A top official at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) demanded the removal of YouTube videos of himself that were published by a physician and writer who has been critical of medical misinformation and public health officials in the Trump administration, according to a YouTube notice that was seen by the Guardian.
Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist in New York City, received an email from YouTube on Friday night, which stated that Vinay Prasad, who is the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, had demanded the removal of six videos of himself from Howard’s YouTube channel.
Howard’s entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement.
The now-defunct channel contained about 350 videos of doctors and commentators, including Prasad, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, and Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the National Institutes of Health, which had been collected by Howard from their social media accounts, interviews and podcasts.
Creating the channel, Howard told Guardian in an interview, had been an attempt to “preserve” what these individuals had said during the early years of the pandemic, including comments that Howard said exaggerated the dangers of the Covid vaccine to children and – in some cases – minimized the risk of Covid infection, among other issues.
“These videos were nothing more than collections of what other doctors said during the pandemic, including doctors who are extremely influential and who are now the medical establishment,” he said.
The Guardian requested a comment from the office of public affairs at the department of health and human services, and attempted to reach Prasad through personal email addresses and by a listed mobile phone number. No one responded to the request for comment.
When YouTube notified Howard of the demand request, it included an email address for Prasad, which is identical to the email address that is linked to Prasad’s now inactive podcast, called Plenary Session.
Prasad, a former hematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco, is now head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which makes him the chief vaccine regulator in the US. He was a vocal critic of Peter Marks, who previously led CBER and was widely respected for his role in Operation Warp Speed, the initiative that developed, manufactured and helped distribute the Covid-19 vaccines. Marks was forced to resign by Kennedy.
Prasad has also been critical of the use of Covid boosters in young people and vaccine mandates, and has defended cuts to health agencies and university research.
“It’s really important to remember [Prasad’s] past words in order to gauge his current and future credibility, and that was the mission of my YouTube channel, to record what these doctors [Prasad and others] said,” Howard said.
Although the videos Howard collected were often only viewed “dozens” of times, Howard included them in his online articles that appeared on the Science Based Medicine blog. Now those video links are dead.
He noted that snippets of Prasad’s comments still appeared on anti-vaccine social media accounts, suggesting Prasad was directing his removal demand only at a critic and not anti-vaccine influencers. In the past, Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies.
Howard has been quoted in the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications and is the author of a forthcoming book Everyone Else Is Lying to You, which he said examines how the medical establishment, which has come into power in Trump’s second term, normalized “quackery” during the Covid pandemic and undermined public health.
“I had thought there was a policy that government officials shouldn’t censor opposing perspectives, but I must be mistaken,” said John Moore, a scientist and colleague who is familiar with Howard’s book and videos.
Howard told the Guardian he wanted to emphasize that he was not a victim, and that the ordeal of having his YouTube channel deleted was nothing compared with the dire situation facing scientists and researchers whose funding is being cut by public health institutions.
Prasad has had a rocky start in his FDA tenure. Jeremy Faust, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Emergency Medicine whose Substack newsletter Inside Medicine is widely followed, once described Prasad as having two sides.
There was a 2010s Prasad who was a “rigorous and professorial cancer research methodology expert with hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, including well-reasoned analyses that often stood up against some slippery stuff from big pharma”. And there was the “2020s Prasad”, who Faust called “newly famous and admired by the Right … [a] hot-headed firebrand who when asked about how we should move forward from the lessons of Covid-19 pandemic criticized the pro-masking contingent saying, “I don’t believe in forgiveness because, in my opinion, these pieces of shit are still lying.”
Prasad briefly resigned this summer after he was the subject of an attack by the rightwing activist Laura Loomer, and then returned to his post at the FDA. He reportedly had a significant role in the FDA’s decision to change rules around the Covid-19 vaccine, limiting its availability this fall to adults over 65 or those with certain medical conditions. Previously, Covid shots were recommended for everyone six months or older.
