The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine and gene therapy official resigned on Tuesday after a public campaign against him led by the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, according to people familiar with the matter.
Over the past week, Ms. Loomer had taken to social media to attack the official, Dr. Vinay Prasad, for a series of decisions denying approval of new drugs for rare diseases. She highlighted past statements of support he had made for prominent figures on the political left, including Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.
Andrew Nixon, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman, confirmed the resignation Tuesday evening.
“Dr. Prasad did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the F.D.A. in the Trump administration and has decided to return to California and spend more time with his family,” Mr. Nixon said in a statement. “We thank him for his service and the many important reforms he was able to achieve in his time at F.D.A.”
Dr. Prasad declined to comment.
As Ms. Loomer’s campaign escalated, the federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the F.D.A., had privately defended Dr. Prasad, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Kennedy’s support, they said, stemmed in part from his role overseeing vaccines. During his brief tenure at the F.D.A. Dr. Prasad had already limited the use of Covid shots and had amped up warnings about a rare cardiac side effect of the inoculations.
Dr. Marty Makary, the F.D.A. commissioner, also defended Dr. Prasad in an interview on Saturday with Politico, calling him an “impeccable scientist.”
Yet it wasn’t enough in the face of criticism from Ms. Loomer and lobbying of White House officials by former Senator Rick Santorum, which reached President Trump this week, one person said. Ms. Loomer also surfaced old social media posts in which Dr. Prasad declared that he was a “political liberal” and another where he said he had a Trump “voodoo doll.”
Dr. Prasad also faced heat for cracking down on the company Sarepta Therapeutics, which came under heightened scrutiny after two teenagers and a 51-year-old man died of liver complications after using the company’s gene therapy drugs. Though Dr. Prasad pressured the company to stop shipping its drug Elevidys for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, he reversed the decision days later for young boys who can still walk and who are believed to be at lower risk for complications.
Dr. Prasad’s critics argued that his actions with Elevidys amounted to a crusade against Sarepta. Mr. Santorum, who has ties to Sarepta, also reposted an editorial lambasting Dr. Prasad on social media and called top officials at the White House to relay his concerns, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“To Prasad, the danger isn’t a fatal disease killing your child — it’s the prospect that someone might get a new medicine he doesn’t think is worth using,” an article in Real Clear Health, which Mr. Santorum reposted on social media, said.
Dr. Prasad was also the centerpiece of a Wall Street Journal opinion article whose headline called him “a Bernie Sanders Acolyte in MAHA Drag.”
Dr. Prasad made inroads with the political right during the pandemic, slamming public health efforts such as social distancing and putting masks on toddlers. He had also expressed openness to supporting placebo-controlled trials of vaccines in the past, a top priority of Mr. Kennedy.
Before joining the F.D.A., Dr. Prasad was an oncologist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as a frequent presence on YouTube and social media. He initially made his name as an outspoken academic. He became well-known in medical circles for arguing that the F.D.A. was greenlighting too many medicines based on weak standards of evidence.
Rebecca Robbins contributed reporting.