“Would it be best if we just stopped talking about COVID19?”
In an essay from January 2024 titled Should We Just Stop Talking about COVID19? Dr. Vinay Prasad asked:
Would it be best if we just stopped talking about COVID19?
Yes Vinay, it would be best if you stopped talking about COVID19.
Unfortunately, Dr. Prasad did not hold himself to the standards he set for others. He never does. Now that he is done podcasting at the FDA and back to podcasting at UCSF, Dr. Prasad is desperate to recapture his glory days of 2020/2021, where he could gain social media followers and paid Substack subscribers by droning on about Fauci, mandates, and toddlers wearing masks.
None of this matters, however. No one should care about Dr. Prasad’s hot takes on anything ever again. He had his chance to translate his opinions into action at the FDA, and he flamed out in dramatic fashion. Podcasting is easier than doing, it turns out, and Dr. Prasasd’s only value now is as a cautionary tale for medical students.
While Dr. Prasad’s future should be complete irrelevancy, it’s vital to remember his past. His copious COVID disinformation and his incompetence/malevolence at the FDA hurt real people. That should never for forgotten.
However, Dr. Prasad recently returned to one of his safe spaces, the disinformation publication Reason, and this interview is worth discussing. It reveals his strategy to rewrite his dismal tenure at the FDA and that once again the COVID Amnesia Project is seamlessly morphing into the MAHA Amnesia Project.
Both must be fiercely resisted.
“Public Health in This Country Is So Broken”
Dr. Prasad’s interview was titled Public Health in This Country Is So Broken. As measles spreads and lettuce sends people to the hospital thanks to the MAHA/MAGA regime he enabled, he’s obviously not wrong.
However, Dr. Prasad wants everyone to know that none of this is his fault. How convenient! Dr. Prasad was eager to blame 2020 for what’s happening in 2026 and absolve his former bosses for anything that is happening under their abysmal leadership. He had this embarrassing exchange:
There have been a number of measles outbreaks. Do you attribute that to sort of either a loosening of vaccine policy or just a general skepticism, rising skepticism toward vaccines?
I think it’s difficult to attribute. People like to attribute it to what Bobby Kennedy has done, but surely, in order to have the outbreak now, people have to forgo measles vaccines in years prior. And it’s also going on in Canada. So I don’t know how he jumped across the border and did it.
I mean, the truth is there is a growing distrust of establishment medicine. It was precipitated by the pandemic, and it probably is also precipitated by, you know, fringe anti-vaccine voices, and they’ve shattered confidence in the measles vaccines. And so, you know, there’s lower uptake of the measles vaccines. There’s going to be measles outbreaks. To blame it on one person doesn’t make sense to me.
According to Dr. Prasad, Kennedy isn’t a “fringe anti-vaccine voice.” Moreover, Kennedy’s 20-year history of anti-vaxx disinformation got magically erased the moment he was sworn in, and his current anti-vaxx disinformation- he claimed the MMR kills kids while in office last year- remains magically restricted to the USA. Dr. Prasad is seemingly unaware information can cross borders.
This is the wisdom and integrity he brings to the table, and the article U.S. Vaccine Rhetoric Blamed For B.C. Vaccination Rates As Measles Cases Rise revealed the obvious truth. It quoted a provincial health minister as saying:
There’s too many bad actors on social media that just do whatever they do for clicks and spread lies about the need and the opportunities that come with vaccination. We know that the U.S. administration is also spreading misinformation that help spread the deadly virus like measles, so due to these falsehoods, childhood vaccinations are decreasing and the rates of measles are unfortunately increasing.
MAHA/MAGA doctors like Dr. Prasad aren’t just to blame for measles in the USA, but anywhere Kennedy’s disinformation has an impact.
Dr. Prasad was also asked about his infamous “leaked” memo from November 2025, which claimed the COVID vaccine killed at least 10 children. I wrote at the time that “my mind is open” to whatever evidence he might provide, and I meant it. I said:
Maybe the FDA leaders will surprise me and do something they’ve not done the entire pandemic. If they produce high quality evidence, which is authored by reliable, apolitical FDA professionals and widely accepted by trusted experts, then I will accept it, exactly as I accepted the J&J vaccine killed some people. I will be critical of the FDA officials who missed this important signal. My loyalty is to a process, not an outcome.
However, Dr. Prasad refused to provide a shred evidence while at the FDA, and the report was only made public after he left office via a document dump from conspiracy theorist Senator Ron Johnson. The report found 0 deaths were definitively linked to the vaccine, while 2 were probable, and 5 were possible. 12 former FDA commissioners also weighed in the NEJM. According to one article:
The commissioners added that all the cases of death that could have been related to vaccination were previously reported to the agency as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. FDA staff, after careful review, “drew different conclusions,” they wrote.
As a reminder, Dr. Prasad opposed the pediatric COVID in early 2021, months before there was a pediatric COVID vaccine, back when he was certain the pandemic was “abating”. Though he claims to be motivated by evidence and data alone, his mind was firmly made up long before there was evidence or data, and he’s never looked back
Predictably, he’s never acknowledged the dozens of studies, both randomized-controlled trials and observational studies, which demonstrate the vaccine’s benefits for children. The most recent addition to this list was study of 3.6 million teens and young adults that found:
Myocarditis, pericarditis, and all-cause mortality were consistently more frequent after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after BNT162b2 vaccination.
Of course COVID’s harms are not restricted to myocarditis/pericarditis, unlike the vaccine.
To maintain the illusion that that he was right the whole the whole time, that unvaccinated children should repeatedly contract COVID, Dr. Prasad now claims that he was the victim of grand cover-up. Anti-vaxxers need such conspiracies the way fish require water. According to Dr. Prasad, his former underlings at the FDA, the same people who loudly sounded the alarm bells about rare blood clots with the J&J vaccine in the spring of 2021, conspired against him to hide kids killed by the COVID vaccine. The Reason interview said:
“They changed the report. I had a draft report with 10 [likely deaths]. They changed it after the media publicity of my letter,” says Prasad, who believes the data were altered for “political or professional” reasons.
Sure, Vinay.
Dr. Prasad’s new standard of evidence is “trust me, bro,” though fortunately only his Sensible Medicine business partners still do.