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Inside the New FDA: What Medical Professionals Need to Know
Session Overview
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration plays a critical role in shaping the landscape of clinical care — from drug approvals and device regulation to food safety and public health guidance. But recent internal changes, leadership shifts, and workforce reductions have left many in the medical community questioning what comes next.
This webinar offers a rare, candid discussion with two former FDA insiders who bring both high-level policy insight and on-the-ground perspective.
- Dr. Peter Lurie, current President of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), and former Associate Commissioner of Public Health Strategy and Analysis at the FDA will analyze the strategic direction of the agency, with implications for drug approvals, transparency, and public health strategy.
- Vera Rosenthal, a former FDA health communications specialist impacted by the agency’s “reduction in force”, will share frontline insights into how these shifts are affecting internal capacity, scientific messaging, and regulatory clarity.
CME Objectives
- Identify the implications of FDA restructuring on drug and device review timelines.
- Understand potential changes in public health guidance and regulatory enforcement.
- Learn how medical professionals can anticipate and respond to upcoming policy and regulatory changes at the FDA.
How to Attend
📅 Date: Thursday, August 28, 2025
🕗 Time: 8:00 – 9:00 PM ET
📍 Location: Live Stream Event
🔗 Registration: Click here to register
About the Advocacy Grand Rounds
The purpose of our Advocacy Grand Rounds series is to provide physicians, medical trainees, and other health care professionals in our network with monthly trainings and courses to supplement their advocacy efforts. Members have the opportunity to obtain CME credits for specially accredited 1-hour events.
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from leaders in healthcare advocacy and to begin integrating electoral advocacy into your professional journey!
Speaker: Peter Lurie, MD, MPH
Dr. Peter Lurie is the president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Previously, Lurie was the Associate Commissioner for Public Health Strategy and Analysis at the Food and Drug Administration, where he worked on antimicrobial resistance, transparency, caffeinated beverages, arsenic in rice, fish consumption by pregnant and nursing women, expanded access to investigational drugs, and prescription drug abuse. Prior to that, he was Deputy Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, where he addressed drug and device issues, coauthored the organization’s Worst Pills, Best Pills consumer guide to medications, and led efforts to reduce worker exposure to hexavalent chromium and beryllium. Earlier, as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Michigan, he studied needle exchange programs, ethical aspects of mother-to-infant HIV transmission studies, and other HIV policy issues domestically and abroad.
Speaker: Vera Rosenthal
Vera Rosenthal is a former health communications specialist at the Food and Drug Administration. Rosenthal had worked at the FDA since 2015 and started as a communications specialist in 2020, initially focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, she has largely focused on compounding of the popular GLP-1 medications for diabetes and obesity, which have seen shortages in recent months because of high demand. Rosenthal also worked on health fraud cases, which she said is particularly an issue with supplements that contain active ingredients that would require them to go through a drug approval process. Previously she was a program analyst at the Agency for Health Research and Quality and was a Health Communications Fellow at the National Cancer Institute.