If you’ve ever used eye drops that didn’t blind you, thank Dr. Timothy J. Pohlhaus. As of yesterday, he’s gone.
And if you’ve ever been injected with a sterile drug that helped heal you instead of killing you, you have relied on the services of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Manufacturing Quality, where Pohlhaus worked for 15 years and was a senior policy advisor.
Pohlhaus was one of the FDA’s few leading experts on sterile manufacturing for drugs. “I work to ensure that when people get a purportedly sterile drug product, that it is actually sterile,” as in, free of any contaminant, toxic or otherwise, Pohlhaus told VF.
He helped write the policies that guided manufacturers, worked to close loopholes that threatened safety, and trained the FDA’s investigators to uncover sterility failures at manufacturing plants scattered across the globe.
And he was among the thousands of FDA and other employees at the nation’s health agencies who were abruptly informed on the morning of April 1 that their services were no longer needed.
The slashing was so wide and deep that it can be hard to get a handle on just how much public-health expertise was lost yesterday. The affected offices at the FDA may not be household names, but they perform critical work that protects every American, and helps shape the regulatory decisions of manufacturers and foreign health agencies around the world, which rely on the FDA’s expertise.
The chief veterinary officer within the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Tristan Colonius, was fired. He had been working to help contain a bird flu outbreak currently burning through the nation’s dairy cows and threatening to spark a pandemic among humans. Also axed: critical expert analysts at the Detroit Medical Products Laboratory, which tests dietary supplements in response to consumer complaints and allegations of fraud.
And though the nation’s new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has pledged radical transparency, all of the roughly two dozen employees at a division within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that handled freedom of information requests—to provide journalists and researchers with agency documents—were informed that their jobs were being eliminated. The FDA’s entire media team was booted as well.
The cuts were so sweeping that former FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, who served under President Biden, posted on LinkedIn, “The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. I believe that history will see this [as] a huge mistake.”
Just days before this unprecedented bloodletting, on March 28, the biotech world was rocked by the news that Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, had been forced out by RFK Jr. with approval from the incoming FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary. Marks had helped drive COVID-19 vaccines across the finish line. It was perhaps the greatest achievement of Donald Trump’s first term—not that the MAGA and MAHA faithful see it that way.
Marks’s pointed resignation letter stoked fears that RFK Jr., a longtime antagonist of childhood vaccinations, plans to sow greater public doubt about the safety of vaccines. As Marks wrote, “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
No one at the FDA replied to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. A White House spokesperson referred us to a Health and Human Services press release from March 27 stating that the reduction of 10,000 employees across health agencies would consolidate HHS’s 28 divisions into 15 that would prioritize “ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”
