From The Lever. “The pharmaceutical industry spent decades manipulating the country’s top drug regulator into rubber-stamping its products. The Trump administration is making matters worse.
A Lever review of all drugs approved by the FDA over a 10-year period found that the majority — 73 percent — were allowed on the market without solid evidence that they work. Far from withholding lifesaving drugs, as patient advocates and politicians have charged, the FDA has been all too willing to approve questionable treatments on the basis of flimsy scientific evidence.
Why has the FDA, once an international beacon of gold-standard regulation, failed so spectacularly? The answer lies with the $618 billion drug industry, which has used its vast resources to influence not only the agency but every stakeholder involved in the drug-approval process, from patients to doctors to universities to medical journals to Congress. ”
