FDA’s New Chief Medical Officer is a Radical Pro-Abortion Leftist

Last Saturday was the 35th anniversary of the Americans for Disability Act. It’s the most important piece of civil rights legislation since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But earlier this month, a liberal who snaked his way into the Trump administration honored that anniversary by preventing terminally ill children from accessing critical medications.

What happened?

Duchenne’s and Sanfillipo are variations of muscular dystrophy that kill children before their peers graduate college. They are horrible diseases with no cures.

Sarepta developed a drug that has, since its FDA approval in 2023, been provided to about 900 kids with Duchenne’s. The goal of using this medication is simple: Help them live longer and higher-quality lives. And according to published data, it’s done exactly that.

Tragically, two kids who were prescribed the drug died earlier this year. But what sent the FDA careening to stop shipping the drug earlier this month was the death of someone who wasn’t even on it – and doesn’t have Duchenne’s. The man who died was 51, had Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, and was on a different Sarepta drug, according to the company.

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On Monday, the FDA once again recommended the drug for some patients. And if the story stopped there, you might think the FDA was acting in the best interests of patients.

But the agency also rejected a drug this month that it admitted had robust research. Ultragenyx is developing the first-ever drug for Sanfillipo – a rare, genetic neurological disease – but while analysts say the issues may “be resolved in a timely manner,” that’s far too late for kids who decline every day. And even the FDA’s Sarepta review was of deaths much earlier this year, meaning that the bureaucrats took a long time to do their basic job.

The man who makes these life-and-death decisions is FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH. He’s a Bernie Sanders-supporting liberal who has been on the right side of COVID vaccine mandates since early in that debate. But he’s also an anti-pharma fanatic who has had it in for Sarepta since at least 2024, criticizing then-pro Trump official Peter Marks, MD, PhD, for approving its drug in 2023.

Prasad also kicked out a voice that many in the gene therapy and rare disease community viewed as a hero – Nicole Verdun, who was modernizing the FDA’s processes and acting as an intellectually honest voice in an agency long known for bureaucratic ineptitude.

Violating Trump’s Right to Try principles

I was born with a neural tube defect called spina bifida occulta. I use a wheelchair. I’m also an alumna of the first Trump administration, where I was the first Commissioner for the Administration on Disability at the Department of Health & Human Services. My job was to advocate for all Americans to be honored for our inherent, God-given humanity at the White House, in the media and on social platforms, and to Congress.

Nobody was more excited than me that President Donald Trump signed the federal Right to Try law in 2018. This allowed terminally ill patients and their families to request access to drugs that passed certain stages of development and testing. It was a law that put people over bureaucrats and – unlike the COVID vaccine mandates – created opportunities to increase personal freedom rather than strangle it.

Unfortunately, almost all Democrats in the House opposed the bill, as did the American Medical Association. And in contrast to the consistent narrative that Republicans don’t care about the disabled, the legislation was driven by The Goldwater Institute, a free-market think tank that wants government to be effective – which means creating more, not fewer, opportunities.

None of this should be surprising, though. More than sixty thousand children are aborted each year in America because of disabilities discovered while they are in the womb. Their parents are pressured by society, medical doctors, and family members to not try – but instead deny – their kids the right to life.

I was almost one of those kids. My parents had been trying to have kids for years when they finally found out they were pregnant. Unfortunately, doctors could not always find my heartbeat when examining Mom and me, so they knew something was wrong. And when they discovered that the placenta was at the bottom of Mom’s uterus, covering the cervix – causing her to be in danger of bleeding to death at any time – doctors urged her to abort me. She refused, lived through surgery along with me, and died decades later at the age of 91.

And liberals don’t stop in the womb. During the COVID-19 pandemic, patients with disabilities were denied the right to have service animals, necessary medical devices, and advocates (often family members) with them when engaging with the medical community. Down Syndrome patients were six times more likely to have “Do Not Resuscitate” on their paperwork during the pandemic – because, as we see with the spread of so-called “assisted suicide” laws and genetic cherry-picking with IVF – only the best specimens get society’s full support in the liberal/fascist mindset.

Honor disabled Americans – don’t kill them

While not without its challenges, my life has been wonderful. And I’m sure that the parents of kids with horrible diseases like Duchenne and Sanfillipo would agree – if their opinion could be heard past the voices of those like Prasad who want disabled Americans out of sight, out of mind, and in the grave.

But his abandonment of the most vulnerable Americans shouldn’t be a surprise. Remember, he’s a socialist, so the government should be in charge of your life. And earlier this year, he said that mifepristone appears to be relatively safe during an abortion – clearly, despite being an MD, he forgot that the science shows unborn kids are human, too.

And that was before he had the power to deny kids needed treatment. It’s clear that those who need the FDA to support them the most won’t get it under his leadership.

LifeNews Note: Melissa Ortiz is founder of Capability Consulting and was Commissioner for the Administration on Disability in the first Trump administration’s Department of Health & Human Services. 

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