A Fatter, Dumber FDA, Unreformed

The House has just passed a bill to increase the size and expense of the federal Food and Drug Administration. The bill would impose new costs on drug makers that produce life-saving drugs.

The bill would make it harder for knowledgeable people to sit on FDA advisory boards by excluding more people because of their “conflicts of interest.”

The smarter a scientist is, the more likely she is to end up with benefactors and clients, and thus, “conflicts of interest.” Incompetent scientists for whom government employment is a life support system seldom have “conflicts of interest.”

The bill would do nothing to prevent the FDA from dragging its feet in approving life-saving drugs. The Times notes that the FDA was under fire last week for denying prostate cancer sufferers access to potentially life-saving medicine.

I have written previously about the FDA’s denying terminally-ill people access to potentially life-saving experimental drugs, even when the experimental drug has passed an initial safety review, and the terminally ill patient will surely die if denied access to the drug. The FDA justifies this, perversely, based on “safety” concerns.