbonization efforts, though its backlash has not been as severe as Germany’s, probably because the French have nuclear power plants keeping electricity relatively affordable.
And so Marine Le Pen is now the front-runner for the 2027 French Presidential election. The poll Sunday found her with the support of 37 percent of voters, about 15 points ahead of anyone else.1
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(Far-right! If CNN says it, you know it must be true.)
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But barring an appeal experts on French law say will probably not be heard in time for her to get on the 2027 ballot, Le Pen won’t be allowed to stand for the Presidency.
Is this liberté?
The crimes for which Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis found Le Pen guilty are not quite traffic tickets, but they are minor. They amount to putting a few party workers on the European Union’s payroll. Even the BBC, hardly a right-wing news organization, acknowledged that “practically every French political party has resorted to similar underhand methods in the past.”
The trial, which started last year, had attracted little attention. Almost no one expected that the court would presume to keep Le Pen from running even if it did find her guilty.
But de Perthuis had other ideas.
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It is impossible not to hear in the Le Pen case echoes of the way the Democratic prosecutors and liberal judges prosecuted — and, yes, persecuted — Donald Trump last year.
Europe, like the United States, is riding a nationalist-populist-conservative wave. The rise of the National Rally in France comes alongside that of Alternative for Germany and the Brothers of Italy, which has ruled Italy since 2022, an eternity in Italian politics.
As in the United States, the rise of the right has raised fears among Europe’s elites and legacy media outlets, often tied to Germany’s Nazi past and the continent’s long and bloody history of nationalist aggression.
The elites seem to have forgotten that these are democracies. And voters in them are tired of the way they’ve been governed. Le Pen has been gaining ground for over a decade; with each Presidential election she has taken more votes.
The United States has a problem with income inequality, but Europe has an even bigger problem with economic stagnation. Voters on both continents have clearly decided that welcoming millions of poorly educated illegal immigrants a year is not the answer to either.
European and American elites may not like that view. They may even find it dangerous.
But for a generation, they have controlled every societal lever, including academia, the film and television industries, the news media, and powerful non-governmental organizations. They have worked in coordinated fashion to impress upon the proles the necessity for decarbonization — which they style as opposition to climate change2 — mass immigration, drug decriminalization, and their other obsessions.
They have been rejected.
What they ought to do is try to figure out why.
What they are doing is crying fascism at every opportunity — and looking for ways to force aside the candidates voters prefer.
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(You have a choice. Choose Unreported Truths.)
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Last spring, Democrats tried to use the courts, particularly in New York, to destroy Donald Trump. At the time, I called this strategy out as dangerous and self-defeating, as it so clearly was.
In November, American voters delivered their verdict, punishing Democrats for their arrogance. The lawfare provoked a deserved backlash. Trying to tell people that they can vote for anyone, except the candidate they really like, is a prescription for failure in democracies.
I strongly suspect that the French will soon teach their elites the same lesson.
At least this time it won’t come with a guillotine.
In the French system, any number of candidates can run, as long as they receive 500 endorsements from elected officials like mayors. If no one receives a majority in the first round of voting, the top two candidates advance to the second round.
This does not include grounding the private jets upon which elites rely.
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