Fellow progress blogger Alex Telford and I have had a friendly back-and-forth going over FDA reform. Alex suggests incremental reforms to the FDA, which I strongly support, but these don’t go far enough. The FDA's failures merit a complete overhaul: Remove efficacy requirements and keep only basic safety testing and ingredient verification. Any drug that doesn’t go through efficacy trials gets a big red warning label, but is otherwise legal.

Before getting into Alex's points let me quickly make the positive case for my position.

The FDA is punished for errors of commission: drugs they approve which turn out not to work or to be harmful. They don’t take responsibility for errors of omission: drugs they could have approved earlier but delayed, or drugs that would have been developed but were abandoned due to the cost of approval. This asymmetry predictably leads to overcaution.

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Outline:

(02:46) Patent medicines and snake oil

(04:53) Chesterton's fence

(06:38) Does the FDA actually help innovation?

(11:59) Addendum

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First published:

Source:

Linkpost URL:
https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/we-need-major-but-not-radical-fda

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.