Makary, the current FDA commissioner, is a surgeon and was a professor of health policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He initially voiced support for stay-at-home orders during the pandemic but later changed his mind. He has written a book arguing that drug regulators need to raise the bar of evidence for drug approvals. Makary and Prasad published their “priorities for a new FDA” in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday. “In some ways, it is absolutely a failure,” says Christopher Robertson, a professor of health law at Boston University.