Fights over vaccine standards have created an unbridgeable divide within HHS, officials said, but White House is unlikely to approve any changes until after the election.
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An angry Azar floats plans to oust FDA’s Hahn
Fights over vaccine standards have created an unbridgeable divide within HHS, officials said, but White House is unlikely to approve any changes until after the election.
Infuriated by the FDA’s defiance in a showdown over the Trump administration’s standards for authorizing a coronavirus vaccine, health secretary Alex Azar has spent recent weeks openly plotting the ouster of FDA chief Stephen Hahn.
Azar has vented to allies within the Health and Human Services Department about his unhappiness with the top official in charge of the vaccine process, and discussed the prospect of seeking White House permission to remove him, a half-dozen current and former administration officials said.
During some of those conversations, he’s gone as far as to float potential replacements for Hahn, said one current and two former administration officials familiar with the talks, identifying HHS testing czar Brett Giroir and a pair of career civil servants – FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy and longtime regulator Janet Woodcock – as prime candidates to step in as acting commissioner should Hahn be removed.
The discussions come amid deep frustration with Hahn over his insistence that a Covid-19 vaccine meet stricter-than-normal safety standards — a contentious decision that rendered it impossible for President Donald Trump to fulfill his oft-expressed desire for a vaccine just before Election Day.
Earlier this month, Hahn ended a lengthy standoff over the rules under which the FDA would grant emergency authorization for a vaccine by flouting the White House and ordering their publication. The move won widespread praise from the nation’s public health community.
But it angered Azar and others who viewed it as the latest in a recent pattern of Hahn breaking with the broader administration in an effort to bolster his own reputation, current and former officials said.
White House officials are unlikely to greenlight Hahn’s firing in the next two weeks despite their own reservations about him, five current and former administration officials said, over concerns about the optics of removing an FDA commissioner soon after his agency ruled out a pre-election vaccine.
Still, Hahn — who has endured a turbulent 10-month run — is viewed as a long-shot to return if Trump wins a second term. In a sign of awareness of his rocky standing, Hahn has largely avoided traveling to the White House of late, two administration officials said, preferring to call in to its coronavirus task force meetings.
In the meantime, the last few weeks have marked a new low point in an extraordinary feud between Azar’s health department and its subordinates at the FDA that has played out in the press and behind the scenes during the nation’s worst pandemic in 100 years.
That months-long battle has disrupted efforts to combat the virus by slowing down internal decision-making and sowing confusion, according to 10 current and former administration officials and others with knowledge of the situation. It’s decimated morale and, at various times, forced the White House to intervene.
And at a time when the administration is fighting to develop the therapeutics and vaccines that can curb a disease killing 800 Americans a day, the Azar-Hahn feud has effectively severed the link between the two men at the center of that high-stakes effort.
“It’s broken,” one senior administration official said of the relationship between Azar and Hahn. “There is minimal interaction.”
In response to a series of questions, HHS and FDA spokespeople separately insisted that Azar and Hahn maintain a good relationship and speak regularly. An HHS spokesperson did not directly address whether Azar has discussed firing Hahn, and declined to say whether he still had confidence in his FDA commissioner, citing policy against conducting “personnel reviews in the press.”
But six administration officials said the disintegration of the relationship between Azar and Hahn is the result of a series of disagreements, missteps and slights that began within weeks of Hahn’s arrival in Washington last December and steadily built to a boiling point. A radiation oncologist and longtime academic with no political experience, Hahn was thrust into the middle of a pandemic response just a month after becoming the agency’s latest leader — and the fourth in 2019 alone, after former commissioner Scott Gottlieb and acting heads Ned Sharpless and Giroir.
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