The Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator has resigned after being accused of soliciting a bribe and tanking a company’s stock as part of an alleged revenge plot against a former colleague.
Dr. George Tidmarsh, who led the FDA’s drug division, was accused in a lawsuit Sunday of retaliating against pharmaceutical investor Kevin Tang starting in 2019, when Tang asked him to resign as CEO from La Jolla Pharmaceutical, where Tang was the board chair.
Tidmarsh, however, says he was ousted because he raised concerns last week about a new program to rapidly approve new drugs, The New York Times reported.
The FDA falls within the purview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, which has been plagued with scandal since the one-time anti-vaccine crusader took the helm in February.
Tidmarsh was placed on administrative leave on Friday and resigned Sunday, the same day the lawsuit was filed, an HHS spokesperson told the Times. As of Sunday evening, Tidmarsh maintained he was still on administrative leave, the paper reported.
For years, Tidmarsh allegedly sent threatening messages to Tang, who also served on the boards of two other pharmaceuticals companies: American Laboratories Holdings, LLC, and Aurinia Pharmaceuticals, according to Sunday’s lawsuit.
After he was hired by the FDA commissioner in July, Tidmarsh allegedly tried to solicit a bribe from Tang and tried to pull a product from the market produced by American Laboratories.
In September, Tidmarsh wrote a LinkedIn post criticizing an FDA-approved kidney drug produced by Aurinia, which brought the lawsuit.
The drug, voclosporin, had “not been shown to provide a direct clinical benefit for patients,” Tidmarsh wrote. It was a highly unusual move for a government official, according to The Wall Street Journal. The FDA approval process had found that the drug trials had shown a “clinically meaningful benefit.”
After the post was published, Aurinia’s stock dropped by 20 percent within a few hours, wiping out more than $350 million in market value, according to the suit, though it later recovered. Tidmarsh later took down the post and said he had been speaking in a personal capacity.
In a statement to the Journal, Tidmarsh’s lawyer denied that his client had solicited a bribe from Tang.
HHS was not named in Aurinia’s lawsuit. The department placed Tidmarsh on leave “after the office of the general counsel and the office of the inspector general were notified of serious concerns about his personal conduct,” the HHS spokesperson told the Times.
Tidmarsh, however, told the newspaper that he hadn’t thought about Tang since joining the FDA, despite Aurinia’s complaint showing that he sent Tang email messages as recently as December 2024.
“He was irrelevant to me,” Tidmarsh told the Times.
He said he had tried to get the American Laboratories drug pulled because it was marketed without FDA approval and that the FDA’s chief medical and scientific officer, Dr. Vinay Prasad, had created a “toxic environment.”
Prasad, a close Kennedy ally who has emerged as a prominent critic of the COVID-19 vaccine, was forced out and then rehired after the far-right activist Laura Loomer unearthed his old social media posts praising Democratic lawmakers.
In mid-October, the FDA announced it would approve a slate of drugs in record time, which Tidmarsh told the Times he objected to on legal grounds.
He said the issue came to a head last week when officials met to make the agency’s first official decision under the new program. Instead of a months-long review with formal opportunities for debate among the FDA’s scientists, officials were supposed to decide in a day.
The Daily Beast has reached out to HHS and Tidmarsh’s lawyer for comment.
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