To save seniors lives, Trump must stomp on this deadly anti-vax call

Does President Donald Trump know that one of his top regulators is in the process of killing hundreds, maybe thousands, of senior citizens?Hundreds of thousands of Americans are hospitalized for flu each year; tens of thousands die from it — and drug bureaucrat Dr.Vinay Prasad looks determined to maximize the death toll, which is always mainly seniors.That is, Prasad — who heads the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research — is blocking what should be the last stage of approval for a vaccine that actually targets this year’s most likely flu strain in the United States.(It should be available in Canada, so you might want to plan a trip there this fall.)The jab Americans will be able to get targets other strains, which may dominate elsewhere around the globe.It’s impossible to say how many US lives this decision will cost, but the rough math is inescapable: Prasad’s intervention is deadly.So why did he do it?His stated reason is blatantly ridiculous, plainly ginned up because he doesn’t dare ’fess up to his real motive.More detail: Prasad recently overruled career staff and longstanding practice to simply refuse to OK a final review of Moderna’s new flu vaccine — a review that amounts to basically just checking that the company made no paperwork mistakes in its Phase Three trials of the jab’s efficacy.Initial results from the trial with 41,000 participants (half getting the standard jab, half Moderna’s) showed the vaccine to be 27% more effective at preventing death, 49% better at preventing hospitalization.Prasad, completely out of the blue, claimed the control group should’ve instead gotten a “high-dose” vaccine — arbitrarily inventing a new standard that makes no sense at all; FDA staff had signed off on the protocol Moderna used in advance of the trial.What might be his real reason? It could be RFK Jr.’s hostility to all vaccines; it could be paranoia against MRNA jabs — which have a bad ra...