Katy, I appreciate your loyalty to Dr. Makary and I truly believe he wanted to reform a broken system. But as someone from the Huntington’s disease community, I need people to understand why so many families were deeply hurt by how we were characterized.
We were not “Big Pharma.” We were not paid lobbyists. We were families drowning in generational trauma because our loved ones are dying from one of the cruelest neurodegenerative diseases on earth.
And the hardest part? While many Huntington’s families, caregivers, and at-risk individuals were literally on Capitol Hill during Rare Disease Week meeting with lawmakers after paying our own way there, Dr. Makary was simultaneously speaking to reporters about “moneyed interests” and outside pressure surrounding AMT-130.
There were no corporate-funded advocacy campaigns behind us. Just families carrying decades of trauma, grief, and fear into congressional offices because we are terrified of running out of time. Nearly 50,000 signatures were gathered from HD families, grassroots advocates, caregivers, and supporters demanding urgency for AMT-130, and those petitions were hand-delivered directly to the FDA by members of the Huntington’s community themselves. Over 10,000 emails were also sent to FDA and members of Congress. Nobody paid us to do that. Fear did. Love did. Desperation did.
At the 2024 EL-PFDD meeting in Maryland, FDA sat across from more than 100 HD families and listened as we described watching parents, grandparents, siblings, and children slowly lose movement, speech, cognition, personality, and independence. People in those rooms cried with us. We were told urgency mattered.
Soon after we learned FDA aligned with uniQure on an accelerated pathway, many of us finally felt hope for the first time in our lives.
So yes, families became loud. Because this disease does not wait.
What also deeply damaged trust was watching Dr. Vinay Prasad speak anonymously to reporters about an active therapy. If someone cannot publicly face the people they serve during moments of crisis and scrutiny, they should not be leading CBER.
Leadership requires courage, transparency, and accountability. This is especially true in rare disease communities where every delay carries irreversible consequences.
Many of us respected Dr. Prasad intellectually. We respected his focus on scientific rigor. But from the patient/family side, much of what we experienced felt dismissive, detached, and at times unnecessarily combative toward a dying community simply asking to be heard.
And Dr. Makary protected that approach far too long.
The Huntington’s community is not asking for reckless science. FDA itself asked our community what level of risk we would accept, and nearly three-quarters of respondents said they would accept treatment risks for even a chance at 5 years without progression.
Because this disease does not wait for “perfect data.”
For families living with Huntington’s, every year means more neurons lost, more memories erased, more independence gone, and more people disappearing in front of us. AMT-130 showed the possibility of dramatically slowing that decline over three years. That is time with children. That is dignity. That is life itself.
We are not a lobbying machine. We are human beings trying to stop generations of suffering from continuing.
💙💜
#Huntingtonsdisease