Daily Caller
Ex-FDA Commissioners Against Higher Vaccine Standards Took $6 Million From COVID Vaccine Makers
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.
“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”
But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington Post, STAT News and CNN.
The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.
Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.
Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.
Mark McClellan has received $3.3 million from Johnson & Johnson as a member of the board of directors since 2013, SEC filings also show. McClellan also consults for the new pharmaceutical arm of the alternative investment management company Blackstone, which invested $750 million in Moderna in April 2025.
Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.
FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.
The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.
Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.
“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.
Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.
Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.
The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.
Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.
Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.
Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.
The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.
David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shots with Pfizer and Moderna.
Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.
That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.
Daily Caller
‘Almost Sounds Made Up’: Jeffrey Epstein Was Bill Clinton Plus-One At Moroccan King’s Wedding, Per Report
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Former President Bill Clinton personally asked to bring Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as guests to the Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s 2002 wedding, a move that unsettled Clinton’s own aides, the New York Post reported Thursday.
Clinton requested permission to include Epstein and Maxwell at the royal wedding in Rabat despite neither having any official relationship with the Moroccan royal family, the Post reported. Sources told the outlet that Clinton’s request was viewed internally as inappropriate and has quietly circulated in Democratic circles for more than two decades.
“[Clinton] brought them as guests to a king’s wedding. I mean, it almost sounds made up,” one source familiar with the matter told the outlet. “How many times in your life have you been invited as a guest of a guest at a wedding?”
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Clinton traveled to Morocco with Epstein and Maxwell aboard Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” according to the Post. Chelsea Clinton attended separately, and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton remained in Washington due to her schedule.
“[Former First Lady] Hillary [Clinton] was in the Senate, so she couldn’t go. Chelsea very much wanted to go, and the president very much wanted to go,” a second person told the outlet. “The idea that they would take [Epstein] was a head-scratcher. But nonetheless, the Clinton office moved forward and made this request … to bring these two guests, and that’s what happened.”
Once in Rabat, Clinton, Epstein and Maxwell were seated with King Mohammed VI during the black-tie wedding dinner, sources said. At one point, Chelsea Clinton requested a group photograph that included her father, Epstein and Maxwell.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for sex trafficking conspiracy and related offenses. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Their crimes were not publicly known at the time of the wedding.
The Clintons continue to downplay the extent of their past relationship with Epstein, maintaining that they cut off contact with him in 2005, three years before he pleaded guilty to state sex crimes in Florida.
Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña previously told the outlet that Clinton took four trips aboard Epstein’s jet between 2002 and 2003 and denied that Clinton ever visited Epstein’s private island or residences.
“I don’t know how many times we need to say there was travel more than 20 years ago before he was cut off. Apparently, we need to one more time. But nice try,” Ureña said, according to the outlet.
Neither of the sources quoted by the New York Post said they believed Clinton was aware of Epstein trafficking or sexually abusing children, but did say the ex-president is downplaying his former links to both Epstein and Maxwell.
The Clinton Foundation did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Both Bill and Hillary are scheduled to give depositions in January to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about their ties to Epstein. The Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Clintons in August, and Committee Chairman James Comer said that if the Clintons didn’t appear for depositions scheduled for Dec. 17 and 18 or arrange to appear for questioning in early January, then contempt charges would be pursued.
Photos released by Oversight Committee Democrats in December show Epstein with prominent figures, including President Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Steve Bannon.
The Department of Justice is expected to release a new trove of documents related to the Epstein investigation Friday.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
I’ve written frequently here in recent years about the financial fiasco that has hit Ford Motor Company and other big U.S. carmakers who made the fateful decision to go in whole hog in 2021 to feed at the federal subsidy trough wrought on the U.S. economy by the Joe Biden autopen presidency. It was crony capitalism writ large, federal rent seeking on the grandest scale in U.S. history, and only now are the chickens coming home to roost.
Ford announced on Monday that it will be forced to take $19.5 billion in special charges as its management team embarks on a corporate reorganization in a desperate attempt to unwind the financial carnage caused by its failed strategies and investments in the electric vehicles space since 2022.
Cancelled is the Ford F-150 Lightning, the full-size electric pickup that few could afford and fewer wanted to buy, along with planned introductions of a second pricey pickup and fully electric vans and commercial vehicles. Ford will apparently keep making its costly Mustang Mach-E EV while adjusting the car’s features and price to try to make it more competitive. There will be a shift to making more hybrid models and introducing new lines of cheaper EVs and what the company calls “extended range electric vehicles,” or EREVs, which attach a gas-fueled generator to recharge the EV batteries while the car is being driven.
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“The $50k, $60k, $70k EVs just weren’t selling; We’re following customers to where the market is,” Farley said. “We’re going to build up our whole lineup of hybrids. It’s gonna be better for the company’s profitability, shareholders and a lot of new American jobs. These really expensive $70k electric trucks, as much as I love the product, they didn’t make sense. But an EREV that goes 700 miles on a tank of gas, for 90% of the time is all-electric, that EREV is a better solution for a Lightning than the current all-electric Lightning.”
It all makes sense to Mr. Farley, but one wonders how much longer the company’s investors will tolerate his presence atop the corporate management pyramid if the company’s financial fortunes don’t turn around fast.
To Ford’s and Farley’s credit, the company has, unlike some of its competitors (GM, for example), been quite transparent in publicly revealing the massive losses it has accumulated in its EV projects since 2022. The company has reported its EV enterprise as a separate business unit called Model-E on its financial filings, enabling everyone to witness its somewhat amazing escalating EV-related losses since 2022:
• 2022 – Net loss of $2.2 billion
• 2023 – Net loss of $4.7 billion
• 2024 – Net loss of $5.1 billion
Add in the company’s $3.6 billion in losses recorded across the first three quarters of 2025, and you arrive at a total of $15.6 billion net losses on EV-related projects and processes in less than four calendar years. Add to that the financial carnage detailed in Monday’s announcement and the damage from the company’s financial electric boogaloo escalates to well above $30 billion with Q4 2025’s damage still to be added to the total.
Ford and Farley have benefited from the fact that the company’s lineup of gas-and-diesel powered cars have remained strongly profitable, resulting in overall corporate profits each year despite the huge EV-related losses. It is also fair to point out that all car companies were under heavy pressure from the Biden government to either produce battery electric vehicles or be penalized by onerous federal regulations.
Now, with the Trump administration rescinding Biden’s harsh mandates and canceling the absurdly unattainable fleet mileage requirements, Ford and other companies will be free to make cars Americans actually want to buy. Better late than never, as they say, but the financial fallout from it all is likely just beginning to be made public.
- David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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