Dear Leaders of the American College of Surgeons,
I have written extensively about MAHA/MAGA doctors, both their COVID misinformation and incompetence/malevolence in power. Much of my writing has featured ex-FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, whose tenure inspired articles such as Why Marty Makary Was the Worst FDA Commissioner in 25 Years. That article said:
I have covered the FDA for the past 25 years, and so I don’t say this lightly: Marty Makary was the worst commissioner in that time.
Makary, who resigned under pressure from the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday, brought to the job a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of the role, of the functions of his agency, and of the needs of the employees who worked for him. He allowed too much of the senior leadership of the agency to leave or be removed, weakened its standards, and ignored staffers who understood both the science and the political art of regulation. Toward the end of his tenure, he seemed isolated and obsessed with notching “wins” that often amounted to very little.
This outcome was unsurprising, at least to those of us who cared enough to pay attention to Dr. Makary’s words before he obtained power. We tried to use his words to warn about him.
To avoid repeating these failures in the future, we must be clear and honest about we came to this sad moment, where the Lancet is writing editorials titled Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 Year of Failure. That article said:
The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.
MAHA/MAGA doctors like Dr. Makary are a part how we got here, as was the silence and enabling of medical leaders. Most turned a blind eye to bad faith, political actors in our profession. Even worse, some sanitized their misinformation as “thinking differently.”
Let’s be honest about Dr. Makary’s COVID history. He was ranked #2 in the article The Dishonest Doctors Who Were Fox News’ Most Frequent Medical Guests In 2021. Here’s what it revealed about him.
- Makary holds a masters degree in public health and specializes in abdominal laparoscopic surgery. He is a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University. Makary has been described as “a darling of the anti-vaxxers” for contradicting current vaccine consensus among medical professionals. Makary has also written that there is “no compelling case” for vaccinating “healthy” children and claimed that he is “not aware of a single healthy child in the U.S. who has died of COVID-19 to date” – discounting all cases that involved disabled children with underlying health conditions. Despite Makary making numerous false predictions (saying, for example, that the United States would reach herd immunity by April) and being called out by other public experts for downplaying the risk of infectious disease, Fox regularly invited him back on-air in 2021 to underminepublic health efforts:
- In March on The Story with Martha MacCallum, Makary predicted there was low risk of new variants causing COVID-19 surges, and on Your World with Neil Cavuto, he accused public health experts of “cry[ing] wolf” over the threat of new variants.
- In June on America Reports, Makary went so far as to complain that discussion of new variants is “fearmongering” to “manipulate people to get vaccinated,” saying, “I’m for vaccines, but this has turned into a tool to try to coax people into it.”
- In June on Special Report, Makary claimed it’s time to “move on and live a normal life” comparing COVID-19 cases to influenza: “right now we’re about at 150th the daily cases of a regular seasonal flu in the middle of that flu season. So people have a distorted perception of risk.” According to Makary’s own employer, Johns Hopkins, COVID-19 has a mortality rate 10 times higher that of the flu.
- On Your World with Neil Cavuto in November, Makary undermined efforts to vaccinate children, saying kids with natural immunity should not be vaccinated. He went on to fearmonger about potential side effects of vaccinations.
- On Fox News Primetime in November, Makary claimed to be pro-vaccine but said he stands against “obsolete” vaccine mandates, especially for children. Makary falsely asserted that “public health officials have brushed under the rug the fact that kids have died from the vaccine, it’s rare” citing myocarditis occurrences in young boys. (However the real risk of myocarditis is from COVID-19, not vaccines, and most people who develop myocarditis recover quickly.)
This is all true, and even if Trump had lost the presidency, it would have been important to remember Dr. Makary’s COVID track record. This sort of misinformation had a real world impact, though a lot of people didn’t care about it.
However, it also implies something about the future. Combined with his performance at the FDA, it means there’s no reason care about what Dr. Makary says moving forward. He has not proven himself to be a skilled prognosticator or reliable narrator. He has given us no reason to trust him. Unless he is willing to spill the beans about his former bosses, Kennedy and Trump, he has no pearls of wisdom or valuable insights to offer.
Moving forward Dr. Makary should judged entirely based on what he’s already done, with Fox News & COVID and at the FDA. He has a track record now, and it’s fair to hold him accountable for it.
You don’t feel that way, however. You recently invited Dr. Makary to speak at your annual conference and didn’t care a lick about any of that. His COVID track record didn’t matter to you, nor did his performance at the FDA. You were willing to overlook it all. You portrayed Dr. Makary as a swell guy, someone we could trust. You said:
Dr. Makary will draw on his experience in surgery, academic medicine, and federal health policy, while exploring the forces shaping the future of healthcare. His presentation will examine new trends and biomedical innovations that are positioned to positively disrupt everything from health insurance to the practice of medicine. Attendees can expect a discussion of emerging challenges and opportunities facing surgeons and other healthcare leaders.
Confirmed by a bipartisan vote of the US Senate to lead the FDA, Dr. Makary led initiatives that included accelerating drug approvals, reducing reliance on animal testing, modernizing artificial intelligence regulation, rewriting national dietary guidelines, phasing out artificial food dyes, and advancing healthier school lunch standards.
Before entering government service, Dr. Makary was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore, Maryland, where he also served as chief of islet transplant surgery and held the Mark Ravitch Endowed Chair of Gastrointestinal Surgery. Dr. Makary founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Surgical Trials and Outcomes Research and has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed publications. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.
Dr. Makary also is the author of two New York Times bestselling books: The Price We Pay, winner of the 2020 Business Book of the Year Award, and his latest book Blind Spots, which tackles nutrition science, the microbiome, hormone replacement therapy, and emerging health trends.
This isn’t false but it leaves out key details. It is fundamentally dishonest.
I can help you fill in the gaps.
My YouTube channel- the one THEY don’t want you to see- has dozens of videos of Dr. Makary, both from when he was a COVID “expert” on Fox News and from his time at the FDA. As an act of basic respect your members, you have an obligation to honestly tell them about Dr. Makary’s track record. Don’t censor it. They need to know his past credibility to judge his current credibility, and there is no better way to inform them than to play some of these videos before his speech. Dr. Makary can hardly object to hearing his own words, can he?
Though there are countless examples, here are some suggestions:
In May 2021, Dr. Makary said most of the country had herd immunity to COVID. The Delta and Omicron variants arrived immediately after this.
In July 2021, Dr. Makary speculated that immunity to COVID was “probably lifelong.” The virus was just 1.5 years old at the time, and natural immunity did not turn out to be lifelong.
Although the Omicron variant killed and hospitalized a record number of children, Dr. Makary called it “omi-cold” and “natures’ vaccine.”
Dr. Makary claimed on Fox News that Kennedy spread “true stories of children who died immediately after the (COVID) vaccine”. In reality, Kennedy stole online pictures of unvaccinated children against the wishes of their parents to use in his antivaxx propaganda.
As FDA commissioner, Dr. Makary promoted leucovorin as a cure for autism based on “incredible stories.” Soon after this, the largest paper making this claim was retracted.
Dr. Makary claimed that Tylenol in pregnancy causes autism. It does not.
As FDA commissioner, Dr. Makary promised he would share “evidence” the COVID vaccine killed children. He failed, and the FDA’s report on this topic was leaked only after Dr. Makary left the agency. It found that no deaths were definitively linked to the vaccine.
As measles spread in the spring of 2025, Dr. Makary claimed that it posed no risk to healthy children. That’s false, and it’s not an appropriate way for doctors to talk about dangerous viruses, especially those in leadership. Measles is hurting American children every day with MAHA and crew in charge.
Dr. Makary fawned over Donald Trump, saying that he has “instincts better than some of the academic elites in America.” Imagine saying that in 2026. “He’s an amazing guy. He’s a phenom. He has more energy than anybody,” he added.
And yet, according to you, Dr. Makary has the right pedigree and so with him at the microphone:
Attendees can expect a discussion of emerging challenges and opportunities facing surgeons and other healthcare leaders
This not my first time writing such a letter. I previously pleaded with conference hosts like yourselves to simply be honest and, if MAHA/MAGA doctors were speaking, simply their audience about the history using their own videos.
They declined, and imagine that this letter will also fall on deaf ears. The revisionist history will continue. The COVID Amnesia Project will seamlessly morph into the MAHA Amnesia Project, and my “vituperative tone” will be deemed the real problem, again.
I’d love to be proven wrong about this. I mean that. I would love for you to show the videos in this essay before Dr. Makary speaks. If someone says it would be rude or inappropriate to show his videos, there’s only one person to blame for that.
Until then, your delightfully sanitized announcement about Dr. Makary shows something both depressing and important about so-called medical “leaders”. They’ve appear to have learned nothing from the MAHA/MAGA debacle. Even with everything that’s happening in STEM today, their top priority is still to provide a safe space to powerful doctors, to deliberately cover up what they said.
I’d argue that we need to remember the doctors who literally stood behind Donald Trump as he said dangerous, untrue things, and we don’t need anyone’s permission to do so.