Virginia Republican Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin announced on Tuesday that his Medical Advisory Team will be led by Dr. Marty Makary, along with a panel of medical experts that include Nancy Agee, Kathy Gorman, Alan Levine, Dr. Bogdan Neughebaeur, and Anand Shah.
“I am proud to announce a group of experts from the medical and public health community that will be providing updates on the pandemic and advice on how to address its ongoing challenges,” Youngkin said in a statement.
“I have been receiving briefings about the coronavirus and Omicron variant regularly and we are going to stay on top of this. I recognize the severity of the virus and the significant loss that it has caused. Virginians should rest assured that we are monitoring this variant and doing everything we can to be smart about this. I will enter office ready to reopen Virginia, support our healthcare heroes, and protect the lives and livelihoods of Virginians,” he added.
Dr. Marty Makary is a surgical oncologist and chief of the Johns Hopkins Islet Transplant Center. He is a clinical lead for the Johns Hopkins Sibley Innovation Hub and serves as Executive Director of Improving Wisely, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project to lower health care costs in the U.S. by creating measures of appropriateness in health care, the statement noted.
Makary has also served as a contributor to Fox News as a critic regarding some of the statements by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
"We have not had good data to inform public policy." @MartyMakary sounds off as Dr. Fauci & CDC Director Dr. Walensky testify before the Senate on the US response to omicron @BillHemmer @DanaPerino pic.twitter.com/rhuXLTm5ST
— America's Newsroom (@AmericaNewsroom) January 11, 2022
Last month, Makary addressed a House hearing on Global COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts, pointing out that the federal government, despite spending $58 billion through the NIAID, NIH, and CDC, had not done even one study on natural immunity vis-à-vis COVID-19. The Daily Wire previously reported:
Makary, who studied epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he received a Masters Degree in Public Health before serving on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for 16 years, also blasted the push for giving young people booster vaccines, saying, “We have a modern-day McCarthyism if somebody asks a question about boosters in young people.”
Makary began by asserting, “I would like to personally ask you to consider new scientific data that tells us that some COVID policies have become too extreme, too rigid, and are no longer driven by clinical data. Take, for example, boosters in children who have already had COVID: when Pharma announced on Wednesday that they did a lab experiment that shows that boosters raise antibodies against Omicron without releasing the underlying scientific data, the CDC immediately urged everyone 16, and 17 years old to get a booster. Is this what we’ve come to? Pharma tells people what to do in a press release and the CDC just falls in line?”
“Meanwhile, Germany just reported that no healthy child five through 17 has ever died of COVID in the first 15 months of their pandemic, with nearly all of those children unvaccinated,” he continued. “The CDC has never told us if any COVID deaths in children have been in healthy children. … Now, I’m very pro-vaccine, I’ve been vaccinated, but we have a modern-day McCarthyism if somebody asks a question about boosters in young people. Remember, just 12 weeks ago, the FDA external experts voted against boosters for everybody by a 16-2 vote and for good reasons. But weeks after that vote the FDA made another internal push to ream through boosters for all, but this time they inexplicably did not convene their experts, their external experts; the CDC did the same.”