"You Got Us"

source* 

                             

That was the blithe response of Chinna Pamidi, the president of Cetero Research, when the FDA discovered  the "'egregious' and pervasive" violations of a lab that had conducted research for the FDA and drug companies worldwide.

Good on the FDA. They caught the bad guys. But then what? According to this Scientific American article, virtually nothing.

To sum up the article, the FDA discovered back in May 2010 that Cetero Research had been presenting fraudulent research. This meant that many FDA-approved drugs were and are based on fake findings. Which unfortunately means the FDA label for an unknown number of unknown drugs is essentially worthless.

That is a bold statement, which is probably why the FDA chose not to disclose this tidbit of information in the "News and Events" section of their website. To this day, three years after their discovery, they still have not released the names of the drugs that are approved based on fraudulent research.

As the FDA claimed, this does not necessarily mean the drugs are dangerous. I would assume they are not, considering that whatever those drugs are, they are currently on the market and there have not been any undue drug-related disasters.

What it does mean, as SA pointed out, is that the "FDA's scientific basis for approving drugs has been undermined". Which leads me to question whether it is even necessary.

The FDA withheld information from the public for three years, and is still doing it, all because they claim they did not want to alarm the public. But the FDA has not flinched from alarming the public in other instances when their reputation would not be tarnished.

Protecting our health... or themselves? source*

                                         


Is the FDA tacitly admitting that a lot of their testing is not strictly necessary? Scientific American seems upset that the FDA did not regulate thoroughly enough. My question is, do they need to?