Marty Makary Exposes Shocking Truths in His Exit Interview — What You Need to Know Now!
Ever wonder what it feels like to steer one of the most powerful and controversial health agencies in the world while juggling the demands of politics, science, and public scrutiny? That’s exactly the tightrope walk FDA commissioner Marty Makary found himself on—not just balancing but sometimes tumbling under the weight of expectations from the White House, the medical community, and a deeply divided public. Picture this: a calm Thursday interview, the kind where you think you’re about to dive deep into groundbreaking health insights, suddenly interrupted by a phone call that shifts the entire atmosphere. It’s the kind of moment that captures the very essence of the pressure cooker living inside the hallowed halls of the FDA’s White Oak Campus. Makary’s story isn’t just about policy—it’s about the clash between innovation and bureaucracy, truth and dogma, and the personal toll of trying to do what’s right in the face of relentless opposition. If there’s one thing to chew on here, it’s this: How do you protect public health in the eye of a political storm without losing your soul? Buckle up for a ride through the eye-opening, often contradictory world of health regulation, straight from the man at the center of the storm. LEARN MORE
23 min readI’D BEEN TALKING to FDA commissioner Marty Makary for about 45 minutes on Thursday afternoon, when his cellphone rang. We were sitting, accompanied by an FDA press liaison, at a long table in a conference room attached to Makary’s office at the FDA’s White Oak Campus in Silver Spring, Maryland. The interview had been going smoothly enough. Makary, who is short with dark, well-coiffed hair and deep-set eyes, looks a bit like Fred Armisen but has the sort of authoritative, comforting presence you’d expect of a guy who has spent much of his career as a practicing physician. The phone call seemed to momentarily disrupt his cool, commanding demeanor.
“Oh, I need to take this,” he said, picking up the phone. He walked into his office, shut the door, and disappeared for fifteen minutes. When he finally re-emerged, he muttered a quick apology, then sat back down at the table, looking a little ashen.
The news around Makary hadn’t been great in the days leading up to our meeting. There had been a string of high-profile stories assailing his leadership, and anonymous White House sources briefing the press that he was “on thin ice.” The building seemed eerily quiet for a Thursday afternoon, though that may have had as much to do with the staffing cuts that Makary inherited—last year, DOGE fired 3,500 FDA employees, roughly 20 percent of the workforce—as it did with his job standing.
While Makary offered no indication as to what the 15-minute call had been about, it clearly hadn’t been good news. A few minutes later, the press liaison, perhaps noticing the same thing, abruptly called time on the interview, which had been set for 90 minutes. By Tuesday, the thin ice beneath the FDA commissioner appeared to have given way: Makary offered his resignation, making our encounter a sort of unintentional exit interview.
In many ways, Makary was handed a near-impossible task at the FDA. He’d been selected for the job, at least in part, because he was an out-of-the-box thinker, someone with impeccable credentials—a pioneering oncologist, surgeon, researcher, and author with advanced degrees from Harvard and Johns Hopkins—who was also sympathetic to the not-always-scientifically-sound views of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Inevitably, the demands of politics, commerce, and science have repeatedly pulled Makary in different directions. There has been a revolving door among high-level staffers at the FDA, and very public disputes over vaccines, peptides, the redesign of the agency’s food pyramid recommendations, and the use of Tylenol by pregnant women, among other issues.
The final straw seems to have been the FDA’s back-and-forth decision-making around approving flavored vapes. Makary was reportedly resistant to approving menthol, mango, and blueberry vapes out of fear they were geared toward underage users. The Trump Administration eventually insisted on the FDA’s authorization, undermining Makary. Upon the news of his resignation, though, President Trump had nothing but nice words to say about Makary: “I want to thank Dr. Marty Makary for having done a great job at the FDA,” he wrote on Truth Social. “So much was accomplished under his leadership. He was a hard worker, who was respected by all, and will go on to have an outstanding career in Medicine. Kyle Diamantas, a very talented person, will be put in the Acting position.” Men’s Health reached out to the FDA for comment on Makary’s resignation. As of press time, the agency did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite the persistent whispers about his job security, Makary was hardly going scorched earth in our conversation. He did his best to walk the party line, even when that line was hard to decipher, and even as the administration was apparently plotting his imminent defenestration. Only rarely did the mask slip to reveal the frustration that predictably comes with trying to keep all of the FDA’s critics and stakeholders happy—or at least at bay. Below is our interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Men’s Health: Was this job, the FDA job, ever on your radar of something that you wanted?
Marty Makary: No. But in the first Trump administration, I had just published a book on hospital price transparency. That led to an invitation to meet with staff in the White House and eventually with the president. After a number of meetings, the White House adopted hospital price transparency as one of its reform ideas. At the time, it was very bipartisan, which is why it may not have been covered in the media. But it was a major first step, and it was very popular. That’s where some people in the White House staff became familiar with me. Then, after the second Trump election, he gave me a call.
MH: Did you ever consider not taking the job?
MM: No, it’s an honor of a lifetime. The FDA is one of the greatest brands in the world. My grandfather trusted it. It’s hard to get things done in government. We live in a very partisan time where there’s a toxic polarization. I was keenly aware that that can drum up a lot of noise and even ruin careers. But that’s a byproduct of this anonymity of shouting and social media and echo chambers and affirming news. But I came here thinking there are so many things we all have in common. Let’s focus on that.
From left: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins at the inaugural Great American Farmers Market last August.
MH: You’ve had a long career as a surgeon. How does that inform the way you look at the job at the FDA?
MM: When you’re a cancer surgeon at the bedside and you have to break bad news, it takes a piece of your soul out of you. You have a sense of urgency, your mind wanders to ask, is there anything humanly possible we can do for this person who’s got young kids who are giggling in the room? It’s soul-sucking. So, I bring that perspective to the agency. A lot of what we’ve done is to accelerate cures and meaningful treatments by cutting the idle time out of the process, re-engineering the entire system. The fastest FDA approval in U.S. history was in 1996 when HIV activists were demonstrating out here. People demanded because of the poor prognosis, the terminal nature, the stigma that was unfortunately attached to those who suffered. The agency responded with a sense of urgency.
I’d like to see the agency respond with the same sense of urgency we had with HIV to address cancer and type 1 diabetes and PTSD and deafness and blindness. We had a deafness treatment recently approved in record speed. We had a lung cancer drug so powerful it can bring people out of hospice. That was approved in 44 days. We’re basically at that record speed approval rate now for powerful treatments for these debilitating conditions. We put out a thing that the New York Times reported on. In terms of the Men’s Health audience, hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women would not be a huge one…
MH: Well, I assume many of these men who read it do have wives, so they’d be interested.
MM: That’s interesting because that’s come up a ton. Hormone replacement saves marriages. The pain with sexual activity can be prohibitive for a lot of couples. So many people have said that their marriages are saved, lives are back, they feel better, live longer. That’s a testimonial we’ve heard millions of times.
MH: You have long been critical of the medical establishment. Now, you are the medical establishment. What has that transition been like?
MM: I’ve been critical of the deep centralization of authority in medicine. A small group of editors at the New England Journal of Medicine get to decide what is a breakthrough in medicine, versus a more decentralized approach where you’re hearing from different people. The grants at the NIH were all going to the old guard scientists. They were not really funding fresh new ideas and not funding as many young investigators and people not from the bi-coastal academic elite. One of the privileges has been to be able to work with Jay Bhattacharya and talk about big ideas. We talked about the need for good, randomized-control trials with peptides. We’re hearing dramatic personal testimonies of people’s experience with this class of compounds. The field desperately needs to put some good data around it.
MH: Secretary Kennedy said he wants to end the FDA’s war on peptides. What does the science say in terms of peptides and what direction do you see the FDA pointing on them right now?
MM: People ask me what do I think of peptides and the question is like, “What do you think of molecules?” It’s a big tent. Some peptides are well-characterized, some are naturally-occurring in the body. And then we have a lot of peptides where we know very little except that amino acids generally are safe. I can’t declare they’re safe or go on record saying they’re safe, but we don’t see a lot of adverse event reports. Amino acids degrade in the acidic environment of the stomach immediately. So, the peptides that people take commonly desperately need good placebo-controlled trials, and that’s where we agree. I don’t take peptides, but we’d like to see some good placebo-controlled trials.
MH: For men with low testosterone levels, tell me about the impetus behind both the panel that recommended testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) and then the recommendation itself.
MM: Well, it’s another area of medical dogma whereby there has been a stigma around it, a stigma that’s lingered from the Olympic scandals of the ’80s and ’90s. The field of medicine has matured. There’s also common sense where we’ve seen in women how replacing natural hormones in the body when they’re depleted or they naturally decrease can have benefit. The natural question is, well, what about in men? Now, it turns out the long-term public health benefits in women are far more well-described. It’s a much more mature body of research, and the benefits are greater, it appears. But there’s probably something there. If you talk to those who are very proximate to this field in treating men who have symptomatic low testosterone, they’re describing results that more people need to hear about. We wanted to invite those experts in, be objective in listening to them, and get rid of some of the scary dogma that’s around this field that’s inhibited people from exploring the option.
MH: A lot of men use testosterone as a supplement that they believe helps increase muscle mass and counter the effects of aging. Secretary Kennedy himself had said that he takes it as part of an anti-aging protocol. What’s your view of these particular uses of testosterone? Does the science back up those potential benefits?
MM: Not yet, but there are indications there may be a trend in that direction. It’s just that this area has been massively underfunded. Now, if you can extrapolate and recognize that the number one predictor of longevity historically has been muscle mass or the inverse, what we call sarcopenia, which is a depletion of muscle mass—that happens with less mobility later in life—increasing muscle mass should have some benefit. It’s just hard to do 20-year randomized trials. It’s hard to study longevity. So, look, if people are finding a benefit out there and their doctors are treating symptomatic low testosterone, we should not be allowing dogma to dominate the labeling or the process of picking up a prescription. Right now, there’s still a stigma around it because it’s treated like a controlled substance. It’s as if you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing.
MH: Which actually brings us nicely to psychedelics. What have you seen in terms of the potential for psychedelics, particularly in treating PTSD and other sort of mental health disorders, and how is the FDA looking at them?
MM: Well, we do have good trial data now that’s suggesting there’s a benefit. The question is where is the benefit, how to best manage the benefit, how durable is the benefit? Now, we have to await the results of more studies to answer those bigger questions. But in the short term, we’re hearing profound testimonials of individuals where nothing else has helped them. And when you think about the population we’re treating, you know, I think it was Mother Teresa who said a society can be best measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members. Some of these folks are young kids who signed up to serve this country and have been suffering from mental illness since they’ve witnessed things no human being should witness. So, if we’re hearing these dramatic personal testimonies, my feeling is you can’t write that off. Those are data points. Now, we can also await the randomized controlled trial and do our standard process. But given that so many people are suffering and we have not been winning with the mental illness epidemic in this country, we owe it to people to get decisions out quickly by cutting the idle time, not by cutting any corners on safety.
MH: When you started at the FDA, what were the most important things you wanted to change about the way Americans eat?
MM: I think the biggest thing is that we have to recognize the dogma we were raised with. That dogma has ignored ultra-processed food and simply focused on calories in equals calories out. It’s not just a zero-sum game. Food functions almost like certain medications can function on the body. Hormonally, when you take prednisone, you will increase your weight. Now, there’s not a lot of calories in the prednisone, but you’re seeing a hormonal metabolic shift in the body. Well, the same is true of some of the chemicals people are ingesting. They may be altering the normal fullness feedback loop that the stomach sends. When you mess with that feedback loop, as I believe we are with the modern food supply, people can feel full but they’re still hungry. That’s a very tragic short circuit in that loop and pathway by which people just keep eating. We blame them and we say, “Oh, it’s a willpower problem.” It’s not a willpower problem. This is something that has been altered. We never talk about these things. All we’ve talked about is avoiding fat, which is hardly the demon in the food supply.
MH: Ten to 15 years ago, my cholesterol was a little high, and my father had had a bypass around the age of 60. I went to the doctor, and he told me, “You got to cut some fats out of your diet, drink skim milk, cut down on butter.” Was that bad advice?
MM: Instead of just avoiding fat for the prevention of heart disease, we now know that there are subtypes of LDL that are far more predictive than the global LDL level. In that subtype analysis, you can get a better prediction of your risk. If you truly are high risk—and family history is one of those big drivers of risk—then eating real food, avoiding ultra-processed food, and there are some new ideas on how to optimize your microbiome. All of those are promising. Excessive fat can absolutely contribute to a higher LDL, but the real issue is exercise and ultra-processed foods.
MH: What’s your own diet and exercise routine like?
MM: I try to get to the gym that’s close to my house. I’m privileged to have a wife that loves to cook super-healthy foods. She prepares snacks for me in the morning. She has a date cashew bar that she makes from scratch. I’ll often drink some juice—watermelon juice is a favorite, or freshly squeezed juices. I try to avoid things that are pre-made and pre-cooked, although in a bind sometimes, especially while traveling, you know, it’s tough. I’ll have a lot of nuts, especially during the day. I have a little kitchen in there with a bunch of coconut, sugar-covered cashews. Anything with coconut—I love coconut on the skin, consuming it, using it for medicinal purposes, cooking with it.
MH: Do you have a guilty pleasure, something you know isn’t good for you, but you still eat it anyway?
MM: Good question. I do have—I don’t think I have it in my pocket right now, but they are Organic yogurt-covered goji berries that do have added sugar in the yogurt.
MH: I’ve got to say, as guilty pleasures go, that’s kind of lame. I was thinking more like a fried Snickers or something like that.
MM: [Laughs.] I do eat a lot of burgers, but I don’t consider them to be unhealthy. We were told, “Burgers, that’s bad for you.” Turns out the worst thing in a burger is the bun, not the meat. So, I do watch the type of bread, but I do love a good burger, a hot dog. We’re going to have FDA night at Nats Stadium.
MH: Let’s talk vaccines. Secretary Kennedy has been an outspoken skeptic of vaccine mandates and has voiced repeated concerns about vaccine safety. To what extent does your research and scientific understanding of vaccines dovetail with his views, and when it doesn’t, what’s your strategy for steering him towards more scientifically rigorous conclusions?
MM: Vaccines save lives, and any vaccine-preventable illness is a tragedy. The questions Secretary Kennedy is asking are questions many Americans are asking and some are afraid to ask. Our job as medical professionals is to provide good data-driven answers to those questions. For example, does a young, healthy, 10-year-old girl need 70 COVID shots, one every year, for the rest of her life? That’s a scientific unknown. But there are zealots who’d say, yes, that not only do they need them—they should be mandated to take them. We do know of adverse events from vaccines, and that’s why people should be informed. Studies should be out there. They should be done. We’ve basically said, “If you have a novel vaccine, we’d like to see a proper scientific study,” just as we do with any other product that comes through the drug agencies for approval.
MH: As you said, studies should be done on vaccines and people should be informed. So why did the FDA recently block publication of research that its scientists did into the safety of the COVID and the shingles vaccines that had concluded they were safe?
MM: I was not involved in any of these decisions. I learned about them in retrospect. The shingles vaccine study was an endeavor to describe the efficacy of the shingles vaccine. And the view of the manager of that area where that study was proposed basically said our job is not to study efficacy. Our job is safety. We review documents on safety from industry. To conduct a study on efficacy is the job of the companies or the sponsors that have products. That’s something they should fund and pay for.
On the COVID vaccine, there was an active discussion about whether or not in that study they had adequately accounted for the healthy vaccinated bias, which means healthier people tend to get vaccinated. There’s a statistical adjustment that can be done that was not done. So, the people in that center believed that unless they did that proper adjustment, accounting for the healthy vaccinated bias or effect, then it would be misleading to make sweeping conclusions about the vaccine’s safety. So, there was a feeling that the studies were not mature enough to put out there, as we saw with a lot of sloppy research that came out of the CDC during COVID.
Dr. Makary delivers remarks during an announcement by President Trump on “significant medical and scientific findings for America’s children” last September.
MH: Do you think you’re naturally a contrarian?
MM: No, not contrarian, not at all. I’d just say there may be more to the story. That’s why I titled my last book Blind Spots. There’s more than we’re seeing. I do feel like in medicine, if we’re taking a global view of it, it’s a pretty narrow field in how it views health. Dentistry is not included. People get sick and die from dental abscesses but they’re not one of us. They can’t publish in our journals. You see this sort of priesthood that has a myopic vision on children during the COVID pandemic, for example. They were the absolute lowest risk. They experienced the harshest restrictions of anybody. You realize that there can be this myopic focus on viral transmission in children but not on the well-being of children, on treating, medicating, and operating, but not on the food supply or environmental exposures. I’ve always been one to say we need to study not just the chemo that treats cancer, but the environmental factors causing it.
MH: You were born in Liverpool but moved to central Pennsylvania when you were young. What were you into as a kid?
MM: I played tennis. I was a bit of a geek in school, studied like crazy. I was very good at math. I always knew I had a bit of a deficit in reading. But in order to compensate for that deficit, I’d just spend enormous amounts of time reading and rereading and rereading. I’m what they call a third culture kid, which means you perceive that your ethnicity or roots are somewhere else and therefore you feel like a guest in society. Many third culture kids can be hyper-observant, things that would otherwise just be taken for granted. I remember going to a high school football game thinking, “Gosh, they’re clashing into each other, and people enjoy watching this. This is interesting.” No one thinks about that. A lot of third culture kids—Albert Einstein, Elon Musk—tend to be research minds or entrepreneurial. They think differently. I’ve done 350 different peer-reviewed scientific studies in obstetrics, orthopedics, ophthalmology. My colleagues have always said, “You’re all over the place. You’re working in every area.” It’s just the intellectual curiosity, I think, is intrinsic in third culture kids.
MH: I was struck by something that you’ve said about your parents. They’d grown up with state TV in Egypt and grew not to trust the government. They assumed they were always being lied to and this carried on even after they had moved here. How do you think that imprinted on you?
MM: Look, that skepticism ended up being an asset when it came to medical research, curiosity, and challenging dogma. It was my mom in particular. Everything she’d see on state-controlled TV in Egypt, she knew there was another story. She kept that mindset when she’d watch TV in the U.S. I’d be baffled at how she might question whether or not a volcano was actually erupting or if it was just doctored footage. But there’s a lot of dogma we’ve accepted where we should be questioning what’s happening on so many levels. It definitely has had an impact on me.
MH: Your father is a doctor, and your grandfather was a pharmacist. At what point did you know medicine was the path you wanted to take?
MM: As a kid, I saw someone cross my father in the grocery store, and she immediately dropped what she had, ran to my father, and broke down in tears and a hug. My dad had been treating her husband for 10 years or something like that. The medical field was an amazing culmination of the things I was interested in, mathematically and scientifically, yet there was this deep emotional connection. You don’t get that in other professions. You don’t get that intimate personal relationship quickly. That’s what really made me gravitate to [medicine]. I joined the local volunteer ambulance and firefighter squad. I wasn’t a very good firefighter. I was a small guy, kind of nerdy. But I did go to the fire station, ride on the back, hold some hoses, and take an axe to some window they’d assign me to go take out. But the real thing I did much more of was the EMT side. I was always fascinated.
MH: Was there ever a point where you questioned it, where you thought, there’s something else that I’d rather be doing?
MM: Yeah, I walked away from it. I took a leave after my third year of medical school. I felt disillusioned. I felt like people were not given a full informed consent of what was happening. They weren’t given all of their options. They were just told, “Now you go to the fourth floor, and this receptionist is going to give you an appointment for this doctor to start this.” I thought, what about all the other options? When you have heartburn, what about spending 30 minutes talking about the foods that increase heartburn rather than just give somebody an antacid pill. So, I felt disillusioned. I left. I got a master’s in public health at Harvard and loved it. I felt like I’d finally arrived at what I was designed to do. It was great. I was doing all kinds of high-level research with big-name people in the field. But in the end, I did flash back to my dad and his ability just to be a community doctor, take care of people with that deep relationship. I did miss the clinical side and decided to go back into it.
MH: You’ve talked about not accepting dogma and conventional wisdom. Are there any ideas that you once deeply held you’ve sort of been convinced you were wrong about?
MM: I certainly subscribed to the notion that to stay healthy, you had to tiptoe around natural fats, that if you drank enough skim milk instead of whole milk—that was the dogma. I had several aha moments where I realized there’s more evidence that this was a house of cards.
MH: How did the pandemic impact the way both that you practice medicine, but also just the way you thought about public health in general?
MM: Well, if you look at the response to outbreaks, for the history of mankind, they’ve been bungled. There has been groupthink—drilling burr holes in people’s brains during the bubonic plague to relieve the spirits. There can be this very centralized authority that squashes out the fresh ideas on what we could be doing differently in the name of “We have to have a united message.”
In the modern world, we need to have an honest and transparent message, even if it’s multiple different ideas that people hear. We can’t be censoring people who have different ideas. I started to have a different idea when I saw this plan to bring in retired doctors to the ICU to help staff understaffed ICUs. Knowing that the infection mortality rate was so dramatic and exponential, that was the dumbest idea in the world…to have old, frail, retired doctors come in. Meanwhile, the young doctors, those who had COVID who recovered, there were no cases of anyone getting severely ill with a reinfection in the first year. It appeared natural immunity held the same principles it had since the Athenian plague of 400 A.D.
I was actually one of those people out there sounding the alarm on COVID before it hit. One of my interviews on TV went viral. I was like, “Hey, we’ve got to shift food service to delivery and pickup. We’ve got to hold off on domestic travel.” I was really worried. I was one of those outliers that was ridiculed. I still have the LinkedIn post, all these prominent CEOs and doctors saying I’m just creating hysteria, how it’s not going to be a problem. When you see groupthink miss things, you do feel a duty to speak up. That was the first thing. Then ignoring natural immunity in the COVID vaccine mandate was an area where I became sort of front and center in America.
MH: The MAHA movement has been a decisive force in health policy during the second Trump administration, and you’ve spoken positively about it in the past. What was your introduction to the movement, and what’s led you to feel like it has been a positive for health and wellness?
MM: Well, I think we’ve gotten a tremendous amount done, not to mention all the awareness around these topics that we’ve been talking about from eating real food, ultra-processed food, artificial food dyes, preservatives—we’ve created national conversations around those things and taken strong action in many of those areas in just a year of being in office. So, you’re now seeing influencers, social media, podcasters responding to this saying, “Hey, I like this. Maybe whole milk is fine for my kid. Maybe I need to think about the microbiome in the gut.” We have seen healthy conversations about SSRI risks in pregnant women. And our work on the school meal program. So, a lot of parents said, “Hey, this MAHA thing, I get it, I believe it. I get the general message that 40 percent of our nation’s kids have a chronic disease, many of them are medicated, and we’re not addressing the root cause.” That really resonated with people. So, I think it’s all good. This is a healthy conversation we’ve never really had.
MH: Have there been times where you’ve pushed back against something that was popular in the MAHA movement, but which you felt like was not scientifically backed up?
MM: There’s nothing that comes to mind. I mean, it’s always good to have a healthy dialogue about ideas on something where there’s not a lot of research yet. But overall, it’s been a very, very productive movement for the country.
MH: Certainly prior to this, I think it’d be fair to say the MAHA movement had a pretty skeptical view of the FDA. Do you see it as part of your remit to win them over?
MM: I think we need to find common ground. You’re touching on something that’s an important topic: How do we take a traditional old guard medical establishment and new fresh ideas that are coming in from younger doctors and non-medical professionals that are describing their observations of seeing health benefits, how do we bring it all together? A lot of the processes at the FDA are very old and rigid. It does take creative thinking on how we can modernize the agency to think about, for example, moving away from the treating suntan lotion as a drug. Does it need a randomized controlled trial? Right now, it does. That’s the system I inherited. Can we modernize the infant formula recipe so we have more products on the market, more infant formula without corn syrup, seed oils and added sugar? We have to think about how to take this old guard process and just incorporate common sense things.
MH: It seems like there are a lot of constituencies you have to balance in your role. You’ve got the MAHA movement, Secretary Kennedy, the president, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the American people, and then you’ve got science. It seems virtually impossible that everyone comes away happy with those decisions. What’s your guiding star through all of that?
MM: I think you always have to do what you think is right because as doctors, our historical tradition is that we block out politics and we always speak what we believe to be in the best interest of somebody’s health. That’s got to be preserved, even if you work in the government. Secretary Kennedy knows that if I have a different opinion, I’m going to let him know. We have very healthy conversations, but he poses questions that challenge us to think about how we approach a topic. That’s good. I mean, that’s good to get that sort of—[his cell phone rings]—oh, I’ve got to take this. [Picks up phone.] Hello. [Walks into adjacent office and closes the door. After 15 minutes, he returns.] Sorry.
MH: That’s okay. I guess you have another job besides just sitting here talking to me all afternoon. You mentioned earlier today about the way as a society we have this toxic polarization around every issue including science, health, and medicine. Do you see your job as lowering the temperature, decreasing this polarization at least within the realm where you work?
MM: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. With a lot of the health stuff, there’s so much common ground.
MH: On that score, you’ve also been pretty scathing about Anthony Fauci. You’ve talked about him using science as political propaganda and engaging in a cover up around COVID. Isn’t it difficult to build trust and lower the temperature while feeling like you have to relitigate those things?
MM: I think you can always express an opinion politely in a civil way. I had a very strong view that the schools in 2021 should’ve been reopened. I thought the nearly two-year closure of schools was an injustice. Kids don’t vote and they don’t have a voice. I felt very compelled to speak about the data on healthy kids. So, I did criticize the CDC school reopening document that was edited by the teachers’ union before it was public—with edits from the teachers’ union appearing in the final version. I was critical of the entire approach that we need to censor those who have a different opinion on school reopening or recognizing natural immunity.
MH: Is it difficult to rebuild credibility with one segment of the population without losing it with another set of the population?
MM: If you start thinking about what different constituencies will think about your medical opinion, then it’s over. You’re no longer a physician, you’re a politician. So, I’ve always had to block out the noise. Look, I was the only health official approved with a bipartisan vote in my Senate confirmation. Everything I’ve done in my career has been a uniting issue, talking about patient safety, talking about egregious hospital billing and price gouging. These are all topics of numerous research studies and books I’ve written—the danger of medical dogma, things like that. So, I came in really asking what can unite this toxic polarization we have.
MH: I’ve heard you talk about staying humble in medicine and avoiding celebrity worship. In your position now—best-selling author, FDA commissioner—how do you make sure that you don’t sort of get swallowed up by that same impulse?
MM: You have to get outside the D.C. subculture when we talk about the issues facing everyday folks. If there’s a pothole in their neighborhood, it’s not a red versus blue issue. If somebody needs access to medication that’s not affordable, these are American problems. In the policy worlds, we like to talk to ourselves, but if you get out there, you see a different side.
David Peisner is a journalist with more than 25 years of experience reporting and writing for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, New York magazine, Esquire, Fast Company, Mother Jones, Playboy, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s traveled to Tunisia to write about the role of hip-hop in the Arab Spring revolutions, to Uganda to profile a singer-turned-politician trying to unseat an entrenched dictator, and to Jonesboro, Arkansas to examine the horrors of living through a school shooting. His 2024 profile of Kid Rock in Rolling Stone was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Peisner is the co-author of two New York Times’ best-selling memoirs, and his book, Homey Don’t Play That!: The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution was named by New York magazine to a list of “Books All Comedy Fans Should Read.” He’s had a gun pulled on him by Kid Rock, been denounced as “a professional Antifa apologist” by Tucker Carlson live on Fox News, and once spent three days on a bus with Kanye West. He lives in Decatur, Georgia.
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