PATIENT BEWARE: Houman David Hemmati, Biotech Entrepreneur & Prasad's FDA Replacement
Are FOX News Guests Good Picks to Run Federal Agencies? Who Can Say!
In the wake of Vinay Prasad’s dramatic ousting from the role of the Food & Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research Director, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has shown an inability to learn an important lesson from the ordeal: You simply cannot put unqualified, inexperienced social media posters in charge of essential federal departments. Makary is looking to replace Prasad with Houman David Hemmati, a regular guest on FOX News. Walker Bragman over at Important Context wrote a great article, of which I’m following up with a stack of damning, incredibly disqualifying quotations.
Houmann is seemingly incapable of independent critical thought. Whenever it comes to COVID-19, he can be found on FOX News simply repeating whatever conservative anti-vax memes he reads on Twitter. This is deeply embarrassing, while making him an obviously perfect pick for Marty Makary’s FDA.
Unless stated otherwise, these quotes come directly from Houman’s Twitter account, “houmanhemmati.”
2021
October 6th, 2021: Hemmati got in early on the propaganda grift to sabotage the pandemic response by spreading disinformation and minimizing the virus. Appearing for the “Global COVID Summit,” Houmann Hemmati declares that “risk analysis does not support vaccinating children.” In August of this year, around 500 pediatric COVID-19 deaths were recorded. This number would double to over 1,000 before Christmas 2021. As hundreds of children, overwhelmingly unvaccinated were dying, Hemmati was telling parents that these deaths weren’t worth trying to prevent. This sort of incredibly unethical garbage establishes that Hemmati has no business in any sort of role at the Food & Drug Administration, especially as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation & Research.
In a just world, Hoummati would be forced to go door to door to the parents of these dead children and tell them just why it’s so great they died of a vaccine-preventable cause. Instead, he’s a coward who hides behind the safety of a keyboard.
2022
January 10th, 2022: During the worst months for pediatric COVID-19 deaths recorded, with record numbers of children hospitalized for COVID-19 and shoots shutting down as a result of unmitigated outbreaks, goes onto FOX News to demand that all mitigations to protect children are abandoned:
March 30th, 2022:
“It is unethical AND illegal for him to openly market/push unapproved pharmaceutical products like fourth+ boosters on TV every day. There are laws against this and [the FDA] strictly should enforce as they do with any other drug. Same for [Pfizer] board member [Scott Gottlieb]...They’re getting all sorts of special treatment because it’s an ‘emergency.’ 2020 I could see the emergency. Now, with all we have and all we know, natural immunity, weaker virus, meds, NO emergency.”
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died of COVID-19 after Hemmati made this claim. Referring to lifesaving vaccines as merely “pharmaceutical products” is an intentional and irresponsible choice to mislead the public. Over a million Americans died in pursuit of this mythical “natural immunity,” with millions more struggling through the ongoing emergency of having become disabled by SARS-CoV-2. This is conservative grievance politics in a nutshell: Whenever society is faced with a real-world problem, such as say, climate collapse, the conservative mind rushes to childish and pitiful denial.
April 25th, 2022: Sharing a LA Times editorial titled “California’s schools don’t need a vaccine mandate - at least, not right now” Houmann declares,
“Too little, too late from the [LA Times] Editorial Board. Anyone with common sense and who’s actually read the data and understands the medical NEED (or lack thereof) for healthy kids to have a mandate has been saying this all along! [article link URL]”
Reactionary mythologists love to abuse the phrase “common sense” to present their uninformed fictions as fact. I have tragic news for Houmann: Repeated COVID-19 infections have rendered millions of previously “healthy kids” into a state of rather unhealthy disability and chronic illness. The thousands of American children who died of COVID-19 were overwhelmingly unvaccinated, meaning that their deaths were preventable. We as adults failed them. Writing off these preventable tragedies as merely “unhealthy” children not worth protecting is morally depraved and unbecoming of a medical professional.
May 10th, 2022:
“...you’re counting CASES not hospitalization/death. As [Los Angeles Public Health] said TODAY (see below) while cases are up 180%, deaths/hospitalizations down 72! Which means case counts are meaningless and deceptive. #StopTesting”
This is the tired old binary fallacy that has been debunked time and time again. As a licensed medical professional, Hemmati has a professional obligation to be up-to-date on the latest medical research, especially about a widespread SARS virus. It’s obvious that he will prioritize junk he reads on Twitter over hard science at the Food & Drug Administration. Even if “case counts are meaningless,” widespread unchecked pestilence is simply not the hallmark of a healthy society.
July 22nd, 2022:
“In our OpEd published today by ocregister & other SoCal newspapers, Scott Balsitis, Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, Dr. Neeraj Sood and I make an objective case for why it’s unjustified for LA Public Health to impose a new mask mandate. URGENCYOFNORMAL - TEAM REALITY”
The “Urgency of Normal,” for those who don’t recall, was a pop-up astroturf of credentialed medical professionals such as Monica Gandhi and Scott Balsitis (a major fan of white nationalist Christopher Rufo), that argued that COVID-19 was harmless to children, and that non-pharmaceutical interventions were destroying a whole generation of kids. As part of their “advocacy toolkit,” they frequently got basic facts about SARS-CoV-2 wrong. They claimed that they simply cared about children’s mental health, and their advocacy suddenly stopped when they got what they wanted: schools becoming hotbeds for COVID-19 outbreaks. Pediatric suicide rates climbing, mass shootings, ICE committing a domestic terror campaign, etc. though? - Urgency of Normal is suddenly nowhere to be found. Hemmati’s dishonesty shows how he will be an irrational, politically motivated hack just like his predecessor Vinay Prasad.
August 2nd, 2022:
“Used for TB whhich is 4 microns in size. COVID is 0.1 microns. COVID virus is 40x smaller and can slip through holes in N95 mask.”
This is not how N95 respirators work. Houmann, not an engineer, is simply repeating a tired old meme he read on Twitter. The leadership of our federal public health agencies must be held to a higher standard than simply regurgitating anti-intellectual slop from the gutters of social media. There are plenty of competent, talented civil servants at the FDA who shouldn’t have to be constantly sabotaged by willfully incompetent leadership.
October 13th, 2022: Houman Hemmati appears on the libertarian crackpot outlet podcast The Atlas Society, presenting himself as a “longtime outspoken critic of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, and medical censorship:”
It is a truly pathetic softball “interview” in which he frequently spreads the same tired old anti-vaccine myths you’ve heard a hundred times before.
2023
Februrary 14th, 2023: Hemmati faking concern that PPE is strangling kids, he squeals:
“Let’s finally put the mask debate to bed. It’s now abundantly clear based on the clincal evidence that: 1. Population-level masking/mandates do nothing to meaningfully reduce transmission; 2. You can mask yourself if you’d like to give yourself added protection ... One thing I’ll ask of everyone: Please be civil. Unmasked people: respect the choices of those who mask themselves. Maskers: respect the choices of unmasked people not to mask. Don’t exclude, shame or harm. Everyone: #StopMaskingKids - leave kids alone. #Let Them Breathe”
This is darkly cruel because COVID-19 has not left children alone, willful understanding about the effectiveness of PPE and PPE mandates aside. A lot of children have died or developed very serious health issues as a result of infection with SARS-CoV-2, and as a medical professional, Houmann has a responsibility beyond putting his fingers in his ears and turning a blind eye to sick and suffering kids. If he’s unable to accept tangible reality, then he will make poor decisions at the Food & Drug Administration.
March 12th, 2023: Houman threatens violent revolution if any form of public health measures, no matter how necessary, are ever re-introduced:
“I can guarantee that that United States will experience a revolution if officials dare to impose lockdowns, mask and/or vaccine mandates, school/business closures, censorship, travel restrictions, etc in the event of another so-called pandemic, regardless of what it is”
Donald Trump was President in 2020 when these measures were first introduced. If Hemmati joins the FDA, he will share in the responsibility should another pandemic begin under the second Trump Administration, including all of the deaths that result.
March 14th, 2023: Referring to a now-infamous and long debunked “Cochrane Review of Masks” by two Evidence-Based Medicine zealots out of the United Kingdom by the names of Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, Hemmati refuses to acknowledge the paper’s basic errors:
“So the editors of Cochrane who reviewed and authorized publication misinterpreted it as well before allowing it to go to press? That’s a lot of misinterpretations by people whose job it is to interpret, all happening coincidentally after backlash from forever-maskers.”
The paper is inconclusive, neither proving a positive or a negative - only for Jefferson to run to an anti-vaccine Substack and intentionally obfuscate this fact. They conflate airborne and droplet transmission of viruses, as well as pretending that a blue surgical mask and a 3M 1080+ N95 respirator are somehow the same thing. Basic, basic errors as a result of treating their ignorance as the definitive article; a trait Hemmati clearly shares. If you are endorsing obviously junk research you clearly haven’t read, you have no business working at the Food & Drug Administration.
March 20th, 2023: Much like his Twitter buddies Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, Hemmati squeals that Long COVID is all fake and no big deal:
“...much of what was labeled as ‘long COVID’ wasn’t actually attributable to the virus after all, and that many long COVID symptoms were isolated, rather an part of a major condition. ...it’s prevalence is dramatically lower than was previously thought. Many of us who suggested this over the last 3 years were told we are ‘dismissing’ facts but looks like long-term studies (which are required to make conclusions) are showing what we suspected.”
We knew long-term health complications was a possible result of infection with a SARS virus, long before 2020, for a significant percentage of the infected. It is now 2026, and the mountain of evidence for Long COVID is undeniable. Hemmati was never close to right, and his inability to simply admit error disqualifies him from science and medicine entirely, much less running CBER.
May 20th, 2023: After getting everything from he wanted from the Biden Administration with the total abandonment of children to repeated COVID-19 infections, Hemmati went on FOX News to smugly take a victory lap:
In it, he attempts to rewrite history and pretend that doing nothing would have been much more preferable, claiming “the consequences of COVID lockdowns will last for decades.”
July 30th, 2023: Replying to the former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, Houmann yet again shows his poor critical thinking skills in an extensive rant:
“One thing that gets lost in all of this is that many people didn’t WANT to be protected. We understood the risks and were willing to face those risks in exchange for having normal life/education/economy. Personally, I’d rather be dead than locked up forever. All we want is choice...long before COVID we had a rule for this: If you’re sick, stay home. If we had major concerns, we could have expanded that to: If you might be sick or exposed to someone sick, stay home. Re: teachers, many wanted to teach in person but kept out.”
This argument simply does not work when it comes to socially transmitted diseases such as COVID-19, in which someone can be asymptomatic but infectious. 99% of the Americans who died or was disabled by COVID-19 was infected by someone else, often people who “didn’t WANT to be protected.” This was also the arguments people made against drunk-driving laws:
Even the fairy godmother of libertarianism, Ayn Rand, understood that government had an obligation to intervene in preventing the spread of a deadly and disabling virus.
“Really? It was that binary option? What % of people under age 60-70 who lived live as usual, no restrictions aside from avoiding sick people, ended up dead FROM COVID? Risk of misery from locking down for a year: 100%. Risk of death: Statistically 0% for young/healthy people.”
This is simply yet another tired rehashing of anti-vaccine memes debunked years prior. The “From/With COVID-19” meme saying that COVID-19 deaths aren’t real is really a revival of the centuries-old miasma myth, that COVID-19 has fourth-dimensional quantum mechanics which render it omnipresent yet totally a harmless and benign friend. It also serves to confuse the public about the mechanics of death reporting, which is incredibly basic, basic stuff.
“Regarding schools, unless we have irrefutable proof that a virus directly kills kids, school shutdowns must NEVER occur. Even vulnerable teahers protected by keeping sick (symptomatic or tested) kids out of school. The devastation is otherwise never worth it.”
This is, of course, preposterous. No matter what hard evidence you show to Hemmati, he’ll simply put his fingers in his eyes and whine “nuh-uh.” This rank dishonesty is childish and unprofessional. As one expects from your standard Twitter troll.
June 4th, 2023: Replying to a former jeans executive and contributor to the “Brownstone Institute,” a propaganda outlet helmed by a lecherous cape-wearing neo-Confederate, Houman writes:
“As a parent, THIS is my top issue in upcoming elections. How did/do candidates stand on the issue of prolonged school closures? Was it worth destroying futures of 16M American kids to MAYBE save a few lives? We have irrefutable proof of harm. Zero solid proof of mortality benefit. And I know the lockdown supporters will come back with ‘but what about long COVID? Think about all the kids we saved from long COVID! And all the teachers that would would have been dead had schools been open!’ I would love to see stats and risk/benefit on this. Show me.”
Just the year before, it was reported that hundreds of thousands of children lost a parent to COVID-19; many because they brought the virus home from school. Had Houmann been in charge in 2020, that number would be much higher - and he’d write those off as just “a few lives” anyways. You can show Houmann every study, every news clip of the many children suffering from Long COVID, and he simply doesn’t care. He never cared - he is lying to you, centering himself as the judge of what is real or not. Houmann irresponsibly abuses social media, cultivating a safe space from the facts that contradict his feelings. Sadly, this makes him a perfect “culture fit” for the Trump Administration.
June 5th, 2023:
“I’ve also seen a high association between cat ownership and long COVID. I’m not kidding. Not to discuss real long-term COVID related symptoms that many experience of course but I’ve noticed an association.”
This is a lot of words to say: “freakin’ hysterial broads,” as if we’ve learned nothing about medical misogyny and post-viral illness since the 1800s. Maybe we just need a federal law mandating that male physicians have to take a class (or two or three?) on just how to not treat female patients like garbage?
June 8th, 2023:
“Last night, most of the citizens of Los Angeles tested positive for the highly contagious WhyStillTestingCron variant of WeDontCare-23. We are all living our lives as usual and not tweeting about asymptomatic infections of non-lethal viruses for most people.”
These sorts of childish japes and jabs are simply unprofessional and disqualifying. It’s just plain simple: If you don’t want the responsibility, don’t take the job. The sad reality, not to downplay over a million deaths, is that the primary threat to Americans has been developing disability or chronic illness caused by a virus that didn’t kill them. As FDA CBER Director, it’s apparent that Hemmati will handle serious challenges (not the fake ones he gets from Twitter) by simply denying they exist.
June 17th, 2023: As failed med student Kevin Bass turned out to be a massive creep who confused the professional politeness of nurses with flirtation, Houmann decided to try and take the little dweeb under his wing. Inadvertantly, Hemmati’s words would be prophetic:
“You’ll be gone in a couple years while they’re there for good, doing the very hard work with little recognition.”
Bass was expelled soon after. Odds are, this will also be an accurate summary of Hemmati’s tenure at the FDA.
2024
June 06th, 2024: In a truly pathetic extended rant, Houman manages to get every aspect of not just pediatric COVID-19, but basic morality, dead wrong:
“...all or nearly the COVID deaths are deaths WITH COVID (not FROM COVID - huge difference) or deaths in children with very severe medical comobidites. Regardless, it was VERY rare for a healthy child to die FROM COVID. And EVEN then, and EVEN with any risk of ‘long COVID,’ PARENTS (not the government) must have been in a position to conduct a risk/benefit analysis for their OWN child. For many, the minuscule risk was worth it. If parents want to lock up their kids at home, they have ALWAYS been free to do so, but NOT at the expense of every other kid. The main issue here is the loss of freedom and the lack of ANY parental input. Moreover, if they TRULY cared, where are the school seatbelt and bike helmet education programs, where are the people confirming they use those things, where are in-school drug tests, or programs to make sure kids aren’t exposed to gun or other violence? IF THEY REALLY CARED, where are schools FEEDING kids complete crap including sugary drinks and ultra processed foods that contribute to cardiovascular disease and death? These are the problems.”
It’s okay the kids die of COVID-19 because of other problems? Check. Parents should be allowed to let their kids die of vaccine-preventable causes? Check. Putting Long COVID in air quotes? Check. Pediatricians are too stupid to diagnose their young patients dying of COVID-19? Check. Even after everything we’ve learned about how COVID-19 harms pediatric health and development, with Long COVID overtaking asthma to become the leading chronic illness in kids, Hemmati doubles down on babbling tired old anti-vaccine Twitter memes. This is truly embarrassing.
August 13th, 2024:
“No school should EVER again go remote for a COVID outbreak. If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that in the risk/benefit analysis of school closures, it’s 100% risk to education with effectively zero benefit.”
Hemmati got what he wanted. Schools now shut down regularly across America due to infectious disease outbreaks instead. Chronic absenteeism is up. Young people share memes such as “the lion does not confirm himself with his brain fog and/or chronic fatigue.” This is the “normal” that Hemmati considered so urgent.
Nobody was thrilled about remote schooling, an imperfect piecemeal that was understaffed, underresourced, and essentially designed to fail. This happened as a result of dozens of educators dying of COVID-19 in New York City in Spring 2020, who could then educate zero kids as a consequence of...dying. Hemmati apparently finds himself entitled to the deaths of teachers so he can pretend nothing was wrong.
December 05th, 2024:
<”Martin Kulldorff> doesn’t need a pardon, but you (GBD Authors) do deserve an apology.”
For ah...what, exactly? Being publicly criticized for getting basic facts wrong and refusing to ever admit error? That we as Americans collectively failed in performing a fantasy, sort of like stage actors in a theater production, in which they’re the heroes who - in their words, not mine - gave a “ray of hope” to imagined “billions” for clinking champagne as bodies piled in the streets?
Should public health policy be dictated by online petitions written by delusional narcissists and bankrolled by crooked billionaires? Clearly, the frequent FOX News guest believes this to be the case.
2026
January 14th, 2026:
“It was an honor to have been asked to moderate the historic [FDA] panel at [J.P. Morgan] Healthcare Conference this morning where [Tracy Beth Hoeg & Vinay Prasad] discussed an unprecedented collaboration that will speed up lifesaving treatments for patients with rare and serious diseases with no other options, often with custom treatments.”
Well, ah...that certainly didn’t happen and was obviously never going to happen. Whoopsie!
Final Verdict
If Houmann David Hemmati is confirmed as the replacement for Vinay Prasad as FDA CBER Director, he will likely follow a very similar path as his predecessor. Reporters will have a field day of writing up the constant melodrama, rank incompetence, and inevitably Hemmati’s dismissal. Much like Prasad, Hemmati treats his ignorance as the anchor the rest of the world should center itself around. Entertaining their anti-vaccine Twitter fans is their priority in life.
Here is an outrageous thought: selecting a biotech entrepreneur to regulate the biotech industry is a poor decision. I am forced to agree with one of the hosts of The Cancer Letter podcast, that perhaps the best candidates for these sorts of roles lack a social media presence. While I would certainly like to be pleasantly surprised and proven wrong, I believe the most likely outcome is, as a loyal MAHA soldier, Hemmati’s arrogant ignorance leads to a preventable tragedy such as Americans dying from complications resulting from deregulated peptides.
My sympathies to the people at the FDA trying their darndest to do a decent job and keep the ship afloat. Whatever disagreements, you don’t deserve this crap. If Hemmati was a decent man, he would take a hard look in the mirror, delete his Twitter account, and quietly retire from the public sphere. He’s got enough blood on his hands.
