Lenzer: An open letter to doctors who are joining the Trump train

I first met Jeanne Lenzer and her colleague, Shannon Brownlee, in Washington DC at the Selling Sickness conference in 2013. I have very little respect for journalists in general and have explained why in my articles and books. But these two women are remarkable exceptions, and I have often quoted their work.

Shannon invited some of the meeting participants to her home for supper. It was one of the most memorable gatherings of famous people in a private home I have ever seen. There was a medical student there and I told him to watch carefully what would unfold during the evening and to remember it, as he might never again be in company with so many interesting people.

One of them was Sidney Wolfe, called the father of “research-based advocacy,” who died at 86 in 2024. Like the rest of us who were Shannon’s guests that evening, he had zero tolerance for bad drugs, shoddy devices, and all flavours of unethical behaviour.

Sidney partnered with Ralph Nader in Public Citizen, which announces that “Corporations have their lobbyists. The people need advocates too. That’s where we come in.”

Currently, Public Citizen has this announcement on its frontpage: “Taking on Trump,” with the explanation that “Trump represents the powerful, not the people.” Co-president Robert Weissman writes about Sidney:

“I think about Sid every day and miss him every day. I reflect on how incensed he would be about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of yet another Alzheimer’s drug with modest benefits and substantial safety risks. He thought the FDA’s decision to approve the first of the recent Alzheimer’s drugs – following a heavily conflicted process during which the agency worked with the drugmaker to recalibrate studies in order to make them seem better – was the single worst decision the agency had made in his 50 years of monitoring FDA approvals. I know Sid would be pleased that we strongly opposed the approval and would insist that we maintain our focus on these poor-quality drugs and take every opportunity to educate consumers and push the FDA to revisit its decision.”

Jeanne and Shannon have written about these drugs, too, which, in my view, should never have been approved: “A new drug for Alzheimer’s disease is causing excitement despite excess deaths, missing safety data, questionable efficacy, and financial conflicts of interest among the ‘independent’ advisory panellists who recommended approval.”

Thanks for coffee, as we say in Denmark, when something is totally absurd and otherwordly.

Sidney learned quickly that government agencies are often in possession of clear, unequivocal evidence that drugs they have approved are harmful but they don’t use their authority to save lives and injuries unless there is outside pressure. Sidney’s book, “Worst Pills, Best Pills,” first published in 1988, sold nearly 2.5 million copies.

Sidney invited me to his home where I met with his wife, Suzanne. We had a lovely dinner to the tunes of Stan Getz playing Brazilian music on his saxophone with João Gilberto on guitar, and we kept the contact.

Sidney always spoke up when it was needed, without thinking about the possible consequences for himself, and Jeanne and Shannon do the same. It is very rare to meet such people but they include some of my best friends.

I am therefore honoured that Jeanne allowed me to republish a blog she published in December 2024, with an update in May 2026.

Lenzer: An open letter to doctors who are joining the Trump train

Dear Colleagues,

I won’t name names. But I’m addressing the doctors I’ve known and admired for many years who are now being romanced by Team Trump. I have quoted you in medical journals and the lay press and we’ve often shared common cause in our support for rigorous science and getting Big Pharma money and influence out of healthcare and out of the drug approval process.

But now you have joined the Trump train. A couple of you have been named by Trump to positions of enormous power, others are taking lesser positions. I’ve spoken with some of you who assured me your only motivation is to help enact the reforms we’ve collectively wanted to see. I believe your motivation is good. But I think you’re making a terrible choice.

For those who will inevitably be tempted by offers the Trump team continues to make, here are two reasons why I object:

First, Trump’s modus operandi is to throw out fishing lines to people who hold ideas he wants to crush while simultaneously enlisting people who share his thirst for power and who will pay obeisance to him. He draws them all in with promises of positions of power and influence. In this way, Trump subdues some of his opposition and simultaneously creates factions among his followers who will be at each other’s throats, each side fighting to win Trump’s favor. This is a well-known feature of Trump’s appointments and is part of how he divides and conquers. Those individuals he appoints in order to subdue will eventually be fired and all internal opposition will be crushed. Such factions are already evident (and privately acknowledged) among Trump’s new Department of Health and Human Services appointees.

This characteristic Trump ploy to pander to people on both sides of any issue is demonstrated in his general actions and his healthcare plans. He claims, “I’m the least racist person in the world,” while simultaneously calling Mexican immigrants “drug dealers, criminals and rapists” and ginning up false claims that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. Similarly, Project 2025’s healthcare policies, now openly acknowledged as the official Trump plan, panders to those of us who want to get Big Pharma money out of FDA’s coffers while simultaneously issuing plans to slash public funding for all aspects of healthcare and allow market forces to determine who gets what when it comes to medicines and healthcare.

Trump is motivated by two things: power and money. To keep control, Trump is consistent in his attacks on any regulations that could rein in corporate profiteering. Trump says drug prices are high, and he might criticize the “bad science” at FDA – but what does Trump know of science? His Medicare and Medicaid appointee, Mehmet Oz, promoted hydroxychloroquine, a sham treatment, (in which he was invested) to treat covid along with many other crackpot promotions. RFK, Jr., who is right about somethings such as diet and exercise and even excessive numbers of vaccines, is an ideologue, not a scientist or a clinician; he opposed the measles vaccine, which contributed to numerous deaths in several countries, including Samoa, New Zealand, and the United States. Do you think either appointee will insist on stringent rules of science?

(Note added by Peter Gøtzsche on 12 June 2026: The measles outbreak in Samoa was not Kennedy’s fault. It occurred after two babies died because of incorrect preparation of the MMR vaccine, which caused the government to suspend vaccinations. And there is no established causal link either between recent measles deaths in New Zealand or the United States and Kennedy’s views on the measles vaccine).

On the other hand, Marty Makary, Trump’s nominee to head the FDA is a doctor I admire greatly, and I worked with him for a while on a project to increase scientific rigor at FDA and to get Big Pharma money out of the agency. However, let’s say that by some miracle, Makary is able to enforce better regulatory science at the FDA and he isn’t overruled by top-gun, RFK, Jr., one thing is certain: Big Pharma is not going to roll over. They will do what they have always done and done very successfully – they will lobby politicians in Congress, whose war chests they have filled with stunning amounts of money, and those same politicians will do what they have always done for the past five decades, they will bend to Big Pharma and strip any regulations that industry says are too “onerous” or expensive.

And dear colleagues, what of Project 2025’s rabid anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ positions? Will you uphold the rule to ban abortion medications and morning after pills? Will you uphold the “right” of doctors and other healthcare workers not to treat LGBTQ individuals as proposed in Project 2025? Will you back hospitals that refuse care for women as they hemorrhage from miscarriage leading some to their deaths? Will you oversee computer tracking of all women who miscarry as Project 2025 insists must be done?

But here is the second reason why I think joining the Trump train is a bad thing – for those of you I admire and who have enormous respect among your peers, it is precisely because you are honorable and decent that you should not lend your credibility, your name, your work to the oligarchy of the super-rich, and to what I believe is a fascist movement unfolding before our eyes.

If you think the f-word is too strong, hyperbolic even, recall what American reporter Dorothy Thompson wrote after she interviewed Hitler in 1931: She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” Thompson didn’t believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.

If you don’t recognize that as the same game plan Trump has openly admitted to, you haven’t been paying attention. He has made clear who he is and what his cause is. And joining the Trump train, even with the best of intentions, is part of how fascism succeeds.

It is happening here, and it’s our job to resist.

Jeanne Lenzer

UPDATE, May 25, 2026: A year-and-a-half after I penned the Open Letter above, things have changed in the ways I predicted. Interference with industry profits wasn’t tolerated. Two of you were given the boot. And far from improving science at the FDA, you ushered in policy changes incompatible with good science. Of the four fundamental criteria the FDA asserted as necessary to show drugs work, you dropped three: the requirement for concurrent controls (eliminating that requirement simultaneously drops the requirement for blinding as blinding is impossible without a concurrent control), and you dropped the requirement for replication. Since surrogate endpoints have already supplanted clinical outcomes in the majority of cases, that’s all four legs of a chair that have been pulled out. You said “biological plausibility” could provide a basis for the approval or drugs or biologics. Here I’ll just quote Steve Nissen, former chair of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, who said, “The road to hell is paved with biological plausibility.”

What I see is an agency that had poor scientific standards when two of you took on leadership roles at the FDA - an agency that had already been captured by industry.* and you leave behind an agency that is in chaos and now subject to even greater political and personal corruption and whimsy and that is now stripped of the few standards that were in place when you took office.

What a tragedy. Nothing can justify this.

Jeanne Lenzer, May 25, 2026

I include the references below because returning the FDA to its policies and practices of the pre-Trump era will only lead us back in a vicious cycle to the deep-seated problems that beset the agency and set it up for distrust.

Part I: The Deadly Secrets Behind “Breakthrough” Alzheimer’s Drugs

Part II: FDA Approved — And Ineffective

Part III: Science For Sale: How Drugmakers Captured The FDA.

The series is free (there is a free-wall - not a paywall in place, just use your email address - no credit card, nada!)

My comments

In the autumn of 2024, I warned in many tweets against voting for Trump because there were clear signs that he wanted to turn the United States into a fascist republic, dismantling democracy as much as he could. His public statements often echoed what Hitler and Mussolini had said in the 1930s.

In his first year as President for the second time, Trump succeeded to turn the rest of the world against him. To such a degree that we in Europe will have great difficulty regaining the trust we once had in the United States. It will take a whole generation to heal the wounds and overcome the immense harm Trump has caused due to his extreme thirst for power and admiration, and his total disrespect for the law, international treaties, and the sovereignty of other nations.

Trump is a total disaster, also for America. And his entourage of loyal people include some that behave as bullies like Trump himself does, also internationally, e.g. Vice-president Jay D Vance and Secretary of War Peter Hegseth. They are hugely embarrassing.

I shall say no more. Jeanne did it so eloquently. I shall only say that I opened a Substack account in January and have published five articles about Trump:

Gøtzsche PC. Trump’s grandiosity complex endangers the whole world. But he cannot be removed from office for reasons of insanity. Substack 2026;March 22.

Gøtzsche PC. Europe says no to helping the US, because Trump has no plan. Substack 2026;March 17.

Gøtzsche PC. Letter from Denmark about Donald Trump: The worst US President ever. Substack 2026;March 1.

Gøtzsche PC. Has Trump made the United States a fascist republic? Deeply concerned observers have noticed many similarities. Substack 2026;Feb 3.

Gøtzsche PC. In Greenlandic, MAGA means Make America Go Away. Trump’s grandiosity complex, lawlessness and narcissism have united the whole world against America. Substack 2026;Jan 30.