President Nominates A Committed Believer To Lead The Agency Built On Waiting For The Evidence

WASHINGTON—The president has nominated Dr. Heidi Overton to run the Food and Drug Administration, an agency whose entire function is to withhold judgment until the evidence is in, and whose nominee is known chiefly for reaching her judgments early.

Overton is a White House domestic policy official who briefs the president on health questions. She is also an abortion opponent who called the end of Roe a huge victory, and before joining the administration she was chief policy officer at a conservative think tank that pressed the FDA to tighten access to abortion medication. Her views are not a secret, which is the point of describing them.

Three weeks ago she stood at the signing of an executive order titled Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations, which cut the list of universally recommended shots from 17 to 11 and split the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine into three separate ones. The order arrived with no new scientific evidence and instructions for the Justice Department to sue states that require the vaccines. Calling a reduction a gold standard, and announcing it rather than showing it, is the house style the agency would inherit.

This is the tension in the nomination. The FDA clears a drug when the data crosses a bar. A conviction crosses the bar in advance and waits for the data to catch up. The agency’s ongoing review of abortion medication now sits with someone who has already told the country how she would like it to come out.

The choice goes to the Senate, which will decide whether the office that exists to say wait should be held by someone who has already decided. The childhood schedule, in the meantime, is shorter than it was in July, for reasons that were declared and not demonstrated.