Dr. Marty Makary intends to resign as FDA commissioner: Sources
Marty Makary attends an executive order signing in the Oval Office on April 18, 2026.(Allison Robbert/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary intends to resign on Tuesday, two sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
His departure was in the works after he clashed publicly with lawmakers, major pharmaceutical companies and President Donald Trump himself. He was scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Makary, who is a surgeon by training, gained notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing against masks for children and vaccine mandates, and criticizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for citing Israeli data in recommending boosters rather than conducting its own research.
Since taking office in March 2025, the commissioner has focused his efforts on reshaping vaccine policy in the U.S. and transforming American diets.
Makary appeared in a video on X alongside Kennedy when the secretary announced in May 2025 the removal of the COVID-19 vaccine from the CDC’s immunization schedule for “healthy children and pregnant women.”
“There’s no evidence healthy kids need it today and most countries have stopped recommending it for children,” Makary said at the time.
Last year, Makary appeared at a news conference announcing the HHS and FDA would be implementing a series of measures to phase out eight artificial food dyes and colorings from America’s food supply by the end of 2026.
Makary said at the time that the agencies are looking to revoke authorization for two synthetic food colorings and to work with the food industry to eliminate six remaining synthetic dyes used in cereal, ice cream, snacks, yogurts and more — claiming American children “have been living in a toxic soup of synthetic chemicals.”
Makary also supported Kennedy’s updated federal dietary guidelines earlier this year. The guidelines recommended that Americans limit highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates but also advocated for consuming red meat and full-fat dairy, a reversal of past nutrition guidance.
“For decades, we’ve been fed a corrupt food pyramid that has had a myopic focus on demonizing natural healthy saturated fats, telling you not to eat eggs and steak and ignoring a giant blind spot: refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, ultra-processed foods,” Makary said. “In this new guidance, we are telling young people, kids, schools, you don’t need to tiptoe around fat and dairy. … You don’t need to push low-fat milk to kids.”
In early May, Trump criticized Makary for not moving quickly enough to approve flavored vape and nicotine products, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Trump’s advisers informed him that Makary was delaying the president’s effort to “save” vaping,” a pledge Trump made on social media during his presidential campaign, according to the Journal.
Health supplies are seen as healthcare workers receive training on administering the Ebola vaccine in a study carried out with the support of the World Health Organization as part of the fight against the Ebola virus in Kampala, Uganda on February 14, 2025. (Nicholas Kajoba/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — A deadly Ebola outbreak is continuing to spread in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, with officials on Tuesday saying there were more than 600 confirmed and suspected cases and more than 100 suspected deaths.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, and at least one American in the DRC has tested positive, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Several public health experts told ABC News that while they agree with the CDC that the risk to the U.S. public is currently low, the outbreak is still concerning. They also expressed unease that the U.S. may not be prepared to adequately respond due to cuts to federal health agencies and its withdrawal from the WHO.
The experts noted cases have been found in remote regions of the DRC and Uganda, as well as urban areas, and the outbreak is growing rapidly. They added that although Ebola is a rare disease, it can be highly contagious and can lead to deadly consequences.
“We’re worried that if this outbreak is not contained, that it could spread elsewhere on the continent, which could increase the risk of the virus spreading outside of the African continent,” Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told ABC News.
“Ebola is not as transmissible a virus as, say, a coronavirus … and that’s why I don’t think that this will ever become a pandemic scenario, but it doesn’t have to be a pandemic to be a worrisome situation,” she added.
Americans affected by outbreak
On Monday, the CDC confirmed that least one American in the DRC contracted Ebola while working in the country.
Dr. Satish K. Pillai, incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, told reporters that the individual developed symptoms over the weekend and tested positive late Sunday, adding that the patient and six other high-risk contacts were being moved to Germany for care and monitoring.
Serge, an international Christian missions organization, confirmed the patient is American medical missionary Dr. Peter Stafford, a board-certified general surgeon with a specialization in burn care, who was serving patients in the eastern DRC.
Pillai did not say if or when the Americans would be returning to the U.S., but experts say, even if the patient and contacts do, the risk level to the public does not change.
“We safely and effectively have [returned affected Americans home] many times before,” Emily Smith, interim chair of the department of global health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, told ABC News. “It’s something we have good experience in and have always safely and effectively done. So, to me, no concerns about doing that.”
Dr. Jesse Goodman, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at Georgetown University and former chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, said it is encouraging that when countries such as the DRC have experienced outbreaks in the past, they have not progressed to pandemic status.
“I think the most [the U.S.] would see is the kind of limited transmission that we’ve seen in the past because this virus almost always appears that transmission is from people who have symptoms,” he told ABC News. “I think if there are cases that come to this country, I would expect limited transmission and think we have the capability to contain it.”
During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, there were two cases of suspected transmission from a patient with Ebola to nurses caring for him. The CDC has established detailed infection prevention and control procedures for health facilities that suspect they have cases of Ebola.
U.S. may not be as connected to the global health community
Even with possible U.S. capability to contain Ebola domestically, the experts who spoke to ABC News said the U.S. is likely at a disadvantage when it comes to responding to several health crises both at home and abroad due to public health capacity cuts.
Last year, the State Department announced it would be taking over programs previously run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the agency — which oversaw foreign aid, disaster relief and international development programs — would no longer be providing assistance to other countries.
In previous Ebola outbreaks, USAID provided millions of dollars and operational support in response, in addition to helping with preparedness activities in neighboring countries.
Additionally, earlier this year, the U.S. officially completed its withdrawal from the WHO, with federal officials saying at the time there are “plans” in place to work with organizations on surveillance, diagnostics and outbreak response to fill in gaps left by exiting the WHO.
Brown University’s Nuzzo said the Ebola outbreak is the kind of situation public health experts warned about as USAID was gutted and the U.S. withdrew from the WHO.
“We warned that the United States would be flying blind, and it would be learning about deadly outbreaks late, and then it would be very difficult for the U.S. to respond because we would have fewer tools to do that,'” Nuzzo said. “The big worry here is that the outbreak wasn’t declared until there were more than 200 suspected cases of the virus and that is very unusual. Usually, we get signals of an outbreak much earlier.”
George Washington University’s Smith concurred, “When we are talking about public health infrastructure and global health infrastructure, we’re in a worse place today than we were two years ago.”
Nuzzo also noted that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an agency within the National Institutes of Health, ended research at its high containment lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to “a safety stand-down” last year.
The lab was one of the few federal facilities studying Ebola and other deadly pathogens, which Nuzzo said could have been useful in understanding the virus and developing therapies for the recent outbreak.
“So now that we have Americans potentially exposed to a virus that’s deadly, for which we have no vaccines or treatments, you can imagine how beneficial it would be to have a laboratory that can conduct world-class research to make sure we develop cures for this,” Nuzzo said. “But we don’t have it. So, we’re basically behind the curve in being ready for this.”
Goodman also said that the U.S. may not be as prepared because Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been actively shifting the department’s focus away from infectious disease management and towards chronic illnesses.
During his confirmation hearings last year, Kennedy argued that too much federal funding has been “devoted” to “infectious disease and to drug development and very little to chronic diseases.”
Goodman argued that there needs to be a focus on infectious diseases because of the threats they may pose to public health.
“I think the message here is these infectious disease, we may be done with them, but they’re not done with us,” he said. “There’s a reason that so many of us work for so many years to be prepared for whatever the next thing is because we don’t know what it is and we just need to be ready.”
Kennedy told ABC News on Monday that his agency is addressing the recent hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks.
“Yeah, we’re working on it,” Kennedy replied when asked if he was worried about the outbreaks. Kennedy did not respond when asked what his message might be to Americans who are concerned about the diseases potentially spreading in the U.S.
On Sunday, the State Department issued “Level 4 — Do not travel” advisories for Uganda and the DRC due to the outbreak.
Nuzzo said she’s worried that the U.S. hasn’t built a public health system that acknowledges viral outbreaks as recurring threats, saying the U.S. has been caught off guard with previous incidents such as COVID-19.
“We don’t do that with other recurring hazards you know; we don’t try to build FEMA in the midst of a hurricane,” Nuzzo said.
Dr. Casey Means, nominee for the medical director in the Regular Corps of the Public Health Service and U.S. surgeon general, testifies at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on February 25, 2026 in Washington, DC. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s surgeon general nominee is appearing before the Senate on Wednesday for her confirmation hearing.
Dr. Casey Means was originally scheduled to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee in October, but it was postponed for four months after she went into labor.
If confirmed, Means would become the nation’s top doctor, leading more than 6,000 members of the U.S. Public Health Service, including physicians, nurses, scientists and engineers working at various federal health agencies.
Means’ views largely mirror those of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with a focus on tackling the chronic disease epidemic, creating a healthier food supply and expressing vaccine skepticism.
Senators are expected to grill Means on her qualifications as well as her business endeavors. In prior filings, Means pledged that, if confirmed, she would resign from her position as an adviser for a wellness company and promised to stop working as an influencer promoting supplements and other wellness products.
“Dr. Means would clearly be an atypical or unusual person to serve in the role of surgeon general,” Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told ABC News. “Typically, the surgeon general has been viewed as the nation’s top doctor or America’s doctor, but Dr. Means has never practiced medicine, and so that is unusual. The part that’s not unusual is that the surgeon general’s impact is largely through influence. Dr. Means is skilled in this regard, when it comes to influence.”
Means graduated from Stanford School of Medicine in 2014 with plans to become an otolaryngology surgeon, also known as a head and neck surgeon, but she dropped out in her fifth year, according to her website.
Means went on to study functional medicine, which uses a holistic approach to prevent disease and illness by studying the root causes of health issues. The field has been criticized for promoting some interventions that are not evidence-based and for an overreliance on expensive supplements. Having never completed residency, Means is not board-certified in a medical specialty, and she does not hold an active medical license.
Over the course of her career, she co-founded Levels, an app that allows people to track their food, along with biometric data like sleep and glucose monitoring, to see how their diet is impacting their health.
Means wrote a book with her brother, Calley Means, titled “Good Energy,” which was published in May 2024 and claims to take a look at why Americans are sick and how to fix it.
The siblings rose to prominence within the Trump campaign in 2024 and among Trump allies, including Kennedy. They appeared at a September 2024 roundtable discussion on health with Kennedy hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc.
“The message I’m here to share and reiterate is that American health is getting destroyed,” Casey Means said during her opening remarks at the 2024 event. “It’s being destroyed because of chronic illness.”
Meanwhile, Calley Means currently serves as senior adviser for HHS. He has worked closely with Kennedy and has touted many of his health proposals. Calley Means has a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard University and does not have medical training.
According to a copy of her prepared testimony for her original confirmation hearing in October, obtained by ABC News, Casey Means wrote that she would work to put “Americans back on the road toward wholeness and health.”
Like Kennedy, Casey Means has called for the removal of ultra-processed foods in school lunches and has advocated for organic foods and ingredients sourced from so-called regenerative farming practices in school meals.
In her “Good Energy” newsletter, she wrote that the U.S. needed to move away “from industrial agriculture that uses synthetic pesticides” in order to create “nutrient-rich food.”
“If she were to use the platform to truly work towards improving the school lunch program in America, that would be that would be terrific, because the Secretary talks a lot about nutrition, the importance of eating healthy food,” Besser said. “But if people can’t afford it, telling people to eat healthy food doesn’t lead to a healthier nation. and one of the ways that we could see big impact in that regard would be if the school lunch program were funded to the extent that every school could have a kitchen, and the people working in that kitchen could actually prepare real food, rather than handing out packaged food.”
While Casey Means’ nomination has received support from members of the administration, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, acting CDC acting director and head of the National Institutes of Health, others have expressed concern over some of her more controversial views.
On Tucker Carlson’s show in August 2024, Casey Means said birth control is being “prescribed like candy” and that Ozempic has a “stranglehold on the U.S. population.”
Means has expressed skepticism about the safety of childhood vaccines and has called for more research on the “safety of the cumulative effects” of vaccines when following the CDC vaccine schedule, she wrote in her newsletter.
“There is growing evidence that the total burden of the current extreme and growing vaccine schedule is causing health declines in vulnerable children. This needs to be investigated,” she continued.
Doctors and major medical organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have said the previous childhood immunization schedule recommended by the CDC was safe and effective. The CDC recently changed the childhood immunization schedule, cutting the number of vaccines recommended for kids.
“I will be very eager to see whether the members of the health committee use this time to lift up concerns and to get Dr. Means’ perspective on the changes the Secretary has made to the vaccine system in America,” Besser said. “I’ll be interested to see if they ask Dr Means about her perspective on the changes that have taken place at CDC and the impact that these could have on health so that it’s clear coming in where she stands on the draconian cuts that the Secretary has made to our federal public health health system.”
Kennedy said on Monday he is “excited” for Casey Means’ confirmation hearing and that the health department has been waiting “a long time” for her to join the team.
“We’ve been waiting for a long time for Dr. Means to come on board,” Kennedy told ABC News on Monday at the department’s rare disease therapies event. “We are very, very excited about her coming on board. She has an extraordinary capacity to communicate to the American public — that is the function of the surgeon general.”
ABC News’ Youri Benadjaoud and Arthur Jones II contributed to this report.
