Gottlieb Resigns to Spend More Time with Family
One month shy of his second full year in the job, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb has resigned to spend more time with his family. Gottlieb commutes from his home in Connecticut, where his wife and three young children reside. He plans to stay on at the agency through the end of the month.
Gottlieb’s decision was met with two tweets from President Trump, who congratulated him for “an absolutely terrific job.” The president also acknowledged Gottlieb’s efforts to help “lower drug prices, get a record number of generic drugs approved and onto the market, and so many other things. He and his talents will be greatly missed.”
Gottlieb has maintained a full plate during his tenure at FDA. He waged battles against teen smoking and took on the opioid crisis as a major initiative. In his resignation letter to HHS secretary Alex Azar, he included accomplishments such as accelerating the approval of generic drugs and modernizing the process for handling novel gene and precision therapies to treat those with cancer and other diseases. He was also focused on the problem of soaring drug prices, an area that FDA typically has shielded itself.
While Gottlieb has had some policy disagreements with the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported that he is well respected there and could be invited back to another post.
“He has been an exemplary public health leader, aggressive advocate for American patients, and passionate promoter of innovation,” Azar said in a statement. “I will personally miss working with Scott on the important goals we share, and I know that is true for so many other members of the HHS family. …The public health of our country is better off for the work Scott and the entire FDA team have done over the last two years.”
The resignation was also met with “good riddance” from the health advocacy group Public Citizen. “Scott Gottlieb was entangled in an unprecedented web of Big Pharma ties when he was nominated in 2017 to be FDA commissioner,” Public Citizen’s Health Research Group director Michael Carome said in a statement. “Not surprisingly, his tenure as commissioner was marked by regulatory decision making regarding medications and medical devices that tilted further in favor of industry's financial interests rather than the interests of public health. This includes the recent, reckless decision to approve the super-potent opioid, Dsuvia, and the withdrawal of a proposed rule that would have allowed generic drug companies to promptly update their labels with new warnings.” Carome said it is “imperative, but sadly unlikely, that the next nominee for FDA commissioner be someone who is independent from industry ties.”