Comment by light_hue_1

Blaming the FDA is popular but the problem is not the FDA itself. Drug manufacturers are part of the problem.

1. When the FDA has fast-tracked drugs, drug makers have taken advantage of this to hide data, lie, and refuse to comply with timelines for proving those drugs work. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/22/1110830...

2. When these accelerated drugs are found to not work or cause harm, the manufacturers continue to push for them and the FDA has tremendous trouble trying to their approval revoked. https://apnews.com/article/science-health-medication-busines...

3. Accelerated drug approval gets mired in advertising. The general public has no idea how to judge if a drug works or not. Plenty of people believe that homeopathy works. The FDA gets massive pushback when trying to take a drug that is worthless away, because people think it works. This hurts us all and creates an incentive for companies to hide data and deceive customers.

4. The FDA is as fast or faster than the Canadian or EU equivalents. The FDA is not specifically slow, bureaucracy everywhere has become much slower because there are no incentives to be fast but countless incentives to be slow.

5. Lawsuits. It's easy to say "I'm hurting, I'll take anything". But, then, there are rights you cannot give away. If a drug harms you, you will sue. If it kills you, your family will sue. The whole system is bogged down by lawsuits with massive disproportionate payouts. The early biotech companies and scientists involved often cannot deal with even a mistaken lawsuit.

We need a much more comprehensive overhaul of the system, starting with open access laws to all data pertaining to any drugs that are on the market (no manufacturer can keep anything secret for a drug that people take), an FDA that has much more authority and much less industry capture, medical tort reform, to create a system where in exchange it actually makes sense to provide fast tracked approval.