Beware STAT News and Other Pharma-Sponsored Media Outlets

Website affiliated with the Boston Globe continues flacking dangerous product, because Big Pharma says so….

4 minute read

A small story splashed across the web over the weekend, with most reporters missing the main news. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration halted clinical use of Sarepta Therapeutics ELEVIDYS, a gene therapy treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), following the deaths of three study participants. FDA reported on Friday that agency leadership also met with Sarepta and requested the company voluntarily stop all shipments of Elevidys.

“The company refused to do so,” FDA said in a Friday statement. Sarepta finally stopped shipping their life-threatening product yesterday, but what media failed to explain is how patients ever got access to a therapy as dangerous as Sarepta’s ELEVIDYS.

Physician-researcher Dr. George Tidmarsh wrote an essay for The Disinformation Chronicle last April laying blame for Sarepta’s regulatory approval at the feet of FDA official Peter Marks, who promoted ELEVIDYS over the objection of career FDA staff. The FDA pushed Marks out of the agency in April, and announced today that Tidmarsh will be director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), filling one of the agency’s key regulatory voids.

Tidmarsh has extensive industry experience, founding Horizon Pharma in 2005, where he served as CEO and won approval of an arthritis drug. He also founded and ran several other small drug companies.

In his April essay, Tidmarsh denounced Marks for “failed judgement” on Sarepta’s ELEVIDYS. For example, Marks overruled his own FDA staff scientists’ concerns in June 2023 and those raised by an FDA Advisory Board to grant approval of ELEVIDYS. Tidmarsh also noted that Marks later expanded the approval of ELEVIDYS last summer without FDA Advisory Committee input and despite FDA staff objections.

When the FDA rid itself of Marks, several reporters celebrated him as the “FDA’s top vaccine scientist” a label Tidmarsh condemned:

The media proclamation that Dr. Marks’ is “FDAs top vaccine scientist” is ironic because that’s a position he gave to himself after pushing out the FDA’s real vaccine experts: Drs. Gruber and Krause. Marks is a physician but he has no clinical or scientific training in vaccines nor immunology. He’s actually an oncologist, a field far from the complex area of vaccine biology. When Dr. Marks removed the FDA’s top career vaccine scientists in 2021, he did so not to advance science, but to force through the approval of the COVID vaccine boosters to meet an arbitrary Biden administration deadline.

Pharma-friendly STAT News, owned by Boston Globe Media, ran continuous, back-to-back coverage of Marks’s forced FDA exit, promoting Marks as the expert’s expert, while condemning the administration for daring to abandon an FDA official known for close ties to industry. Days after Marks’s dismissal, the stock price of Moderna and other vaccine manufacturers plummeted.

STAT News’s Matthew Herper and colleagues began their online cheerleading campaign for Marks shortly after Trump won office, with Robert Kennedy Jr. as his choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Marks began selling himself as an expert on vaccine disinformation and defender of science and public health, despite a history showing the opposite.

After Kennedy pushed Marks out, STAT reporters switched to defending Marks as FDA’s key man—a purported voice of transparency and reason, who protected lifesaving products from FDA over-regulation.

Today, STAT ran a piece defending Sarepta’s ELEVIDYS from FDA action by two mothers: Jennifer Handt who founded Charlie’s Cure, and Kelly Maynard who started the Little Hercules Foundation. Sarepta funds Little Hercules and Charlie’s Cure seems quite cozy with the company.

Next month, STAT News’s Matthew Herper will host an event at the Broad Institute to showcase Bill Gates, an early investor in COVID vaccines. This October, STAT reporters will throw one of their many “summit” parties for their subscribers and other pharma investors in Boston. General admission is $850 and major funders include Merck and Genentech.