Within three months of firing Tracy Beth Høeg, its top drug regulator, the FDA had approved the first mRNA flu shot, cleared a Sanofi diabetes treatment for children that she had held up, and approved a twice-rejected melanoma drug whose maker went to the White House.
“I’m worried about approvals that we’ve seen recently, like the mRNA influenza vaccine,” Høeg told journalist Paul Thacker in an interview posted Wednesday, citing “very concerning safety issues.“
Of the melanoma drugmaker’s White House meeting, she said: “I guess that’s what you do now if you’re angry that your product is not approved. One has to wonder, is it approved based on the data or do they just know the right people?”
Høeg still doesn’t know who ordered her firing. When agency lawyers came to her office on May 15, three days after Commissioner Marty Makary was pushed out, she refused to resign. The lawyers told her the order came from “someone way above their pay grade.”
The person who supposedly wrote her termination memo denies writing it or ever seeing it, she says. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. only learned of the firing after she was gone, the New York Times reported.
