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# No More Political Pressures at FDA: Woodcock
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/no-more-political-pressures-at-fda-woodcock/
- Published: 2021-03-05T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T16:49:41.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5148820

FDA acting commissioner **Janet Woodcock** seems relieved that FDA is getting back to normal and putting the memory of political pressures from the Trump Administration behind it. Asked during an interview on [NPR’s *All Things Considered*](https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973791989/the-new-head-of-the-fda-on-covid-19-tests-and-vaccines?ref=fdaweb.com) about what has changed now that she is temporarily in charge of the agency, Woodcock replied: “Well, I believe that right now we are really free of political pressure, that we are making science- and data-based decisions and that will continue... I’m doing a lot of things differently, but that's because I'm very well familiar with the agency. But I believe the agency processes are very robust. And we have great assurance that our scientific processes will go on independently.”

Much of the Woodcock interview addressed Covid-19 issues. For example, she was asked whether Covid vaccinations will become the new normal like annual flu shots. “Well, that’s going to depend on the virus and how fast it changes,” she said. “As you know, right now, variants are spreading in the United States. So far, it looks like those different versions of the same virus are still going to be susceptible to the immune response that the vaccine stimulates. But it is possible that we could get variants that were more resistant to that immune response, and so we would have to give a booster. And that would depend on how fast that variant would spread in the United States and how prevalent it would become. And a concern scientists have right now is because the whole world is like a petri dish with the vaccine replicating everywhere, that every time it replicates in a person gives it a chance to mutate and change.”