The FDA tightened guidelines in 2007 to minimize industry ties that could sway a panelist’s view, partly inspired by the scandal with Merck’s pain reliever Vioxx. Ten of the 32 panelists advising the FDA on the drug consulted for drugmakers. Nine of the 10 recommended putting the drug back on the market after it was pulled in 2004 over concerns about heart risk.<\/sup><\/p>\n The restrictions go too far, say lawmakers who want the FDA to approve more new medicines, in part because they promote American jobs. ‘No longer can we deny experts simply because they have ties to industry,<\/em>‘ said Georgia Representative Phil Gingrey during a House of Representative hearing on FDA funding last month. The committee’s chairman, Fred Upton from Michigan, called the conflict of interest rules ‘rigid and unrealistic.’<\/em><\/sup><\/p>\n Industry executives, who want the FDA to speed drug approvals, also support relaxing the rules.<\/em> Biogen Idec CEO George Scangos said the guidelines ‘exclude a lot of people who would be the best qualified.’<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\nOf course, the drug and device companies have been touting their paid "key opinion leaders" as the best and the brightest for a long time. There is plenty of evidence, however, that they are mainly those whom those companies find the most compliant, and in many cases, those who are willing to be stealth marketers on those companies’ payrolls.
"Key opinion leaders" supported by commercial grant funding may seem like experts to academic medical institutions’ leadership who now value outside funding more than teaching and research excellence.<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n <\/p>\n
Furthermore, as reported by Politco, the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, chastised FDA leadership for exaggerating the difficulty of finding unconflicted experts, concluding in their letter to the FDA Commissioner, "to gain the public trust, we must ensure that the FDA relies on the best available information for its policies, rather than personal opinions and biases." So far, government officials seem to be more worried about the opinions of corporate leaders than the public trust…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This story is rotten from start to finish with the pharmaceutical industry fighting to maintain its influence on drug approval by the FDA – Congressmen, even FDA employees involved. But there’s another aspect of the story worth considering. "
‘We have had difficulty in recruiting highly qualified people.<\/em> And we’ve had delays in having panels because of this<\/em>,‘<\/em> Dr. Janet Woodcock, head of the FDA’s drugs center, told a House of Representatives hearing earlier this month.<\/font><\/strong>" I’ll bet that’s true. So many of our academicians, our experts, are tied to the pharmaceutical industry that they’re having trouble recruiting anyone who is ‘clean’ to sit on FDA panels, saying a bunch about how thoroughly the upper ranks of medicine have been infiltrated, or should I say, bought. And what’s the hurry anyway? If anything, we need to slow down… <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"National Physicians Group Protests FDA Attempts to Allow Industry Influence POGO By PAUL THACKER August 11, 2011 The uproar over attempts to loosen conflict of interest rules at the FDA has prompted a response from the National Physicians Alliance (NPA), a collection of doctors who advocate for patients and public health. Unlike most physician professional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12040"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12053,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12040\/revisions\/12053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}