FDA to Big Pharma: The Peter Marks Pipeline

Updated

By Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards

As society moves forward from the deadly experimental mRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” rollout, a clear picture has emerged that requires clearheaded scrutiny. At the center of this unfolding smoke and mirrors narrative is Dr. Peter Marks, former director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). Once regarded as the chief architect of Operation Warp Speed’s vaccine approvals, Dr. Marks has now quietly transitioned to a top executive role at Eli Lilly—a pharmaceutical giant that stands to benefit from pandemic-era regulatory acceleration. 

Let’s pause right there for a moment. Clearly, thankful that Marks is no longer running CBER, why should we care what he does next? For starters, when a top regulator transitions into the pharmaceutical industry with little to no explanation, it makes sense to be suspicious. Indeed, Marks’ move to Eli Lilly raises serious questions about regulatory capture, accountability, and whether the public’s trust is being sacrificed for public gain. Given the corruption now revealed under Mark’s leadership, his recent move fully exposes the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they are tasked with overseeing, highlighting the obvious pattern. An October 8, 2025, thread on X posted by The Highwire with Del Bigtree lays out a troubling sequence of events, opening with a pointed statement:

“Dr. Peter Marks, the man who approved all the COVID-19 vaccines, just took a top job at Eli Lilly.”

What follows in the thread is a jaw-dropping paper trail, including emails and testimonies suggesting that while serious adverse events to the mRNA jabs were quietly acknowledged behind closed doors, the public-facing stance was dismissive. For example, in one internal email, Dr. Marks writes, “We have to figure out how to address this without causing panic.” Similarly, elsewhere, another revealing line stands out, where Marks declares, “The signal is real, but we can’t undermine vaccine confidence.” It is at this shameful pivot point where, undoubtedly, the priority under Marks’s leadership becomes protecting the utterly sinister COVID-19 “vaccine” program rather than the innocent souls unquestioningly receiving them. 

The thread also features testimony from Dr. Marks before Congress in which he stated: “We take safety seriously… there is no evidence of widespread harm.” But hold on. He stated this despite simultaneous internal disclosures that adverse injury reports post “vaccine” were rising and that the tools for reporting them (such as VAERS) were under strain. And now, as Marks assumes a powerful new role at Eli Lilly, these red-flags are difficult to ignore because we aren’t merely evaluating a career transition. We are witnessing the culmination of a structural failure, where regulatory capture—when a regulatory agency that’s supposed to serve the public interest instead starts acting in the interest of the industry it’s supposed to regulate—isn’t a conspiracy theory, but an observable, repeatable strategy. 

And Eli Lilly’s announcement backs up this failure. In October 2025, Eli Lilly advertised Dr. Peter Marks would become its Senior Vice President of Molecule Discovery and Head of Infectious Disease. The company praised Dr. Marks’ decades of regulatory experience and his role overseeing the FDA’s vaccine programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, as we’ve shared, before this recent move, in March 2025, Marks was pressured by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign from his role at the FDA. Marks responded to Kennedy with a scathing letter, accusing the Secretary of seeking “subservient confirmation of misinformation.” His dramatic departure now casts an even more suspicious shadow over his new role at a hugely profitable pharmaceutical company. 

Indeed, this is textbook “revolving door” behavior. How? By bringing in someone who understands the inner regulatory processes and whose future now depends on being navigated effectively. Of course, Eli Lilly states Marks’s employment as a strategic leadership hire, but the optics demand scrutiny. And, despite multiple announcements focused on Marks’s “value to pipeline acceleration” and “decades of service,” we don’t know (but should, for the sake of transparency) what Dr. Marks will be paid. Senior vice presidents at Big Pharma firms of a similar size to Eli Lilly’s can pocket a total annual compensation in the range of $3 to $7 million when factoring in salary, bonuses, equity, and stock options. 

We currently live in an era when public health policy and private industry are deeply entangled, and, unfortunately, the health and safety of the public no longer receives top billing. Make no mistake, it is on these dark and greedy stages where accountability and transparency must be front and center. Dr. Marks’s transition from FDA gatekeeper to pharmaceutical executive is incredibly dangerous unless clear disclosures and ethical safeguards are apparent. At the very least, the public deserves answers, such as, for example, “What restrictions—if any—are in place regarding his knowledge of FDA strategy?” Science requires trust. And trust requires transparency. Until we get both, this announcement remains unsettling.

 

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Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards

Tracy Beanz is an investigative journalist, Editor-in-Chief of UncoverDC, and host of the daily With Beanz podcast. She gained recognition for her in-depth coverage of the COVID-19 crisis, breaking major stories on the virus’s origin, timeline, and the bureaucratic corruption surrounding early treatment and the mRNA vaccine rollout. Tracy is also widely known for reporting on Murthy v. Missouri (Formerly Missouri v. Biden,) a landmark free speech case challenging government-imposed censorship of doctors and others who presented alternative viewpoints during the pandemic.