Good-bye to My Pal, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb

Well, shoot.

“The FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced his unexpected resignation on Tuesday, in a letter the FDA tweeted. The reasons are unclear, but it leaves a lot of people extremely disappointed, myself among them. (He’s been commuting to D.C. from Connecticut and says he misses his wife and young family.)

Since his appointment in May of 2017, Gottlieb has earned wide bipartisan support as a public-health advocate (also unexpected, given his previous ties to the pharmaceutical industry), due in large part to his efforts to curb the opioid epidemic, which he told CNN last year was the “biggest crisis” facing the FDA. “Gottlieb has been shockingly good so far,” Stanford public policy expert Keith Humphreys told Vox. (However, Harvard professor and FDA-scrutinizer Daniel Carpenter said the “jury is still out” on Gottlieb’s legacy, in an interview with STAT.)”