Cap and Trade Debate, FDA’s Record on Cancer Drugs and Taxing Soda
The release of Treasury Department memos on the cost of a cap and trade system for greenhouse gas emissions creates a furor.
Critics assail Richard Pazdur, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s cancer drug office, for slowing down the approval process for experimental new treatments.
Public health activists lobby for a tax on soda.
Listen to LibertyWeek, the CEI podcast, here.
1. ENVIRONMENT
The release of Treasury Department memos on the cost of a cap and trade system for greenhouse gas emissions creates a furor.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Iain Murray on the likely effects of restricting energy use:
“…there’s no guarantee that a reduction in American emissions will amount to a reduction in global emissions. We have seen the response to European cap-and-trade schemes being the relocation of facilities to other jurisdictions. If so, the effective foreign aid program of Waxman-Markey might actually be a loss of American jobs to be replaced by developing world jobs, with no emissions reduction at all. That would be very generous of us, but not quite what the authors of this study have in mind.”
2. HEALTH
Critics assail Richard Pazdur, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s cancer drug office, for slowing down the approval process for experimental new treatments.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Gregory Conko on one of the drugs Pazdur is accused of derailing:
“Provenge works like a vaccine to help a patient’s immune system fight off prostate cancer, a disease with few other available treatments. The independent panel of scientific experts that advises the agency on new oncology drug approvals unanimously agreed that Provenge was safe, and voted 13 to 4 that it was effective enough for approval, but the agency demanded additional testing before it would approve the drug. In one trial, 34 percent of patients receiving the drug were alive three years after treatment, compared to just 11 percent of patients receiving the placebo.”
3. CONSUMER
Public health activists lobby for a tax on soda.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Risk and Environmental Policy Angela Logomasini on why this is a bad idea:
“Nanny statists are, apparently, equal opportunity hacks. Activists on the left and their legislative team players are not only going after the bottled water ‘sin industry.’ They are also increasing the pressure for regulations on other beverages, seeking to slap a federal 3 cent tax on beverages containing sugar. Where will it end?…We live in a free society in which individuals should be responsible for themselves. And who seriously believes that 3 cents is going to matter a hill of beans? However, it will aggregate into a good chunk of change to enrich government bureaucrats who will probably do lots more stupid and possibly evil things.”
Listen to LibertyWeek, the CEI podcast, here.