Tag: fda commissioner

Emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, released by WikiLeaks last week, show that her campaign weighed whether or not to attack Robert Califf for being...

Pharmalot, Pharmalittle: “US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf appeared in a federal database of payments made last year by drug makers...

“Robert Califf's ties to Big Pharma run deep and the Obama nominee for the FDA just sailed through the U.S. Senate.” Article →

Two facts about Robert Califf are beyond question. He is an expert on clinical trials, who is already seen as a leading architect of the future of medical research. And as the New York Times put it, he has “deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any FDA commissioner in recent memory”. A lot of senior figures in medicine support Califf in spite of his ties to Pharma. The guy is just so bright, and understands the nuts and bolts of drug research so well! Surely a person like this is more useful than some outsider who offers only a squeaky-clean resume, they argue.

For STAT, Ed Silverman reports on growing concerns about the industry ties of the new nominee for FDA commissioner.  “The nomination comes at a...

Democratic Presidential nominee, Bernie Sanders, questioned the nominee for FDA commissioner, Robert Califf, during yesterday’s Senate hearing. Sanders remarked that we need a commissioner who will stand up to the pharmaceutical companies and protect American consumers. Of Califf, he added, “with regret, I think that you are not that person.”

In Saturday’s New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise describes the close industry ties of Dr. Robert Califf, a cardiologist and researcher recently tapped by the Obama administration to head the FDA. In a conflict of interest statement published last year, Califf “declared financial support from more than 20 companies,” leading some public health advocates to “question whether his background could tilt him in the direction of an industry he would be in charge of supervising.” Tavernise points to a presentation Califf gave on “Disrupting Clinical Research: Transforming a System” in 2014 where he singled out regulation as a barrier to research and innovation. “I think it illuminates his thinking,” Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard professor who studies the FDA, said of the slide. “In a sense, he’s the ultimate industry insider.”

On Tuesday, the Obama administration nominated Dr. Robert Califf to be the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In a statement, director of the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Dr. Michael Carome called on the Senate to reject the nomination. He contends that Califf “racked up a long history of extensive financial ties to multiple drug and medical device companies, including Amgen, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck Sharp & Dohme and Sanofi-Aventis, to name a few.”