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The White House is taking steps to kill the FDA reform legislation recently passed in the House of Representatives that would require drug companies to publicly post clinical trial results so that doctors, researchers and the public could review them. According to a report in Inside Health Policy, the White House sent congressional staff an "unofficial statement of administration policy" that opposes this provision in the House bill. The blocking of this provision would allow drug companies to continue to conduct their clinical trials in secret, hiding results from the public and cherry picking only those clinical trials they wish to make public.
Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, issued a press release warning about this new White House action. Bill Vaughn, a senior health policy with Consumers Union, stated in that press release, "At a time when parents can't even trust their kids' toys to be safe, it doesn't make sense the White House would oppose legislation to help make prescription drugs safer."
Fudging the numbers, sidestepping realityThe White House reportedly opposes the drug safety disclosure requirements for two reasons: 1) It claims the public wouldn't understand the information, and 2) It claims the FDA has no way to validate the accuracy of the information.
Of course, the whole point of publishing this information is to achieve open disclosure so that doctors, scientists, medical staff and the public can exercise additional oversight on the FDA and Big Pharma. Drug safety should not be carried on behind closed doors, in dark corridors, and through under-the-table bribery deals. The safety of pharmaceuticals should be openly disclosed and debated. The White House, it now seems, does not want the public to learn the truth about drug trial results.
The real reason the White House opposes this legislation, in my opinion, is that the White House is far too cozy with drug companies. Big Pharma maintains strong ties with the Bush Administration and helped elect virtually every Republican currently in office. In return, the Bush Administration has worked to pump up the profits of drug companies at every opportunity: His administration made it illegal for the U.S. government to negotiate volume discounts on Medicare drugs, he's pushed for mandatory "mental health screening" of children that would result in a windfall of profits for psychiatric drugs, he has supported legal immunity for drug companies in cases where patients are killed by drugs like Vioxx, and he has supported the FDA's actions on banning drug imports and protecting monopoly drug pricing in the United States.
The White House, it seems, is heavily influenced by Big Pharma, and this effort by the White House to keep Americans ignorant of the results of important drug trials seems to be just the latest effort to appease the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of public health.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
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