If you’ve ever used eye drops that didn’t blind you, thank Dr. Timothy J. Pohlhaus. As of yesterday, he’s gone.

And if you’ve ever been injected with a sterile drug that helped heal you instead of killing you, you have relied on the services of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Manufacturing Quality, where Pohlhaus worked for 15 years and was a senior policy adviser.

Pohlhaus was one of the FDA’s few leading experts on sterile manufacturing for drugs. “I work to ensure that when people get a purportedly sterile drug product, that it is actually sterile”—as in, free of any contaminant, toxic or otherwise—Pohlhaus told VF.

He helped write the policies that guided manufacturers, worked to close loopholes that threatened safety, and trained the FDA’s investigators to uncover sterility failures at manufacturing plants scattered across the globe.

And he was among the thousands of employees at the FDA and other federal health agencies who were abruptly informed on the morning of April 1 that their services were no longer needed.

The slashing was so wide and deep that it can be hard to get a handle on just how much public health expertise was lost yesterday. The affected offices at the FDA may not be household names, but they perform critical work that protects every American and helps shape the regulatory decisions of manufacturers and foreign health agencies around the world, which rely on the FDA’s expertise.

The chief veterinary officer within the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Tristan Colonius, was fired. He had been working to help contain a bird flu outbreak currently burning through the nation’s dairy cows and threatening to spark a pandemic among humans. Also axed: critical expert analysts at the Detroit Medical Products Laboratory, which tests dietary supplements in response to consumer complaints and allegations of fraud.

And though the nation’s new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has pledged radical transparency, all of the roughly two dozen employees at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention division that handled freedom of information requests—to provide journalists and researchers with agency documents—were informed that their jobs were being eliminated. The FDA’s entire media team was booted as well.

The cuts were so sweeping that former FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, who served under President Joe Biden, posted on LinkedIn, “The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. I believe that history will see this [as] a huge mistake.”

On March 28, just days before this unprecedented bloodletting, the biotech world was rocked by the news that Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, had been forced out by Kennedy Jr. with approval from the incoming FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary. Marks had helped drive COVID-19 vaccines across the finish line. It was perhaps the greatest achievement of Donald Trump’s first term—not that the MAGA and MAHA faithful see it that way.

Marks’s pointed resignation letter stoked fears that Kennedy Jr., a longtime antagonist of childhood vaccinations, plans to sow greater public doubt about the safety of vaccines. As Marks wrote, “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.”

No one at the FDA replied to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. A White House spokesperson referred us to a Health and Human Services press release from March 27 that stated that the reduction of 10,000 employees across health agencies would consolidate HHS’s 28 divisions into 15 that would prioritize “ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

By 6 a.m. yesterday, a nightmarish scene was unfolding at the FDA’s White Oak campus as employees arrived. A security team working under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lined them up and checked their badges against a list.

Those targeted for elimination, including Pohlhaus, were then handed what are being called RIF (“reduction in force”) letters, with their jobs eliminated on the spot and in front of their colleagues. The scene was “brutal,” one FDA employee told Vanity Fair. “People were sobbing and crying like I never thought I would see. These pathetic lunatics chose April 1, as if this was a joke. People were being embarrassed in front of their coworkers and hand-delivered these notes of no-go.”

Relying on algorithms rather than real-world understanding of how the FDA operates, DOGE lopped off key arteries of the public health system, decimating divisions for everything from the approval of new drugs to the regulation of tobacco products. An HHS fact sheet said that no food and drug inspectors were cut. But frontline staff members—who accompanied them on inspections, helped analyze their findings, cleared their reports for public release, and brought unsafe manufacturers into legal compliance—were cut all around them. One source says inspections at overseas manufacturing plants have already been halted due to lack of staff to coordinate travel and arrange visas. The FDA has allegedly reached out to some RIF-ed staff to ask them to temporarily return to work so that inspectors already overseas are not stranded and upcoming inspections can proceed.

“The people making these decisions, they are clueless about what the FDA does,” says the FDA employee. Because Pohlhaus’s title had the word policy in it, did the DOGE team assume that he was nothing more than a disposable desk jockey? In reality, when investigators in the field confronted a potentially life-threatening contamination that compromised drug sterility, Pohlhaus was the person they would call. He’s the one who helped them gather evidence that could halt dangerous manufacturing or shut down a pipeline of compromised products.

Under current regulations, a registered facility can start selling purportedly sterile eye drops without having its manufacturing premises inspected first, as long as the products are sold over the counter without a prescription. In 2023 contaminated eye drops made in India and sold in the US led to severe infections that killed four Americans, blinded at least 14 people, and led to four others having their eyeballs surgically removed. Pohlhaus worked to get the products recalled and helped train manufacturers and FDA investigators to better understand the hazards.

According to David Jaworski, a former FDA microbiologist and current senior adviser to the Parenteral Drug Association, the work Pohlhaus did “takes special training. You can’t just say that you’re going to make a sterile aseptic product without having the knowledge of how contamination takes place. It’s really critical to understand the biological nature of microorganisms.”

As of yesterday, six out of eight members of Pohlhaus’s team were cut. They were the ones responsible for the intense review of some of the worst manufacturing lapses, including those involving sterility failure. “When you hear the terrible things on the news,” he says, “that’s us.”

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