Longtime readers know Vinay Prasad. We’ve been on his show. He was one of the few credentialed voices willing to say the obvious out loud when saying it cost you something, and he’s been a genuine force in Team Reality and later in MAHA.
His path since is unusual enough to be worth stating precisely, because people keep getting it wrong.
He was appointed director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research — CBER, the division that regulates vaccines and gene therapies — in May 2025, replacing Peter Marks. On July 29, 2025, under sustained political attack and in the middle of a fight over a Sarepta gene therapy, he abruptly resigned. Two weeks later he was back, reinstated at the FDA’s request after a White House review of the campaign against him. He left again at the end of April 2026; Commissioner Makary characterized it as the end of a planned one-year leave from his UCSF faculty position rather than a resignation under fire.
Critic, then insider, then out, then in, then out. He has now sat down with Reason, and he is telling all the truths.
▸ EMBED THE YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE —
The thing a former CBER director is not supposed to say
The interviewer raises the question of whether any child has died from the COVID vaccine. Prasad does not hedge:
“Absolutely, is it the case that kids died of myocarditis from the COVID-19 vaccine? Yes, absolutely it is the case.“
Then he does something more useful than the assertion — he explains why the official coding says otherwise, and why that coding is misleading.
For some vaccines, he notes, you can find physical proof. Give MMR and a child develops a granuloma, you can biopsy it and find vaccine product. Give the varicella vaccine and a child dies, you can sample the cerebrospinal fluid and find the vaccine strain.
Myocarditis leaves no such fingerprint. There is no assay that pulls the vaccine out of the heart muscle. So under a standard demanding that kind of certainty, the deaths get coded “possible” or “probable” and never “definitive” — not because the evidence is weak, but because the test does not exist.
His point, and it is the sharpest thing in the interview:
“Just because the death isn’t coded as certain and coded as probable or possible, that doesn’t negate the fact that it is attributable. In fact, the standard across all of drug development is possible and probable are attributable.“
That is the whole argument in two sentences. Every other drug in America is regulated on the basis that “possible” and “probable” adverse events count. For this one product, a different and unmeetable standard was applied, and the resulting zero was reported as though it were a finding.
He follows it with an analogy about base rates that is hard to argue with. Send a million people down one stair. Most walk it off. A thousand twist an ankle. Ten split their heads open. One dies. Not because the stair is dangerous — because a million is a large number. Myocarditis is a known side effect. The arithmetic follows.
And then the part that is actually news
The interviewer notes the published figures: zero childhood deaths definitively linked to the vaccine, five classified as possible and two as probable — seven total — and observes that this is fewer than the ten that had circulated earlier.
Prasad’s answer:
“They changed the report.”
“I had a draft report with 10. They changed it after the media publicity of my letter.“
Asked who changed it, he says: the people who did the report.
We covered the ten. In November 2025 we published FDA Finally Admits It: At Least 10 Healthy Kids Likely Died from the Covid Vaccine. That number then quietly became seven.
Prasad is now saying, on camera and on the record, that the revision followed press attention to his letter.
To be careful: this is his account. He is a party to the dispute and an interested one. We have not seen the draft, and “they changed it after the publicity” describes a sequence, not necessarily a cause. But the man saying it ran the center that produced the report, and the specific claim — a draft of ten, a published seven, a revision after coverage — is checkable by anyone with access to the drafts. Somebody should go get them.
Fauci
Asked directly whether Fauci committed a crime, Prasad says yes, and locates it in the gain-of-function funding:
“I think that was a crime for which he’s been pardoned. I think it’s not just my assessment. I think that’s what Joe Biden’s autopen thought… when he signed, or whoever signed, a pardon — that he committed a crime. That’s why he has a pardon that goes back that far.“
The reasoning is worth following. The pardon reaches back to 2014. Prasad’s argument is that the scope of the pardon is itself evidence: you do not indemnify someone that far back for conduct nobody believed was criminal.
On the legacy question, he doesn’t reach for nuance:
“I think very poorly. I think this is where the media is completely enraptured by the guy.”
And then the bill of particulars — the man who told you to put a cloth mask on a two-year-old; the six-foot rule that he later conceded was, in Prasad’s paraphrase, a number they made up; the school closures, including a call to Bill de Blasio urging him to close New York’s schools, recorded in Fauci’s own diary.
On origins, Prasad points at the same diary. Fauci writes of being brought into a SCIF and shown intercepted Chinese communications that made the CIA suspicious of a laboratory incident. And on the Huanan market — the origin Fauci publicly endorsed — the diary reportedly concedes that at best it was an amplifying event, not the source.
“I suspect that many intelligence people do in fact know the answer, and that answer is probably lab leak.”
The part nobody will quote, and the most important
Everything above will be clipped and shared. This won’t be, and it should be.
Prasad went inside. He got the job, lost it, got it back, and served out a year running the division that regulates every vaccine in America. Asked what public health could become, he describes something modest — honest, proportionate, humble, bipartisan.
Then he describes what it is:
“Public health is far from these things. Public health could actually aspire to be bipartisan. Public health is not. It’s becoming an increasingly entrenched left-wing discipline run by left-wing ideologues, reaching more and more absurd conclusions.”
Asked whether any of that changed during his tenure: “Not much at all.”
And then the sentence that should stop you:
“Changing an entrenched organization with tens of thousands of people is very difficult… I don’t think a real reform is possible. I suspect it’ll splinter into different sort of public health groups.”
That is not a critic on the outside throwing rocks. That is a man who was handed actual regulatory authority over American biologics, used it, and came out the other side saying the institution cannot be fixed — only fragmented and routed around.
For those of us who spent four years arguing that these agencies needed reform, that is a genuinely uncomfortable conclusion, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
The framing worth stealing
One more, because it dismantles the dumbest argument in this entire debate in about fifteen words.
People tell him vaccines save lives. His answer:
“Drugs save lives. The right drug given to the right person at the right time is life-saving. But the wrong drug given to the wrong person at the wrong time can be harmful. Vaccines are the same way.“
You cannot say anything meaningful about “vaccines” as a category, he argues, any more than you can about “Tylenol, aspirin and Plavix all in the same breath.” They are pharmaceutical products. Each one has an indication, a population, a dose, a risk profile, and a benefit that depends entirely on who’s receiving it.
That is not an anti-vaccine position. It is the position every other class of drug in America is already regulated under. The only reason it sounds radical here is that for five years we were told the category was exempt.
Interview: Reason, with former FDA CBER director Vinay Prasad.
"He was appointed director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research — CBER, the division that regulates vaccines and gene therapies — in May 2025, replacing Peter Marks. On July 29, 2025, under sustained political attack and in the middle of a fight over a Sarepta gene therapy, he abruptly resigned. Two weeks later he was back, reinstated at the FDA’s request after a White House review of the campaign against him. He left again at the end of April 2026..."
Vinay Prasad was up against and corrupt and thoroughly rotten organization. One man cannot fix the rot. Vinay himself said it: "I don’t think a real reform is possible. "
I've said this many times: The FDA and CDC are far too corrupt to be able to reform them. The corruption is systemic and thorough all thru the rank and file. The only fix for them is to disband them completely, fire all the employees, and mark the employees "not eligible for rehire" for any government position.