A little more about my FDA article from Monday….
Prospect/Nation journalist Ayelish McGarvey, who wrote the article about David Hager, and knows way more about Plan B than I’d ever want to, says that I (and by implication Robert Steeves who’s earlier article on Plan B I lifted for THCB) don’t actually understand what’s really going on with Plan B’s non-approval. She tells the real story in a long comment to my piece over at Ezra’s blog.
Essentially Barr’s first application to make Plan B available OTC was turned down. The delay in approval, over which the three Dem senators are holding up Crawford’s nomination is for a second application in which Barr Labs asked to put Plan B behind the counter for women over 16 years old and by prescription only for those under 16. FDA hasn’t approved drugs in that manner before, and its lawyers won’t sign off. To know more we need to wait till McGarvey’s article comes out (next week), but it’s clear that in her view, Steven Galson, the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and the surprise signatory to the original non-approval (the one that turned over the 23-4 scientific vote in favor of approval) acted more or less independently from Crawford. It’s certain that he went against the staff scientists advice. This is what it says on the FDA page about Plan B:
12. Dr. Steven Galson signed the letter FDA sent to the sponsor. Does Dr. Galson usually sign such letters? Why did Dr. Galson sign the letter?No, Dr. Galson does not usually sign regulatory action letters. However, his opinion of the adequacy of the data in young adolescents differed from that of the review staff. He believes that additional data are needed and for that reason he made the decision to take final action within the Office of the Center Director.
And the differences between the political leadership of the bureaucracy and the staff are huge. Meanwhile there is a pretty good article which I missed at the time in the NEJM on what happened, and another blog, The CarpetBagger Report, picks up the story from what Jon Cohn wrote in TNR.
On the other hand, I really only wanted to make two points about the FDA.
First, there are fundamentalist loons with an agenda inside FDA (i.e. whoever it was inside FDA who asked Hager to provide a dissenting opinion), or at least those who want to air the fundamentalist loon’s opinions. I can never tell if its the fundamentalist loons using the cynical rightwingers or the other way around, but their views are clearly being heard and acted upon.
Secondly, forgetting Plan B — which in the grand scheme of things is just another story of how screwed up sex education and reproductive health in this country have become — the issue of whether FDA can be trusted on pharma safety overall is still a complete mess. That cannot change unless we get a total change in the current regime at FDA including Crawford, Galson and anyone else favoring either fundamentalist loons or the short term interests of big pharma over full disclosure about drug safety. I know that Ted Kennedy (and by Ayelish’s implication Sens Clinton and Murray too) have given up on trying to fix that, but someone needs to be reminding the American public about it!
And, for the nth time, full disclosure about drug safety may lead to people taking drugs that could be considered dangerous. Some people might want to take a Cox-2 and trade off pain relief for a higher chance of heart disease. But the key is that they need to be sure that the FDA is making all the information available — and that’s where it’s fallen down on the job and lost the public’s trust. And in the end it’s better for big pharma to be in a market where the public trusts what the government says about their products.
On another topic, talking of what pharma says about its products, the Washington Legal Foundation, which got DTC ads on TV in the first place, is causing a little more fuss in that arena.
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