In 2015, prior to leaving the agency, Hamburg took her own advice and appointed Robert Califf, MD, to serve as FDA Deputy Commissioner for Medical Products and Tobacco. Months later, Obama nominated Califf as FDA commissioner and all but four senators approved the nomination.
Now, proving the dearth of conflict-free government officials in the pharmaceutical space, President Biden has again nominated Califf who left in 2017, to be FDA commissioner.
How conflicted is Califf from drug maker money, making a mockery of any firewall between the FDA and those it is charged to regulate? According to disclosures in a November 20, 2013 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) opinion piece that Califf cowrote:
"Dr Califf receives research grants that partially support his salary from Amylin, Johnson & Johnson, Scios, Merck/Schering-Plough, Schering-Plough Research Institute, Novartis Pharma, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Aterovax, Bayer, Roche, and Lilly".Dr Califf also consults for TheHeart.org, Johnson & Johnson, Scios, Kowa Research Institute, Nile, Parkview, Orexigen Therapeutics, Pozen, WebMD, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, AstraZeneca, Bayer/Ortho-McNeil, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, Daiichi Sankyo, Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, Medtronic, Merck, Novartis, sanofi-aventis, XOMA, University of Florida, Pfizer, Roche, Servier International, DSI-Lilly, Janssen R&D, CV Sight, Regeneron, and Gambro"Dr Califf holds equity in Nitrox LLC, N30 Pharma, and Portola."
After leaving the FDA in 2017, Califf did a stint at Big Tech, becoming head of medical strategy at Google parent company Alphabet Inc. (Thomas Insel, MD, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health , also joined Big Tech, the Life Science division of Google X, now called Verily Life Sciences, upon leaving government.) The cozy relationship between Big Tech and drug makers has led to censorship, many charge.
While at Duke university, Califf presided over a subsequently-discredited drug trial of the blood thinner Xarelto. A fabricated data scandal related to experimental cancer treatments at Duke under Califf's watch was featured on Sixty Minutes.
Appearing on PBS he said, "Many of us consult with the pharmaceutical industry, which I think is a very good thing. They need ideas and then the decision about what they do is really up to the person who is funding the study."
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