The FDA states they are responsible for US drug safety

According to its official website, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for “assuring the safety, efficacy and security of human and veterinary drugs”, among other things. Having an agency responsible for ensuring drug safety should mean that medications approved for public use are safe; however, that may not necessarily be the case. In fact, there is increasing evidence that the FDA might actually be protecting drug manufacturers by falsifying studies or redacting information that would actually prove certain medications were unsafe.

News Inferno recently reported on an article first published in Slate Magazine claiming that information in official FDA documents concerning fraud is frequently hidden. According to New York University journalist Charles Seife, the FDA has shown a pattern of hiding evidence of misconduct for more than ten years. He claims that FDA inspectors who are investigating reports of wrongdoing often redact key information that would help the public determine how a study was tainted. Information such as the name of the drug, name of the study and source of misconduct are typically “blacked out”, making it possible to determine the particular study and name of the drug in only 100 out of the 600 cases they reviewed.

The effects of tainted medical studies are far-reaching, as the team of researchers from New York University were able to track down approximately 78 scientific publications that cited a tainted study. This is problematic because doctors are also being kept in the dark concerning fraudulent studies. As such, they may therefore recommend certain medications to their patients because they believe them to be safe when in fact they may not be.

Hiding information about clinical trials may not be all the FDA is responsible for. Slate, reports the FDA was aware of falsified data during the “Record 4 study” on rivaroxaban, an anti-blood clotting medication. They claim that doctors engaged in clinical trials for rivaroxaban “systematically” discarded medical records or otherwise committed fraud or misconduct, without being sanctioned by the FDA for doing so.

The seeming interest of the FDA in protecting pharmaceutical companies was confirmed in 2005 by David Graham, then associate director of the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety. In an interview given to Fraud Magazine, he claimed that the “FDA is inherently biased in favor of the pharmaceutical industry. It views industry as its client, whose interests it must represent, it views its primary mission as approving as many drugs as it can regardless of whether the drugs are safe or needed.”

The fact that the FDA appears to favor Big Pharma’s profit over public safety means the odds of someone suffering ill health effects due to prescription drug use are actually rather high. If you or a loved one have experienced unusual or life-threatening side effects due to medication, please contact our office for a free, no obligation evaluation of your case.