FDA Leadership Has Been Compromised
The Long Shadow of Enron Lingers
If there’s one issue that unites almost all Americans, it’s their collective disgust with the revolving door between corporate America and government agencies.
With April being the month Vinay Prasad returns to the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine (UCSF), after being kicked out of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) twice in less than a year in humiliating fashion, there are some serious questions left unanswered. Oh, by the way, you should sign this petition! Prasad’s ousting is linked to a rather volatile rejection of a treatment for Huntington’s Disease, a rare yet fatal neurodegenerative condition. Upon returning to UCSF, Prasad will also go back to overseeing a vanity lab which, on its website, featured a giant logo showing their funding from Arnold Ventures.
Arnold Ventures is helmed by John Arnold, a libertarian billionaire who got his start at a little-known company called... Enron.
What’s an Enron?
If you’re under the age of 35, you likely have no memory of the Enron scandal of 2001, the precursor for the 2008 financial crisis that wrecked the global economy - of which America has never truly recovered from. Enron was a major energy company that discovered a fascinating new way to generate record profits: defraud investors by producing completely fraudulent financial records (”creative accounting”) in order to hide billions of debt from their many failures. Kind of like what’s happening now with the “artificial intelligence” bubble.
This did not end well, with Enron’s stock plummeting from $90 a share to less than a dollar in just a few years, even with their cozy relationship with the Bush Administration. Enron ended up filing for bankruptcy, and criminal charges were filed. John Arnold managed to escape prosecution, making out like a bandit with an $8 billion golden parachute in the last days of the company: the largest bonus in the company’s history. He would later be deposed by Antara Resources for market manipulation, hiding behind the Fifth Amendment to again escape prosecution.
Soon enough, John Arnold would found Arnold Ventures and become the country’s youngest billionaire. Arnold Ventures has its fingers in a lot of pots, but Arnold himself has some rather... “interesting” views, as all libertarian crackpots do. Most notably, he thinks we need drone surveillance over every major city, federal nature preserves should be sold off to private interests, and that we should eradicate public education & teachers’ unions - a view publicly shared by UCSF’s Vinay Prasad:
John is not someone who has the best interests of the American people at heart.
Venture Capital Funded Disinformation
As we established before, UCSF’s Vinay Prasad has a self-titled “lab” bankrolled by Arnold Ventures. Between 2017-2023, Prasad has received about four million dollars in grants from them, some of which flowed into the hands of fellow COVID disinformation artist Tracy Beth Hoeg, now head of the Center of Drug Evaluation & Research at the FDA. What you may not know is that Arnold’s also bankrolled FDA Commissioner Marty Makary with nearly $700k in grants.
Arnold Ventures has also lined the pockets of John Ioannidis, who started a pathetic conspiracy theory blaming doctors for COVID-19 deaths after his prediction that SARS-CoV-2 would only kill 40,000 Americans was immediately disproven by a mountain of corpses. Arnold even bankrolled the pro-SARS propaganda of Brown University’s Emily Oster, who made a pretty penny misleading parents into believing COVID-19 was harmless to children. Perhaps university administrators need to rethink their policies about having their faculty produce unscientific propaganda on behalf of a billionaire’s political agenda.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that wealthy libertarians are against the very concept of public health. It should be a scandal that supposed journalism outlets completely failed to disclose the financial ties to these billionaires when quoting “experts” such as Vinay Prasad & Emily Oster, who frequently made basic errors. For their ideological commitment to spewing an endless stream of elaborate fictions and inflammatory accusations about COVID-19, masks, and vaccines, three Arnold-owned quacks (Makary, Prasad, Hoeg) were rewarded with senior roles in the Food & Drug Administration. Katherine Szarama, Director of Healthcare at Arnold Ventures, would later be appointed CBER Deputy Director in October 2025. Here is all you need to know about Szarama, from the Wall Street Journal:
“Ms. Szarama has supported the requirement of randomized superiority trials for emerging therapies such as CAR-T, even when patients have exhausted multiple prior treatments. In rare diseases and advanced cancer, such demands can be impractical, ethically dubious and less informative than carefully analyzed real world evidence.”
This “revolving door” has taken a dark and twisted turn for the worse.
John Arnold’s FDA vs. uniQure’s AMT-13
Huntington’s Disease is a rare yet devastating genetic neurodegenerative disorder with a 100% fatality rate. The biotech firm uniQure was developing a gene therapy treatment called AMT-130, which from early trials published September 24, 2025, showed a promising result of slowing the progression of the disease by 75%; a remarkable development. Prior to Trump taking office, uniQure met with the FDA in November 2024 and was given the green light to move forward.
Little did uniQure know, they’d soon be dealing with Vinay “RCT or STFU” Prasad. Exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic, Prasad chose to become an obnoxious social media troll who lost all respect amongst his colleagues in medicine. Prasad believes we should all simply shrug off pediatric disease deaths “as a matter of course,” and that we’ll just forget these dead kids:
Vinay Prasad is a zealot of “Evidence Based Medicine” (EBM), a hierarchy framework developed in the 1980s to evaluate the quality of evidence when making medical decisions, which often involve a great deal of ethical and technical complications. At the top of the EBM pyramid are “systematic reviews” and “meta-analyses,” followed by randomized control trials (RCTs). While EBM sounds reasonable enough on paper, it’s rather easy to take it too far - as we’ve seen with numerous academics on social media, it takes no effort to jump on Twitter to demand absurd RCTs.
As Dr. Jonathan Howard noted in his recent article for Science Based Medicine, Prasad spent years demanding RCTs on social media while failing to design, perform, or even participate in any RCTs. (Howard & myself are both COVID-19 vaccine RCT veterans. You may thank us for our service, and we want the 10% discount.) At the Food & Drug Administration, Prasad also facilitated zero RCTs. This is because EBM Zealotry is opposed to doing actual work; tearing down others for clout is much easier.
“Right now drug companies are mad [at Prasad], rare disease patients and advocates are mad, and now Congresspeople are mad, which is a lot of mad people, and I think when you’ve united pharma, Congress, and patients, that’s almost impressive.” -Claire Marie Porter, The Cancer Letter Podcast, March 18th
On March 5th, after reportedly attacking AMT-130 as “snake oil” and revealing trade secrets on a press call, Vinay Prasad then demanded that uniQure perform a double-blind randomized control trial for their treatment of a disease which has, in case you forgot, a 100% fatality rate. Who in the hell would volunteer their child for a trial in which they might wind up in the control group? Nobody was happy, and Prasad had finally drawn the last straw: His second departure was announced the very next day.
So What Really Happened Here?
At this point, we’re left with informed speculation. What we do know is that a willingness to openly participate in financial crimes and naked corruption is essentially a requirement to work in the Trump Administration. So just what is the nature of the relationship Arnold Ventures has with their COVID disinfo artists?
On July 8th, 2025, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary (with Prasad in tow, no doubt) met with Arnold to discuss “Items of Mutual Interest.” uniQure would publish the positive results of AMT-130 to treat Huntington’s Disease just months later. On March 3rd 2026, just days before Prasad’s smears of uniQure and his second ousting, Makary & Prasad attended a meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland with Arnold to discuss... “Collaboration Opportunities.”
The minutes of these meetings have not been disclosed to the public. Makary and Prasad sure do love their closed door meetings with private interests, where they can freely whine about “misleading media narratives.” You know, the sort of above-board conduct that non-corrupt civil servants regularly engage in.
On March 6th, the same day Prasad’s second ousting was announced, Republican Representative Jake Auchincloss calls Prasad’s misconduct “a prohibited act under the FDCA & a criminal violation under the Trade Secrets Act.” Gee whiz, isn’t the timing of all this quite suspicious? With just a hint of ass-covering on top?
Well class, we’ve already established that John Arnold is a morally depraved financial crook. The real PAI-heads will remember that Vinay Prasad previously lent his credentials to produce anti-vaccine propaganda for RFK Jr.’s “Children’s Health Defense” and the “Brownstone Institute,” helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, Jeffrey Tucker. A fellow libertarian billionaire like Arnold, Tucker wants to take your teenage daughter out of public school and give her a pack of Virginia Slims to go with her new Hooters uniform.
To understand John Arnold’s play in all of this, remember that Enron is the precursor to the 2008 financial crisis. Short selling is essentially a form of gambling, betting that a company will fail. Adam Mckay even made a whole movie about it. Now what if you had the influence to ensure that a certain company might fail & that their stock price would crash almost overnight? Perhaps through newly appointed government officials you have generously lined the wallets of and maintain a relationship with?
The stock ticker for uniQure speaks for itself.
A Deadly Cocktail of Corruption and Cowardice
This is speculation, not a confirmation of guilt. However, it certainly warrants a serious investigation. It should already be a national scandal that the leadership of the federal agency entrusted with ensuring your children’s food and medicine are safe are all in the pocket of a single billionaire. What many Americans may not be aware of, however, is that our favorite ex-Enron crook has also been developing an “abundance” of influence over the opposition party:
After the humiliation of the 2024 election, liberal pundits Ezra “MAHA is a Bad Answer to a Good Question” Klein and Derek “School Closures Were a Failed Policy” Thompson wrote a silly little fantasy titled Abundance. They foolishly claim that climate collapse can be magically handwaved away with mass desalination, vertical farming, and “sustainable jet fuel.” They claim the genAI scam “is built on the collective knowledge of humanity” (instead of theft) and thus, “its profits are shared.”
These are not smart people.
Abundance also features a chapter on COVID-19 and the National Institutes of Health! They argue that masks & other NPIs don’t work, the NIH should be run like a business and cites Jay Bhattacharya as their “expert.” This is the now the basis for a major billionaire-backed lobbying effort to dictate the Democrats’ policy platform going forward.
Many respectable doctors and scientists are rallying behind the banners of pop-up activist groups such as “Stand Up for Science” and “Defend Public Health,” trying to rally the public to come out & support Democrat candidates. One has to ask: just what is their plan for when it comes time to write the party platform, and they’re quietly hushed out of the room so anti-vaccine crooks like John Arnold and their pet pundits like Ezra Klein can dictate Democrat policy? These billionaire creeps like what RFK Jr. and his cronies are doing to federal public health agencies. This is a conflict that cannot be handwaved away; not when the nation is besieged by a legislative war of hundreds of bills on state & local levels to eradicate public health.
MAGA-billionaire backed disinfo peddler Emily Oster is still widely respected in liberal circles. Liberal influencers such as Pete Buttigieg, Scott Galloway, & Ashish Jha are on the record saying that schools should have been fully in-person in 2020. This would have achieved absolutely nothing except killing & disabling many more teachers, parents, and kids. Billionaires like Arnold would just demand even more.
With mentalities like these and the influence of billionaires like John Arnold, we run the risk of public health repeating one of the greatest mistakes of 2009: The cowardice of the Obama Administration to reverse the damage and punish the crimes of Wall Street, and normalization of corruption: a full surrender to reactionary billionaires and their obscene propaganda in exchange for…nothing. This time, it’s not just millions of Americans losing their homes. It’s more children dying of vaccine-preventable causes. It’s a rising tide of pestilence making us all sicker.
This fight won’t be won by simply telling people to blindly vote Democrat and casually shrugging in utter humiliation after the anti-vaccine friendly billionaires tell activist doctors & scientists to go kick rocks. Cowardice is complacency. Complacency is an endorsement. Shying away from taking on the “Abundance” agenda is letting corrupt billionaires like John Arnold profit from playing games with the public’s health.
