With Senator Rand Paul posting on social media that the DOJ has until May 11th to prosecute Anthony Fauci before the statute of limitations expires on COVID-related conduct, and with a former NIH official already indicted for concealing emails about potentially risky virus research, the question of accountability for public health failures during the pandemic is once again at the center of public debate.
Dr. Jeremy Levin, founder of Ovid Therapeutics, former president and CEO of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, and author of the forthcoming Biotech in the Balance: Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to argue that the distrust generated by COVID-era public health mismanagement is now threatening to dismantle one of America’s most critical strategic assets.
Levin said the distrust that exploded during COVID did not start there, but the pandemic accelerated it dramatically and the hangover persists in ways that are producing real damage. He said he actually edited a book in 2020 documenting how confused virtually every major institution was during that period, and acknowledged that much of the contradictory messaging came from genuine uncertainty about an unprecedented situation. What is harder to forgive, he said, are the authoritative pronouncements that were not factually grounded, delivered with a confidence that the underlying science did not support, and the subsequent failure of anyone in a position of responsibility to engage in the kind of transparent accounting that might begin to rebuild public trust. He said without some form of cathartic public reckoning in which prominent figures acknowledge specifically what they got wrong and why, the gap between the public health establishment and the American public will continue to widen.
The strategic stakes are high in ways that go well beyond any individual’s credibility, he argued. American biotech represents decades of government and private investment and has saved millions of patient years of life. If the industry is systematically dismantled by distrust-fueled policy responses, innovation does not disappear. It migrates. Clinical trials are already moving to China. Investment is following. China has spent years copying the American model of pharmaceutical and biotech development while making systematic improvements, and the window for maintaining American leadership in this sector is closing faster than most people appreciate. He compared the potential loss of biotech leadership to the already-realized loss of rare earth processing and solar panel manufacturing to China, and said he does not want to watch the same dynamic play out in medicine.
On FDA and CDC reform, Levin said he wants change and acknowledges that institutions can become sclerotic in ways that require intervention. His criticism of the current approach is about method rather than objective. He said the right analogy for reforming a critical regulatory institution is adding lanes to a bridge while keeping traffic moving, not dropping the bridge into the river and starting over. He said approximately ninety percent of the experienced scientific leadership at the FDA and CDC has departed over the past year, people who represented genuinely irreplaceable institutional knowledge about drug evaluation, safety monitoring, and public health infrastructure. He said this was done not out of malice but out of impatience for change, but the practical consequence is that the regulatory capacity needed to maintain American biotech leadership has been severely impaired at exactly the moment it needs to be strengthened to compete with China.
The conversation turned to pharmaceutical pricing, where Levin said the public conversation systematically misidentifies the source of the problem. Pharmacy Benefit Managers, the largely invisible intermediaries who negotiate between drug manufacturers and insurance companies, capture approximately fifty percent of drug price increases while bearing no responsibility for the research and development costs that justify initial pricing. He said PBMs began as genuine competition-promoting intermediaries among fifteen or sixteen firms competing to reduce costs, but over the past decade and a half the major insurance companies recognized their profit potential and acquired them, consolidating the industry to roughly five entities that now control coverage for nearly all Americans. He was emphatic that pharma companies do not own PBMs. Insurance companies do. His prescription was direct: eliminate PBMs entirely, require insurance companies to perform their actual function of covering patients when they are sick, allow genuinely innovative new drugs to be priced to reflect their development costs, and require manufacturers to convert drugs to generic pricing when their patent protection expires rather than using regulatory maneuvering to maintain artificial price floors.
On GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, which nearly one in five Americans are now taking, Levin offered a nuanced assessment that cut through both the enthusiasm and the alarm. The underlying science, he said, has been developing for thirty years and the results to date are genuinely impressive. But a consequence that many patients and even some prescribers underappreciate is that these drugs suppress appetite in ways that lead to muscle wasting alongside fat loss, meaning patients who do not maintain aggressive exercise regimens may end up lighter but physically weaker in ways that create their own health risks. He said the next generation of drugs in development is specifically targeting the muscle preservation problem, attempting to produce fat loss while protecting or even building lean mass, and said that when those drugs become available they will represent a genuinely transformative therapeutic advance. His larger point was that with nearly one in five Americans now taking these medications, a centralized data collection effort to accumulate and transparently publish the full body of real-world outcome data would give everyone, patients, prescribers, policymakers, and researchers, a hard rock understanding of long-term effects free from any single stakeholder’s influence.
He closed on an optimistic note about biotech innovation more broadly, pointing to recent advances in early detection of pancreatic cancer as an example of the kind of progress the industry is producing. He drew the parallel to certain genetic types of breast cancer that were effectively death sentences two decades ago and are now curable at detection rates approaching ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent when identified early through genetic screening. He said early detection in pancreatic cancer, one of the most lethal diagnoses in medicine, is following the same trajectory, and that this kind of progress is exactly what is at stake when distrust leads to the systematic dismantling of the institutions and the industry making it possible.