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# Marks’ Firing Challenges RFK Jr.’s Fitness for Office
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/marks-firing-challenges-rfk-jr-s-fitness-for-office/
- Published: 2025-03-31T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T14:56:36.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Biologics, #legacy-id-D5158918

*Analysis by Jim Dickinson\]* CBER director **Peter Marks**’ shocking resignation 3/28 raises an unexpected challenge to HHS secretary and vaccine skeptic **Robert F. Kennedy Jr.**’s fitness for office, for coercing it amid the morale-destroying consequences that **President Trump**’s mass firings are generating inside the agency and beyond.

Rebutting Kennedy’s infamous views, Marks’ [two-page forced resignation letter](https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/c946b864e1dc08f9/05e7e4f0-full.pdf?ref=fdaweb.com) provided a succinct history of the public health success of vaccines dating back to **George Washington**’s 1777 order requiring inoculation of his troops against smallpox, which was later eradicated from the globe. “The application of the remarkable advances of Drs. Salk and Sabin’s vaccines led to the elimination of polio in the United States,” Marks wrote, broadening his attack on RFK Jr.’s vaccine skepticism. “And these are just effects of two of the vaccines that have been associated with saving millions of lives.”

Marks wrote that he had attempted to address RFK Jr.’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency but “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

Marks’ resignation after 13 years exemplary service foretells a rising tide of other forced departures among FDA’s best and brightest, expected to total 3,500 out of the nearly 19,000 employees now at the agency.

As if to nudge the hesitant into resigning, FDAers were confronted by parked armored vehicles and more security personnel than usual at the door when they arrived at FDA’s White Oak headquarters Friday morning, according to a *Politico* report. Later that day, employees were told, via email that FDA would be discontinuing use of an overflow parking lot set up to accommodate the glut of people coming into the office after HHS canceled work-from-home arrangements, *Politico* said.

Unlike Trump and his Washington enablers, nobody who seeks FDA or for that matter any federal civil service employment is looking for power or glory. In my 50 years of reporting on FDA as a journalist, I’ve lost count of the number of FDAers I’ve met and routinely worked with who were sincere patriots, doing it for love of country but who could just as easily have earned bigger salaries in the private sector.

They fit the same mold as Peter Marks.