Can We Trust the FDA? Marty Makary on Science, Power & Patients

Marty McCary, commissioner of the FDA. Welcome to San Francisco. Great to be here, Dave. Good to be with you. Yeah. Thanks. It's JPMorgan Healthcare Conference this week in San Francisco considered, I think, probably the biggest, most important biotech conference globally, very important week. So you're visiting this week, for the conference? Yeah. Yeah. 120,000 people. Great conversations. You hear from everybody. Just not enough time to meet everybody you wanna meet with, but it's a great time. Well, thanks for sitting down with me. You and I have gotten to know each other a little bit over the last year or so. Yeah. And I'm really excited, to hear a little bit about how things are going. It's been almost a year since you've been in the role. I think maybe for our audience, you could share a little bit about how you got this role. How did you get involved with this administration? How did you get connected with them? And maybe we can go all the way back to your very outspoken views, during the COVID pandemic and maybe how that brought attention to you and your philosophies that that drove this role. Yeah. So my, interest in academia, I, went to graduate school for public health and served on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health as I also had a clinical practice in GI and cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins. And my interest was always in the root causes of our health care system problems from quality, transparency, and price. And then the work on price, I led sort of a national effort to try to get more price transparency of hospital prices. I wrote a book on it that did very well. It took me to the White House where they had read the book, invited me in. And in that first Trump administration, we had a lot of great conversations. And then they implemented the idea, and I was so impressed. This makes sense. You know, we want common sense ideas. And so we got the hospital price transparency executive order signed by the president. That's where I developed some of the relationships and got to know the folks. And then when, president Trump got reelected, he gave me a call days after the election, and I was very honored to be offered this role. So it's been awesome. COVID you mentioned COVID. It was a crazy time. I mean, the sort of sociology of medical dogma is a fascinating historical thing, and we still suffer from it. Paternalism, the sort of suppressing ideas that are not the legacy ideas, the sort of sacrificing the basic principles of science to question everything to have no sacred cows. And you saw the worst of that bad behavior during COVID. Cloth masks on toddlers for three years, vaccine mandates for young college students, recommending COVID boosters with such absolutism in young, healthy children. You the, ignoring natural immunity, one of the …