From Bloomberg: “One ALS drug made $400 million in sales for its maker. It doesn’t work. A cancer treatment brought in $500 million. That one turned out to have no effect on survival. A blood cancer medication made nearly $850 million before being withdrawn for two of its uses. That drug had been linked to patient deaths years prior.
All of them were allowed to be sold to Americans because of the US Food and Drug Administration’s drive to get new drugs to patients quickly — sometimes even before they’re done testing.
The agency has been under pressure to move faster, a dynamic that has roots in the AIDS crisis when patients were dying while waiting for new medications. But in the years since, it has evolved into an approval process that critics say is driving confusion and could be putting people at risk.
Drug companies are profiting, though. Since 2014, they’ve made at least $3.6 billion in global sales of medications that have either later been shown to be ineffective or had most or all of their uses withdrawn in the US, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
‘We get drugs faster and faster and know less and less about them and pay more and more,’ says Yale University public health professor Gregg Gonsalves, a former AIDS activist who was part of a group that urged the FDA to get quicker — but also more rigorous — in the 1990s.
Patient groups that are now pushing for speedy approvals took the wrong lessons from the HIV crisis, he said. ‘The idea is not to have more drugs. It is to have drugs that work.'”
***
Back to Around the Web
