Comment by maxbond
3 years ago
It's one thing to say they should approve drugs faster and another thing to say they should rubber stamp anything that Europe and Canada approve.
3 years ago
It's one thing to say they should approve drugs faster and another thing to say they should rubber stamp anything that Europe and Canada approve.
It seems that if the Canadian and European regulatory bodies are incompetent or too quick to approve meds, it would show up in some statistics, right? Maybe their life expectancies would be lower or they would have higher rates of certain kinds of deaths. Yet if anything, it’s the US that lags in those areas.
There are tons of examples of the FDA failing to approve things, resulting in Americans dying unnecessarily. A more recent example was Omegaven, an IV nutritional fluid.[1] The FDA took 14 years to approve it, resulting in hundreds of infant deaths. Before its approval, only a few infants at Boston Children’s Hospital managed to get it. The staff there had to get FDA approval to import the fluid from Europe for every infant they wanted to treat, resulting in a lag time of several days. Even though it was clear that Omegaven was much more effective than previous IV nutrition, the FDA’s bureaucratic hurdles prevented it from being adopted sooner.
1. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducan...
Maybe part of the reason that the Canadian and UK drug regulators are competent, is because we haven't created a sufficiently large system of incentives to undermine them. Maybe if approving a drug in Canada got you access to the entire world, we would have a very different scenario.
A rubber stamping scheme removes redundancy from the system. Approving drugs faster sounds like a great idea, but there was a reason someone put up that fence you want to tear down, and your arguments haven't addressed it. Furthermore, the fence doesn't need razing to accomplish your goal - I don't see why advocating for the FDA to approve drugs faster should be synonymous with turning them into a rubber stamp.
No one (or at least not me) is contesting the assertion that approving drugs faster may save lives. But I don't want pharmaceutical companies to be able to undermine a single regulatory body and then be able to distribute their drugs everywhere.
There is no reason because it wasn’t a deliberate choice. Different countries created their own standards bodies and didn’t try to coordinate until later. The same thing happened with safety regulations around automobiles and aircraft. Fortunately in those cases, most countries have coordinated and manufacturers can sell the same vehicle in different countries with little extra effort. But for rare diseases with cheap treatments (such as in the case of Omegaven), nobody has the both the resources and the desire to overcome the FDA’s bureaucratic hurdles.
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