Trump is considering a radical to lead FDA. That’s dangerous for public health
By Ed Silverman,
STAT
| 12. 12. 2016
Imagine being prescribed a medicine when neither your doctor nor the manufacturer has any clue whether it will actually work — because the government never required it to be tested for effectiveness.
That’s not how things are done now, because federal law requires drugs to undergo clinical trial testing to gauge benefits and risks. But the incoming Trump administration may seek to undo a decades-old standard of evaluating drugs for effectiveness — to the detriment of every American who takes a prescription medicine.
One of two people being vetted as the next Food and Drug Administration commissioner gave a speech two years ago in which he suggested the agency require only safety testing for new drugs. After that, good luck.
Imagine being prescribed a medicine when neither your doctor nor the manufacturer has any clue whether it will actually work — because the government never required it to be tested for effectiveness.
That’s not how things are done now, because federal law requires drugs to undergo clinical trial testing to gauge benefits and risks. But the incoming Trump administration may seek to...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Isabelle Bartram
| 07.17.2024
Image by Kuzzat Altay from Unsplash
Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in China, are mainly located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has pursued an aggressive settlement policy in this region since 1949, with the percentage of Han Chinese in the region increasing from five to forty percent in the second half of the 20th century. Since 2014, the Uyghurs have been subject to persecution and re-education – various sources have estimated that at least one million...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 07.11.2024
Louise Perry’s recent article in The Spectator cautions against “The quiet return of eugenics,” a threat she locates in preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. The technology is billed as a way for parents undergoing IVF to select which embryo to implant based on information about each embryo’s genetic risk factors and traits. These reports, she says, give parents “a very full picture of the adult that embryo could become”––from their child’s risk of developing different diseases to their “likely...
