Originally posted by: bamacre
Originally posted by: Xavier434
Originally posted by: bamacre
Originally posted by: Xavier434
Originally posted by: bamacre
Originally posted by: Xavier434
Sorry pal, but as I already stated, I would much rather have the government regulate certain products like medicine so that when my kid is sick I don't have to walk down the pharmacy isle fearing that one of the products I buy for him might make him a lot worse and maybe even put him in the hospital.
It happens all the time.
And the FDA isn't the only organization that could do this job. If the government wasn't doing it, someone else would. And they'd most likely do a better job of it. If not, another organization would simply do it.
I'd rather leave it in the hands of the government.
Yeah, because they are so effective and efficient.
See, that is where you and I share a different opinion. I don't believe that everything in government is ineffective and inefficient. In the case of orgs like the FDA, it depends on the product we are talking about like I keep mentioning post after post. Personally, I don't have any problems with the medicines. I live without fear that my medicines have a very low chance of hurting me or my loved ones when I buy them. I am satisfied with the quality and the reason I am satisfied is because the FDA does a good job most of the time when it comes to my medicines. I am generally happy with most of my products and services for that matter.
Why would I want to completely revamp the system considering the number of unknowns and risks involved if we did when I am mostly satisfied now? I recognize that there are flaws but they are not nearly large enough to convince me that we should privatize the whole thing. That is lunacy imo.
So stories like this one...
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c...6_apfdadissidents.html
... don't bother you?
You guys seem to be talking past each other.
Xavier is right that the answer is to fix the FDA, not replace it with privatization.
Bamacre is right that his article shows a terrible problem -namely, the result of the leadership being the party whose #1 donor industry is the drug industry and whose party phislophy is to give the private wealthy what they want and not to represent the public interest against those private wealthy, as the FDA was designed to do.
That's what leads to the industry virtually picking its own overseers, the regulators coming from the drug industry lobbyist ranks, the fox guarding the henhouse.
Contrast the two following stories:
1960, a former pharmacology professor, Frances Kelsey - not an industry person - is on her first FDA drug review. The drug company told her it was a routiine sedative, Thalidomide, that had been sold in Germany for years, nothing to worry about. It was being prescribed to thousands of pregnant women in Europe. Kelsey saw anomolies in the test data that led her to withhold approval. The company pushed, but she resisted; by the following year, thousands of babies with deformed limbs were being born in Europe to mothers who had taken the drug. Sadly, because the company had given a million free samples to US doctors in the meantime who had given them to patients without warnings, there were many such children born here as well. She was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by President Kennedy for her efforts. (This incident led to a new law prohibitng such free samples of unapproved drugs the next year by the Democratic administration and Congress).
1965, Aspartame was invented accidentally by a chemist (who licked his thumb and it tasted sweet). The approval process had such bad data submitted to the FDA, they not only did not approve it but at one point planned criminal charges against the company. Studies showed it created brain tumors in mice (presumably at very high amounts).
In 1977, Republicans lost the White House, and President Ford's former chief of staff left to head drug company Searly, who owned Aspartame. He sent it back for approval in 1980; the FDA created an independant board to review the product, and decided not to approve it. But by 1981, Reagan was in office, and his new FDA commissioner overruled the FDA's independant commission and approved the product. Shortly after, the commissioner left the FDA to work for Searle's PR firm.
The CEO of Searle who had pushed the product through to approval: Donald Rumsfeld.
Now, whatever you think of the safety of Aspartame, there are clear problems with the appearance of corruption with that process.
Under Bush, to keep the FDA ineffective, much of the time he hasn't even appointed a full-time commissioner.
There's a lot more - for example, the Republicans, with their top donors the drug industry, make the corrupt Medicare bill that prohibited Medicare from negotiating the price of drugs and was a vehicle for giving the industry hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, followed the suggestion of a very similar bill suggested by right-wing/Libertarian think tank 'Cato Institute' - who receives funding from the drug industry. The Congressman who led the effort to pass the bill left just after it passed to a nice position in the drug industry.
We need to fix the corruption, not get rid of the institutions created to represent the public interest against the private sector just because corrupt leaders are corrupt.