The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. HEALTH
The Food and Drug Administration announces a plan to speed up access to new, experimental drugs.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: General Counsel Sam Kazman on how the FDA slows medical innovation:
“Advances in medicine may require difficult scientific breakthroughs. Advances in medical regulatory policy might only require the reframing of basic questions, such as the role of FDA. FDA’s veto power over new therapies has a gruesome side effect: Every approval of a new life-saving drug or device means that people died waiting for that approval to be issued.”
2. POLITICS
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) discusses the tension between controlling spending and long term regulatory reform.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews on the growing costs of the federal regulatory state:
“In the Fiscal Year 2006 federal budget, President Bush proposed $2.77 trillion in discretionary, entitlement, and interest spending. Although those costs fully express the on-budget scope of the federal government, there is considerably more to the government’s reach than the sum of the taxes sent to Washington. Federal environmental, safety and health, and economic regulations cost hundreds of billions of dollars every year—on top of official federal outlays.”
3. INTERNATIONAL
The Gates Foundation announces a $83.5 million initiative to combat malaria, while the President and First Lady host the White House Summit on Malaria.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Economic Policy Fellow John Berlau on misleading efforts to link malaria cases with global warming:
“But when it comes to global warming and malaria, many of the ‘diehard skeptics’ who are ‘out of step’ with Annan and the media are prominent scientists who have produced studies published by the U.N.’s own World Health Organization. Research papers from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show not only that global warming is not to blame for malaria in Nairobi and the highlands, but that flawed environmental policies are the real culprit. We indeed should cry for Kenya, but our tears need to be directed at the right target. In Kenya and elsewhere, it is modern environmentalism that is ‘producing a sicker world.’ And it is now primarily the U.N. and Europe that are blocking Kenya from using the best tool to fight her malarial epidemics. That tool is the ‘environmentally incorrect’ insecticide DDT.”