The FDA buries evidence of fraud in medical trials. My students and I dug it up

Setup by the SEC. The incentives are structured, by the government, in the most ridiculous way possible. Pointing at the failure of government mandated and monitored rating agencies as a failure in private enterprise is just stupid.

Most likely self-experimenting and community based "trials" are gonna be much more prevalent in the coming years, due to bio hacking opening up. Gonna be even trickier to regulate and navigate.

Maybe as a condition of hire, the appicliant, if hired by the FDA, couldn't seek future employment in any aspect of the Pharmacutical industry?

I belonged to a union that flat out told apprentices that they were forbidden from going through the program and opening up a non-union shop. I've always wondered about the legality of putting conditions on a job? I know the formentioned union still has the clause in it's bylaws, and it's a union in a huge city.

To clarify: I'm not calling for less regulation from the FDA. Far from it. Rather, I'm pointing out that in the follow instance where more regulation is being called for, a major influence is again Big Pharma and the motivation is, to my eyes and reading, not primarily consumer protection.

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There is also the other "half" of this FDA saga. "Supplements" and herbal treatments are a mixed bag, and there are fraudulent manufacturers and suppliers in this market as well. However, there are repeated pushes to get the FDA to more or less outlaw all of them and/or to regulate this marketplace out of existence.

I'm someone who, along with more than a bit of grief from pharmaceutical industry products, has actually found some significant results in the "natural" marketplace. I've had to be careful, and I've had to find manufacturers who actually deliver what they say. But the idea of one of these knee jerk, "ban 'em all" reactions taking these items away from me, scares me in no small measure.

The FDA appears no longer to be an effective regulator; it has become ever more an economic and political tool of the most moneyed private interests. (Where a focused Big Pharma far outweighs the broader field of smaller supplement providers, for example.)

To be somewhat repetitive, I don't want to discount the significant problems with the "supplements" marketplace. But I have been able to achieve results with it that I have not found in the pharmaceutical marketplace. I am unwilling to cede this territory to the pharmaceutical companies, as they seek to have it shut down -- for their own economic self-interest, rather than the public interest.

The oped piece you cited does not support your assertion that the "FDA is incompetent and corrupt". They may be, but that is a pretty hefty accusation and requires more evidence.

Nor, honestly, does it support the "getting a drug approved is more dependent on how much money you want to spend than on whether it works" claim, or the "some drugs that may be effective are delayed for years and years".

Developing a drug is an incredibly complex operation. The FDA requires evidence that a drug will not kill people before it will approve it, which means that most drugs need to be tested in thousands of people. That requires outsourcing clinical trials to hospitals, which are then paid per patient to take on the extra work.

The original link cites corruption at the hospital level, which does seem like the weakest link in the system. The hospitals/doctors get paid based on getting patients through the trial protocol, or at least saying they did. Much of the cost born by pharmaceutical companies is actually auditing this process, to make sure it happens correctly.

Just yelling about the FDA will not change the corruption practices of a hospital in China.