Posted by worik 1 day ago
I’m so curious how someone goes from being a professor to a science denier? I simply can’t imagine that journey.
His what now?
These people are all delusional ideologues. If reality does not match the ideology, reality must be wrong.
2. There's nothing whatsoever wrong about asking questions. It becomes wrong when refusing to listen to the answers and dismissing all the ones you don't like because you don't like the person saying them. Ironically, that's ad hominem.
Scepticism is healthy, and I don't begrudge you your scepticism. The scientific consensus can be wrong, especially for issues like this where debates get heated.
But I think that's an argument for 'let people do what they want' rather than 'prevent them from doing what mainstream science seems to think is the best action'.
Your point of view is not legitimate, and you deserve to be ridiculed wherever you go.
> When did asking for better evidence, or bringing up side effects, or Absolute Risk, suddenly become things that we cannot discuss on HN?
Because vaccine skeptics do not engage honestly on these things, they wouldn’t be vaccine skeptics if they did.
Look at these stats: https://boxed.github.io/micromort/?q=vaccine&scale=log&sel=v...
Note the LOG scale! You can switch to a linear scale, but then you can't even see there are multiple vaccine adverse risk data points, as they all collapse to one dot compared the the huge risks of the diseases they prevent.
I think like with that person that found their cancer to have some dna from an mrna vaccine in it the issue is when the prominent messaging is that there is no 0.1 micromort risk. There is no risk whatsoever and everyone who says so is a looney. Immediately you'll have thousands who say i told you so and harden their conviction.
There was also bad communication on the topic, often when politicians got involved or due to outdated information continued to be repeated. But there certainly was a lot of public discussion about the risks of the vaccines, they were simply vastly outnumbered by the benefits of the vaccines.
That 20 is in large part the kid that was brought into the hospital too late if at all. The kid that might have had astma or what have you.
The 3 is potentially yours or one in your family or friend group or community. It is a government mandated death and you might already distrust the gov.
A tragic event vs an authoritarian death inflicted upon you from that perspective.
My grandma is a scientist presumably very familiar with all this stuff but when her partner (not my grandpa) died from a bloodcloth shortly after getting an vaccine she also veered into that territory.
Well.. no. It was a government RECOMMENDED death at the most.
In fact, it's even more stupid. Sweden for example were so deadly afraid of anti-vaxxers that they threw away tens of thousands of doses of AstraZenecas vaccine. The one with 2 deaths per million. At the time it was estimated at 5 per million. Sweden has a population of 10 million. So if we instantly vaccinated the entire population we would see 2 deaths. While this decision to throw away doses was done we lost tens per day. And the government didn't allow those who understood math to take this if they wanted. No. They mandated the deaths. THOSE deaths WERE mandated. For real.
No. Lying about the risks is what got us in this mess. There IS a risk. It's just crazy low. https://boxed.github.io/micromort/?q=vaccine&scale=log These are the real risks. Yellow Fever vaccine is the worst with ~7 micromort risk. That's roughly your baseline risk just by living for 7 hours. It's not a lot, but saying it's zero is false, and lying about shit is how you radicalize people.
This wasn't the only time he stepped in and overrode experts with seemingly no justification. Just the most prominent example.
I think it's good he's gone.
This guy got fired for a good reason - he's an idiot.
Come on, make your buddies proud, "umadbro" me, next.
* it was a Trump political appointee who had made a “shocking” decision to not even review the vaccine
* it was despite the objections of the subject matter experts and career scientists
* it was despite the submitted study results being exactly what the FDA had previously approved
* the vote to go the opposite direction of him was unanimous
I mean sure, you could find an odd scientist who doesn't believe in something that 99.999% of scientists agree on, appoint them as the political head of an agency to overrule the 99.999% of scientists, and call that a “difference of opinion between scientists”, but…
If Prasad approved of the trial design and later decided it was insufficient then I would see things differently.
They'll just ban it again. Science got a temporary victory but I predict it won't matter.
The trust was not eroded by scientists, it was eroded by politicians pushing lies. I'm still to this day hearing lies & misinformation repeated about the vaccines.
The very concept of merit has been destroyed and replaced with judgement calls on celebrity (necessary for leadership role) and subservience to the political whims of the last 15 minutes (and you had better switch in the next 15 minutes or you're out).
Americans are incredibly pissed about all sorts of things, both valid and absurd, and have a long track record of picking bad options as a fix.
Lab leak theory was dismissed and actively suppressed. Inflated claims were made a priori about absolute vaccine efficacy that any responsible researcher who have not made.
Moreover, the trouble with trying to shut down real disinformation, eg claims that vaccines were more dangerous than the virus, is that many people will view any sort of paternalistic behavior by the government, especially around speech, with suspicion. ("Why do they care so much about what I say? They must be hiding something")
In the age of social media, I think the study of public health needs to consider more seriously the effects of viral psychology. The irrationality and stubbornness of people needs to be expected when planning public policy.
From my perspective, it’s hysteria borne out of the difference in requirements for urban health policy vs. rural health policy, and the fact that rural people quite often travel through urban areas (e.g. airports).
Talk to anyone from Wyoming and ask what Covid was like during the worst days, and then talk to an ER doctor who worked in New York City.
Cynically, I want to blame it on the absurd lack of empathy of rural Americans and a complete lack of ability to imagine day-to-day lifestyles that do not match their own.
Were there a few scandals? For sure, I will not deny that. But I have the distinct urge to invent time travel for the hemmers, hawers, and devil’s advocates and transport them to New York Presbyterian in April of 2020.
Edit: I also have to credit rightwing media, of course, for capitalizing on the opportunity to manufacture a wedge issue that every American had an armchair opinion of. Chicken and egg, of course, but media ghouls will be media ghouls.
Doesn't that cut both ways, though? Controls needed to keep densely populated areas safe aren't always necessary in low density areas like Wyoming. Yet some of those controls affected the livelihood of many people in areas of the country that are often poorer than those in dense urban areas.
And, yes, if a rural person is traveling to an urban area, they would have to abide by the same rules. Same as an urban person traveling to a rural area should be able to relax some of the restrictions they had to deal with. But it was mostly all or nothing, helping the divide grow even larger.
Isn’t this precisely what organically happened? Again, there were no federal agents armed with guns and pepper spray roaming the nation, enforcing Covid compliance. Rural bars, restaurants, stores pretty much all remained open the whole pandemic minus the couple of weeks where we weren’t sure if it was thousands or millions of people who would die.
People were “forced” to wear masks, which again, in practice, meant that once you got a certain number of miles away from an urban center there was no enforcement.
Plenty of Americans never got vaccinated. Their travel was restricted. Fair trade off all things considered. Urban people shouldn’t be forced to eat (i.e. live) where rural people shit (i.e. gallivant around as a disease vector).
> Yet some of those controls affected the livelihood of many people in areas of the country that are often poorer than those in dense urban areas.
This is very bad faith. The rural poor were completely unaffected by Covid measures. I traveled to Kentucky throughout Covid for hiking and pretty much never saw a mask. The rural poor also were unaffected by travel restrictions because the rural poor do not travel.
I swear the only acceptable policy for some people would have been no policy at all. Any active policy would have eroded “trust in institutions”.
Dead people don’t buy products either.
I would not say shutting down all discussion about a topic (lab origin) that ends up getting vindicated is a minor scandal. It's something everyone observed that erodes trust at a national level.
“Shutting down all discussion” - lol. I mean this is grossly hyperbolic. Were social media companies coordinating with the government to slow disinformation? Yes. Was it applied too broadly? Maybe. But describing it as “shutting down all discussion” is a disservice to people who don’t know as much as you and I do.
And yes, in the grand scheme of things, it is a minor scandal. Have you watched the news recently? Save your energy for issues that matter.
I don't think whataboutism is helpful here. I think the FDA was broadly well-intentioned, and this administration is not. But this article isn't about ICE.
It's wild to me that we keep talking about Biden/Kamala as if they are the ones responsible for the lost in trust in institutions when we have a Republican party and Fox news that blast that the government can do nothing right for the last 3 decades of my life.
Sure, the Democrats can do a LOT better for the common folk, but it's so misplacing the blame as to be mind boggling.
People reject science because of misinformation spread by conservatives?! Oh that's the scientists fault for not doing a better job of countering the conservatives!
You see it all over this thread too.
Is this not what the store owners did?
I'm not litigating my mothers treatment here. I am expressing the damage done.
So if someone says they oppose paternalism in public health and yet supports the Trump administration's public health efforts, I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that they're lying.
What I don't see is how anyone could argue this isn't paternalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror?wprov=s...
Which (conveniently) both justifies aggressively “fighting back” against the fictitious conspiracy and waters down any criticism as a “both sides” partisanship thing that can be cynically dismissed as business as usual in DC instead of a seismic shift in federal scientific policy to conform to arbitrary political mandates.
> The very concept of merit has been destroyed ...
It's the subversion of truth. I think that way of saying it is more accurate, addresses the consequences, and is less occluded by jargon: People care about truth; 'scientific expertise' may seem esoteric to most people.
I think HN is frequently part of that process: Merit - expertise, actual trials and evidence - is replaced both by sensational too-clever hot takes / takedowns, and by political/social advocacy.
Most threads begin with a takedown, a 2 minute drive-by from an amatuer, often of years of research by someone spending their life studying the matter. For some issues, we all know what side many will take before you know any facts or evidence.
These comments are normalized and given greater credibility than the OP and than valuable comments. How is that any different than the things we criticize (other than the FDA's subversion of truth [EDIT:] is far more consequential [sorry, I didn't finish that sentence!])
There are valuable comments to be found; maybe that's one difference, but I'm wonder how the signal-to-noise compares with other forums.
Very different. Decisions with enormous health implications, enormous financial implications, are made at FDA.
At HN, most people are here to learn, here to understand more.
Vinay Prasad is a fraud, completely unfit for the leadership role he was placed into, making baffling and arbitrary decisions on his own, overturning those with far more experience, knowledge and expertise.
If a HN comment gets things wrong, a few people might be misinformed, if they are credulous enough to not double check things.
When the FDA makes decisions like they have been making, thousands to millions of peoples' lives are worse off, and billions in capital is wasted.
Discussion forums of all sorts are incredibly valuable, even when they get things wrong. I have lots of complaints about the overhyping of, say, CRISPR, especially on HN, but whatever, it's a far far higher signal-to-noise than a random person I meet around town. Mention you work on drug development for big pharma to the random person and they think you're evil, at least HN is less likely to have that basic misconception.
What’s with him being allowed to continue to practice at the University of California [1]?
The fraud is in his supposed thrust towards better scientific rigor when he is so sloppy with major decisions of life and death.
Just as the comment up there says that HN comments that are critical and misinformed get a lot of attention and upvotes, Prasad has been highly critical and misinformed about scientific research, and his stint at the FDA has exposed that his critiques are much like that top-level HN comment that doesn't get things quite right.
How can one tell whether he has tenure?
The whole thing is kind of fascinating. Some of his "skeptic" fellow travelers like Cifu and Mandrola still carry water for him. Presumably he has a champion in Bob Wachter who also likes to fly the "contrarian" flag.
COVID really brought out a lot of crazies from UCSF and Stanford
I can dislike someone’s stance while at the same time recognizing that others benefit from the same protections.
If protections are reduced, the process will be weaponized.
This is a valid concern. So is moral hazard from a lack of accountability. I’m trying to figure out how those balance.
To be clear, the FDA regulates marketing claims. “Is the label accurate?”
Major decisions about life and death are between the doctor and the patient, not the FDA.
It sounds like you’re taking an expansive view of this government agency’s mandate. People will push back on this at the ballot box, even if they can’t put it to words themselves.
Such decisions, what treatments are available, are far more widespread and momentous than any individual decision between a doctor and a single patient, because they affect all conversations between doctors and patients.
> It sounds like you’re taking an expansive view of this government agency’s mandate
It sounds like you don't know what the FDA does in practice. It is not my supposed "view" it is the basic factual reality of the FDA for decades and decades. (And if you are asking for my view, I believe it has the appropriate level of control of the industry, having developed products directly under their regulation. My personal experience with the FDA, and the experience of all the people I know in similar situations, has been with a very astute and scientifically meritous institution, that worked hard to make sure that products see fair and rapid evaluation. At least, up until what I have seen under Vinay Prasad.)
In the case of vaccines, FDA's decisions can quite obviously make a difference in whether we have a rampant lethal pathogen roaring through our schools and killing our children and elderly... or not.
It's pedantic to the point of being outright false to say the FDA is not involved in major decisions of life and death. Silly take.
this is how Martin Shkreli described his work of identifying drug patents to buy that he could jack up the prices on. If that's the extent of the description you gave, I think random people would be right to first think you are doing something evil
- This baffling Moderna decision, which is so bad that many in the industry assumed it was from a failed bribe solicitation
- Linked in this article is the "truly evil" decision requiring sham brain surgery in the placebo arm for a Huntington Disease trial https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/truly-evil-fda-reject...
- Prasad holding a defamatory PR event about the company producing the HD candidate treatment, and only talking "on background" to hide his identity, which is sleazy and unethical "The criticism apparently struck a nerve with Prasad. The FDA held a press briefing later Thursday in which an unnamed “senior FDA official”—who identified himself as a hematology-oncologist—launched into a diatribe against UniQure, saying its “failed therapy” was supported by “distorted and manipulated” data. As for Woodcock’s comments, the official said he “expect[s] better” from her." https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/03/trumps-divisive-fda-v...
- His first ouster and reinstatement last year, over a unilateral Duchenne muscular dystrophy decision, severely lacking in scientific rigor and analysis
- Lied on his CV about being on a highly prestigious council he was not on (The Cancer Letter is not a random YouTube channel, it's high quality cancer research journalism) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCASAb7J-LE&t=41
As is often the case with such contrarians and critics, their own critiques apply most aptly to themselves.
I actually think he's just grifting and the notoriety he achieved went to his head. His pre-2020 takes were better reasoned and at least worth engaging with. I could see his takes shifting with popular misinformation ideas in real time as it contributed to his success
IMO this is worse than if he were just wrong. I think he knows better, but then he talked himself into a box, and doesn't have the people and political skills to survive on a bigger stage.
You called this “minor CV fibbing” above. If he was lying about this when he applied for tenure, wouldn’t that be Cause?
In fact, he probably would have had the same decision with or without the claim which is the essence of "not material".
My own personal take is that the lying is crucial, however.
That should be their primary objective.
Yes, I started writing that and didn't finish the sentence (see my edit near the end of the GP).
But I don't let HN off the hook: The attitude I described in the GP represents and perpetrates the same outlook that politically supports or tolerates this behavior from the FDA. HN users generally legitimize that approach rather than discrediting it.
> Mention you work on drug development for big pharma to the random person and they think you're evil
I think that's paranoid: The random person won't know what that means. Few who know will also know or care about the social implications. Of those who do, only some will be knee-jerk critical of big pharma, and fewer still of research rather than the business side. It's also a victim perspective: Big Pharma has enormous power; punching up at power by questioning, criticizing, and being skeptical (or even cynical) is not at all the same thing as punching down at the vulnerable. If someone wants the power and resources and salary of Big Pharma, benefitting from its enormous power, the pushback and reputation impact comes with it (though the latter is usually positive - great resume material and credibility).
In their minds there are two classes of people, and all of politics and law is about establishing the hierarchy. For the in group, the law is meant to protect and not bind, and the out group for which the law exists to bind but not protect.
It's clear in the language about "criminals" too. Actual convictions and clear corruption in the in group politicians? That's A-OK. An immigrant that is showing up for an official hearing? Time to be whisked away and treated with cruel and unusual punishment, whether or not their bureaucratic forms were filled out perfectly. (In particular I'm thinking of the immigration raid where South Korean professionals were helping to set up a battery factory and treated with chains as if they were violent criminals)
There's a substantial "learn and understand" cohort, but there are other factions. At the start of the pandemic, there were 2 posters explicitly here to proselytize Trump style conservatism. I'm reasonably certain there was an anti-vaxx voting ring 2020-22, and I suspect there's remnant Elon fanboy and MAGA coordinated voting.
I'd love to be proved wrong on these things.
even the lead researcher of mrna vaccines before covid said she would not consider mrna vaccines safes outside of the covid emergency. and this study focus on effectiveness, not side effects.
so while turning away from science for politics is as bad as pushing it irresponsible for commercialization.
Be specific?
(I have complaints - I thought Dr. Meissner was wrongheaded about opposing allowing EUA to extend to pediatric populations. But the committee as a whole functioned well and balanced the urgency of the situation with the need for voluminous data.)
This guy is a disaster. But really it's not just him. It's the entire organizational structure that puts him, or any other one person, in the position that they have the power to do this. There is simply no one qualified.
We need to have expert scientists to set up trials and review the design of the trials and conduct the analysis of the data. This is something that is generally objective and not able to be done without skills and experience. But then you have to make a decision based on those results. And the decision is some sort of risk reward trade off. While science can quantify what that tradeoff is, which path to take is fundamentally outside of the scope of science.
Trade offs are not objective determinations at all because they are based on subjective preferences. And therefore it makes no sense to force it into a one size fits all approval or denial by some centralized body. The only rational approach to such a trade off is to allow each individual to choose for themselves. The only person's opinion on whether the risk justifies the reward for the experimental Huntington's disease treatment is the patient's. The best we can do with science is to use it for its intended purpose to produce good data for him to make his choice.