Six months without a day off, 24 death threats and a COVID-19 pandemic — the past three years of leading the TGA have been a tough test for Adjunct Professor John Skerritt. 

He is retiring this week after more than a decade at the TGA, where he dealt with the regulation of medicinal cannabis, an abandoned plan to merge the TGA with New Zealand’s Medsafe drug regulator and, of course, the rage surrounding the agency’s approval of COVID-19 vaccines.  

The latter became “pretty ugly” as anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists threatened to kill Professor Skerritt.

His other alleged crimes include the TGA’s decision to restrict prescribing of ivermectin to official indications, like scabies, rather than allowing it to be used as a wonder cure in the absence of any real evidence.