Since Dr. Vinay Prasad’s appointment as a key political voice within FDA, the tone of U.S. biotech policy has shifted from enabling innovation to second-guessing it. Alongside figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who continues to elevate anti-vaccine rhetoric and cast doubt on long-settled scientific questions from his perch at the Department of Health and Human Services, Prasad is eroding the regulatory integrity that has for so long given America an edge in medical technology.
The consequences of this decline are unfolding in real time. According to Fierce Biotech’s 2025 Layoff Tracker, U.S.-based biotech companies have experienced a sharp and sustained wave of job losses. In just the first six months of 2025, the industry saw over 128 separate layoffs, already outpacing the total layoffs for all of 2024. Far from being isolated restructurings, these cutbacks reflect a systemic cooling of investor interest and regulatory confidence in the sector.
While the U.S. reevaluates its scientific foundations, China is forging ahead. Over the past five years, Beijing has invested billions in biotech infrastructure, talent repatriation programs, and regulatory reform to expedite approvals.
Say what you will about the origins of COVID-19, but it’s notable that the pandemic led to a massive slowdown in the U.S. and a ramp-up within China.
Chinese biotech IPOs are gaining global traction, and international collaborations are increasingly flowing eastward. If the U.S. does not reassert its leadership through policy clarity and scientific support, it risks becoming a secondary player in an arena it once dominated.
The slowdown looks a lot like when biotech firm Sarepta Therapeutics halted the deliveries of a gene therapy after relabeling pressure from the FDA, because one patient died during a clinical trial from an unrelated illness.
The growing embrace of the European “precautionary principle”, which treats innovation as inherently risky until proven safe beyond all doubt, poses a direct threat to the American biotech engine that drives medical breakthroughs.
This mindset is becoming mainstream in the U.S. under the influence of figures like Prasad and RFK Jr. Their shared skepticism toward new drug approvals reflects a deeper philosophical shift from viewing science as a solution to viewing it as a threat.
Prasad has already suggested that certain palliative treatments for cancer patients should not have been approved because he sees too little value in them. This is strange, because the FDA does not set the prices of drugs or assess value. Their lane is to weigh safety for patients.
This shift has real consequences for patients. Politicians tend to focus only on lowering the prices of well-established medications, but overlook the fact that for countless diseases, there remains no treatment at all.
For patients with ALS, glioblastoma, or rare genetic disorders, the debate is about survival, not pricing. Every policy that slows down R&D, hampers clinical trials, or chokes off funding is a policy with a human cost.
Instead of making it faster and less costly to bring new innovative drugs to the market, the cues the biotech community gets from Prasad are to slow down. Investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers take their cues from regulatory tone, and right now the tone in the U.S. is one of skepticism.
America must recommit to being the world’s most fertile ground for medical discovery. Science, when responsibly governed and robustly funded, saves lives. Caution has its place, but when caution becomes paralysis, patients literally suffer. Nothing about that helps to “make America great”. A better aim is for the US to remain a global hub for medical innovation where delivering cures and effective new treatments is the top priority.
