The expert who kept eye drops from blinding you was fired yesterday (2 April 2025)

Summary

If you’ve ever used eye drops that didn’t blind you, thank Dr. Timothy J. Pohlhaus. As of yesterday, he’s gone.

And if you’ve ever been injected with a sterile drug that helped heal you instead of killing you, you have relied on the services of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Manufacturing Quality, where Pohlhaus worked for 15 years and was a senior policy adviser.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency terminated thousands of experienced public health professionals in an April Fools’ Day massacre. We’re all about to pay the price, writes Katherine Eban in this Vanity Fair article.