The problem is, that the existing manufacturer can quickly lower the price. It’s always going to cost some money to create a new production line and get approvals. Before a new manufacturer can bring a lower price version to market, a pharma douche can lower the price enough that the new manufacturer will lose money. If the market for a drug is large enough, this isn’t as much of an impediment. But there’s a reason that these “buy an old, out of patent drug and jack up the price a gazilion times,” stories are for drugs with smaller demand. THOSE are the ones targeted by pharma-douches for this treatment.
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No hyperbole whatsoever. If you search my comment history you can see I have performed this exercise several times now. It’s pretty easy to Google.
What’s the principal driver of antibiotic resistant bacteria? There are many peer reviewed papers about this, but the quick take is that the FDA determined in the mid-1970s that increasing use of antibiotics by the meat industry was going to decrease antibiotic effectiveness in humans, causing ever-increasing unnecessary suffering and death. An attempt at regulation was made in 1977, but after some congressional puppets of the meat industry objected to this objectively determined truth, the FDA acted and continues to act to this day to help meat producers prevent effective regulation to address this issue.
Or how about the fast-track aspartame FDA approval? If you have the right connections, you’ll get approval, even when it’s known that your testing was rigged. How about the FDA sabotage of Dendreon? If you have connections, you can get the FDA to drive your competitors out of business by monkeying with the approval process. How about the various Monsanto/FDA shenanigans? This stuff is all public record and easily found online, which is why I said demonstrably. You don’t have to take any Internet Random Person’s word on it, you can find documentation on the FDA’s own web site.
After spending even a single day on research, one has to be willfully blind to believe that the FDA is anything other than a completely captive regulator. The independently verifiable evidence is overwhelming, it requires massive self-deception, on the level of climate change denialism, to ignore it or rationalize it away.
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I believe I also showed in another post how the FDA and Big Pharma are demonstrably corrupt. But I also showed how the FDA and Big Pharma are demonstrably essential, as well.
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I very much agree. They need to be reformed and regulated, respectively, not removed.
But the Democratic Party’s stance is summed up as “what? FDA corruption? Big Pharma influence too strong? You must be an anti-science kook!” and the Republican Party’s stance is “Burn it all down and let the buyer beware!”.
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It’s sad to see multi-million dollar companies exploiting people to the point of having to pay $768 for a pill that will prolong their lives. The greed is disgusting
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It sucks. Where are the reasonable people? Why can’t we have a voice?
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My friend El Dra says, “I’m a liberal working woman and mother who believes in the right to bear arms and the right of women to control their own bodies. Where is the party that represents me?”
I think that unfortunately most Americans care too much about being on a winning team, and fear social consequences of hanging out with losers too much, so they vote for those who will never represent them and persuade themselves that this irrational behavior is virtuous. The “teams” are exploiting human tribalism to harm humanity.
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Well, I’ve already pointed out the logical problem of using a set of behaviors (like fast-tracking or delaying actions on some drugs) as prima facie proof of FDA corruption. I agree that having someone from the industry as an FDA advisor gives the industry some voice in decisions, but that only becomes problematic in the absence of other advisors; from the link I posted with the list of current advisors on drug policy, it is pretty clear that the industry does not have a dominant voice.
These kind of arguments work (or, rather, don’t work) mutatis mutandis for showing that Big Pharma is conspiring with the FDA to force deadly vaccines on us. If you start from the premise “vaccines bad”, then it is easy to conclude that the FDA must have been corrupt to follow the industry’s advice on this. If instead you start from a premise that the FDA is responsibly processing advice from all sides, then you instead conclude that vaccines can be good.
So actual proven behavior does not prove anything about how an agency behaves, and if anyone posts the simple and verifiable facts about FDA corruption, they must be an anti-vaxxer with conspiracy theories.
C’mon, you are better than this.
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This is off-topic, but I had a math-gasm when I read that sentence.
draws three little circles in the air
Billion, with a “B”, it’s much cooler.
It doesn’t prove anything about intent. Agencies make bad decisions, and they make good decisions, and it makes no sense to chalk the latter up to doing their job but the former up to corruption. Moreover, if you strongly disagree with a decision it could also mean that your judgment of it is wrong or missing some factor in the decision, and it is exactly this self-certainty that leads to the anti-vaxx conspiracy theories.
I posted a link to the FDA drug advisory board. To me it looks like a balanced and mainly independent board of qualified experts. If the FDA has been corrupted on pharma policy then either this group is actually corrupt themselves, or somehow they are less aware than you are of the FDA’s corruption. Or is there some other choice I’m missing?
Makes sense. Probably targeting drugs that are used by a small number of people, but those people really need it so for them demand is inelastic.
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I’ll look at that link… OK, I don’t know a single one of those people, nor have I read any of their published works as yet, nor do advisory boards make policy as far as I can tell. So while this might be meaningful to others, it has no impact on my ability to gauge whether the FDA is on a trajectory away from the current status as a corrupt and captured agency.
I can (and do!) hope that these people will make a positive difference, but at this time I have no reason to assign any weight to their influence.
If the FDA shuts down the multibillion dollar livestock antibiotic industry for good, that will demonstrate a change in status. As long as they continue to fail to take real, decisive, meaningful action -action, not mealy-mouthed words- I have to consider them demonstrably corrupt. I think any nonpartisan assessment of the evidence to date will agree with me.
As previously stated, I don’t want the FDA shut down like the laissez faire knobs do. I want it fixed. That’s unlikely to happen under the current government 
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How do you believe that the FDA functions? Do you think that the CEO of Bayer phones some incredibly powerful lone guy with “FDA” stamped on his forehead and promises him a new dress for his wife provided he OKs flooding horse troughs with tetracycline?
Like most government regulatory agencies, the FDA operates under a variety of constraints: external ones, like legislative mandates, budgetary limitations, and shitty political appointments in the directorship, as well as internal ones like friction between subagencies. I get that you don’t like some of their decisions, but chalking it up to “corruption” is simplistic and non-factual, and just feeds the right-wing/libertarian dictum that regulation is bad.
I’ve been an environmental regulator, a former girlfriend was a telecommunications regulator, my sister was an antitrust prosecutor, and for years I’ve seen similar accusations lobbed against the agencies we worked for. It is both offensive and disheartening for all the people at such agencies who have devoted their lives to working in the public’s interest.
I don’t want the FDA shut down like the laissez faire knobs do. I want it fixed.
The first step is to correctly identify what and where the problems are. Vague cries of “corruption” aren’t helpful.
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Its the logic of capitalism dude! Oh and dont forget to say “fuck you” while doing it. Milton Friedman would love it and Im pretty sure Ayn Rand too!
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Isnt this just a simple manifestation of selection bias? If too many FDA regulators behave in a way which is contrary to the industries interests the industry will lobby to have them removed. Over time this - and the tendency to offer jobs to ex-regulators (revolving door syndrome) create a incentive to view problems from the perspective of the industry rather than the consumer. The same can be seen to have happened at the SEC over the last 40 years.
Is this corrupt? Well yes it is because the agency loses focus on its remit and you have regulatory drift. Is any one regulator necessarily corrupt? No not at all. In fact anyone pushing to be more aggressive will not last very long in the job and so will also be useless. But overall the system creates a “race to the bottom”.
Im pretty sure, most Pharma bosses do not like the unnecessary extra scrutiny that obvious price gouging creates, However the company which markets Epi pens had no problem hiking the price of those pens from $6 when they bought the original manufacturer to $600.
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Other than a couple of directors (which is a political appointment), do you have any reason to believe this is happening at the FDA?
The FDA has had several major overhauls, starting with the FDCA of 1938 (and subsequent codification in 1951), the Kefauver-Harris amendments in the 1960s, several reforms in the 80s (eg, the Orphan Drug Act of 1983), accelerated approval programs in the 90s, and the breakthrough drug program of 4-5 years ago. All of these were pushed as reforms by ordinary citizen advocacy groups, though one could also argue that things like accelerated approval benefit Big Pharma. Unlike the SEC (and especially unlike the FCC, which seems to concentrate power in a handful of political appointees), the FDA is huge, power is widely distributed, and it is being lobbied constantly by various stakeholder groups (AARP, the DOD. cancer advocacy groups, etc.) in addition to big business.
However the company which markets Epi pens had no problem hiking the price of those pens from $6 when they bought the original manufacturer to $600.
This aspect of pricing is not FDA jurisdiction. However, it is interesting that many of the most egregious recent examples of health care gouging – Epi pens, Shkreli, and this latest one from this DiCrisci subhuman – are not from Big Pharma, but rather from Small-To-Intermediate Pharma, who presumably are not part of the imagined structure.
The FDA required a temporary suspension of the only competing product to the Epi pen due to an unreliable production line (my recollection is not entirely reliable so I might be wrong as to why). As a result the last price hike happened at a time when there was no competition because the FDA excluded it. That said, one might argue that the idea that the FDA should not have jurisdiction over pricing is a bit odd. If not the FDA then who should have any regulatory input into the pricing of the ultimate in inelastic monopoly products?
Given the Purdue - Oxycontin situation, one might argue with the efficacy of the FDA as well. To parrot Cormack McCarthy, if the road you traveled led you to this place, what use was the road?
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“The FDA is demonstrably corrupt” is an objectively true statement. As I recall, you asked me to support that statement, so I did. It’s really not fair to criticize me for doing what you asked me to do. And I haven’t been vague; I’ve provided specific, documented, independently verifiable examples of past and ongoing instances of FDA misbehavior, I even went to the trouble of including links.
