FDA Advisers Abruptly Removed Amid COVID-19 Communications Mess: Reports
Two public relations advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have been ousted after the agency came under fire for overstating the efficacy of blood plasma as a COVID-19 treatment, multiple news outlets reported Friday.
The news comes a day after President Donald Trump repeated the FDA’s misleading claims during the Republican National Convention, boasting that plasma from people who have recovered from the coronavirus “will save thousands and thousands of lives.”
One of those removed is the FDA’s chief spokesperson, Emily Miller, who started in the job just 11 days ago.
“Effectively immediately, Emily Miller will no longer serve the FDA as the assistant commissioner for media affairs and will no longer be the official spokesperson for the agency,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn wrote in an email to staff obtained by Politico. “I will appoint someone to an acting role in that position in the interim.”
Miller, who previously worked at the far-right outlet One America News and on the reelection campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), tweeted Trump’s erroneous remarks about plasma during his RNC speech on Thursday.
Yet days earlier, after announcing that the FDA was authorizing wider use of convalescent plasma therapy and sharing false data indicating it to be a far more effective coronavirus treatment than the study actually suggested, Hahn was forced to apologize for his remarks.
“The criticism is entirely justified,” Hahn tweeted on Monday after scientists blasted him for grossly overstating how many deaths the plasma treatment could be expected to prevent. “What I should have said better is that the data show a relative risk reduction not an absolute risk reduction,” he continued.
While plasma, the fluid left over when red and white blood cells are removed from a donor’s blood, may be a promising element in the development of COVID-19 treatments, the data simply isn’t there yet for the FDA to make such bold claims,...
