Another Remedial Leadership Lesson (FDA Edition)
A Relatively Easy Multiple-Choice Quiz
The year is 1944, and you are the Captain of Easy Company, 101st Airborne, United States Army. You and the men under your command have all had the ridiculous idea of crossing the Atlantic Ocean and jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, in the dead of night with flak rounds bursting all around you, to parachute behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied France. Come morning, you find yourself engaged with a mechanized division’s worth of Nazis. They have plenty of men, heavy tanks, and “Hitler’s Typewriter:” the MG-42 light machinegun.
This will not be an easy day.
You run down the line, shouting orders for your company to hold position and lay down fire - and near the end, you notice something is very dearly wrong. One of the men under your command, Blithe, cracks under pressure. He is cowering in his foxhole crying as the Nazis advance upon your position, while the other companies of the 101st Airborne have already began retreating. Imagine yourself in the impossible position of being in command of what is clearly an impossible situation.
What do you do?
Option A: Shoot Blithe for cowardice and make an example out of him to the other men under your command
Option B: Order your men to retreat, abandoning Blithe to either be killed, captured, tortured, or worse.
Option C: Hold your position with the rest of your men, and hope that Blithe doesn’t become a liability, sending him back home after the battle
Option D: Trusting that the rest of your men are competent, run over to Blithe, start pouring lead downrange, and rally him to stand and fight: yelling step-by-step orders over his shoulder to encourage him to overcome his fears; to stand and face down the manmade nightmare that was Hitler’s ungodly war machine.
Historically, Captain Winters took a gamble under fire and chose Option D.
Captain Winters is a textbook example of effective leadership: when one of his own wavered, he encouraged, inspired, and empowered his subordinate to not only do better, but be better, all while leading by example. Doing this with the knowledge that the rest of his company could hold off the Nazi advance. Needless to say, the war ended quite poorly for Theo Morell’s most beloved patient, Adolf Hitler.
Yet, what if I told you…that there was a secret fifth answer?
Option E: Sit down with a pencil and paper and write an unprofessional 8,000 word screed calling the men under your command stupid & incompetent, demanding their resignations if they don’t pledge their loyalty to all sorts of ridiculous, unethical, and frankly impossible demands. Capped off with an absurd, completely fact free claim that doesn’t past basic scrutiny.
Ladies and germs, welcome to the Vinay Prasad School of Leadership.
The Neon Badge of Incompetency
Vinay Prasad made a name for himself - not by saving lives or producing anything of worth - but simply by making all sorts of personal attacks tearing down not dozens, not hundreds, but literal thousands of his professional colleagues across science and medicine, including literal name-calling with demands for mass layoffs. Gullible people on social media misread this as an indicator of his own competence. They believed that producing a leviathan of social media criticisms was somehow evidence of one’s own intellectual capability and leadership effectiveness.
Yet, there were signs that Prasad’s grip over all of science and medicine wasn’t all that cracked up to be. The frequent blocking of doctors and scientists who pointed out his errors; the writing for anti-vaccine propaganda outlets such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Children’s Health Defense” and the neo-Confederate “Brownstone Institute.” The publishing of open-access “research” papers to social media which aren’t subject to peer review, because they contained basic, fundamental errors. Prasad’s cherry-picked endorsements of single studies which aligned with his social media antics, many of which would go on to be redacted. This is someone who clearly lacks credibility.
If Cpt. Winters was the textbook example of effective leadership under pressure, Vinay Prasad is the textbook example of failed, ineffective leadership. Whereas Winters empowered and inspired his men, Prasad is doing what he’s done for years: tearing others down. Outside of the undignified screeching jackasses on Twitter, (many of which aren’t even from America), Prasad has no defenders; nobody worthwhile who can vouch for his competence.
Twelve former FDA commissioners (all of the last still alive) wrote a scathing demolition of his recent e-mail rant in the New England Journal of Medicine. Conservative media outlets are publishing headlines like “Get rid of the clowns to win the midterms,” and other highly critical articles. This should be a wake-up call: to either resign or be humble enough to admit error and start making a change.
Vinay Prasad is instead whining behind closed doors about “misleading media narratives.” If you’re a science journalist like Lizzy Lawrence over at STAT News, apparently the federal government now thinks it is your job is to write nothing except gleaming praise of what a wonderful job Makary, Prasad, and Hoeg are doing. Prasad is simply doing what he has done for half a decade now: attack others while producing nothing of value himself.
A Trojan Horse?
The staff of the Food & Drug Administration, whatever criticisms or disagreements one might make in good faith, don’t deserve to be subjected to the brazen incompetence of their current leadership. Your job as a leader is to serve and empower the people that report to you, so that they can do the best job possible. It is perverse and utterly irresponsible to neglect those duties and instead demand that your staff uphold your personal fantasies.
Very real American children dying of infectious disease outbreaks under your watch? Not a problem. Imagined children dying of a vaccine you dedicated years to attacking, for your own personal financial gain? Shame on everyone who has pointed out my most obvious of errors.
Perhaps there is more to this...
Last year I warned people that the goal of this Second Trump Administration was to destroy federal regulatory authority in its entirety. What’s the best way to compromise an essential federal institution? Infect it with a lethal virus; corrupt its ability to perform essential functions. The combined incompetence of Vinay Prasad, Marty Makary, and Tracy Beth Hoeg is precisely how one would achieve such a goal.
These constant infectious disease outbreaks are the desired outcome.
