I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Essentially the entire U.S. economy is one gigantic fraud. No one has honor anymore in this society, it is a totally forgotten and discarded virtue. The ethos of the land is to take whatever you can however you can. It doesn’t matter who you hurt or what sorts of immoral acts you need to do to get it. One of the key dynamics that allows for such blatant theft is that the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us are in fact gatekeepers from the criminals in their respective industries. In the financial area, this manifests with the SEC and CFTC revolving door to Wall Street. In healthcare, it manifests with the FDA. I’ve highlighted the FDA’s shadiness previously, most notably in my piece: The FDA is Caught Spying on its Employees and Creating an “Enemies List.” Now in this latest story, we find how little the FDA concerns itself with public health. From Pro Publica:

On the morning of May 3, 2010, three agents of the Food and Drug Administration descended upon the Houston office of Cetero Research, a firm that conducted research for drug companies worldwide.

Lead agent Patrick Stone, now retired from the FDA, had visited the Houston lab many times over the previous decade for routine inspections. This time was different. His team was there to investigate a former employee’s allegation that the company had tampered with records and manipulated test data.

When Stone explained the gravity of the inquiry to Chinna Pamidi, the testing facility’s president, the Cetero executive made a brief phone call. Moments later, employees rolled in eight flatbed carts, each double-stacked with file boxes. The documents represented five years of data from some 1,400 drug trials.

Pamidi bluntly acknowledged that much of the lab’s work was fraudulent, Stone said. “You got us,” Stone recalled him saying.

Based partly on records in the file boxes, the FDA eventually concluded that the lab’s violations were so “egregious” and pervasive that studies conducted there between April 2005 and August 2009 might be worthless.

The health threat was potentially serious: About 100 drugs, including sophisticated chemotherapy compounds and addictive prescription painkillers, had been approved for sale in the United States at least in part on the strength of Cetero Houston’s tainted tests. The vast majority, 81, were generic versions of brand-name drugs on which Cetero scientists had often run critical tests to determine whether the copies did, in fact, act the same in the body as the originals. For example, one of these generic drugs was ibuprofen, sold as gelatin capsules by one of the nation’s largest grocery-store chains for months before the FDA received assurance they were safe.

Stone said he expected the FDA to move swiftly to compel new testing and to publicly warn patients and doctors.

Instead, the agency decided to handle the matter quietly, evaluating the medicines with virtually no public disclosure of what it had discovered. It pulled none of the drugs from the market, even temporarily, letting consumers take the ibuprofen and other medicines it no longer knew for sure were safe and effective. To this day, some drugs remain on the market despite the FDA having no additional scientific evidence to back up the safety and efficacy of these drugs.

By contrast, the FDA’s transatlantic counterpart, the European Medicines Agency, has pulled seven Cetero-tested medicines from the market.

For its part, the FDA has finished its review of just 21 of the 53 submissions it has received, raising the possibility that patients are taking medications today that the agency might pull off the market tomorrow.

To this day, the agency refuses to disclose the names of the drugs it is reassessing, on the grounds that doing so would expose “confidential commercial information.” ProPublica managed to identify five drugs that used Cetero tests to help win FDA approval.

She declined to release the risk assessment or detail its design. A subsequent statement from the agency described the assessment as “fluid” and “ongoing.” The FDA also has not released its 21 completed reviews, which ProPublica has requested.

Some experts say that by withholding so much information in the Cetero case the FDA failed to meet its obligations to the public.

By contrast, the European Medicines Agency has provided a public accounting of the science behind all the drugs it has reviewed. Its policy, the EMA said in response to questions, is to make public “all review procedures where the benefit-risk balance of a medicine is under scrutiny.”

To be sure, just because a crucial study is deemed potentially unreliable does not mean that a drug is unsafe or ineffective. What it does mean is that the FDA’s scientific basis for approving that drug has been undermined.

Banner said it repeated the tainted Cetero tests at a different research firm, and the FDA said it received the new data in January 2012 — leaving a gap of at least five months when the FDA knew the drug was on the market without a rock-solid scientific basis.

Suspect research conducted by Cetero Houston was not only used to win FDA approval but was also submitted to peer-reviewed scientific journals. Aided by the FDA’s silence, those articles remain in the scientific literature with no indication that they might, in fact, be compromised. For example, based on Cetero’s work, an article in the journal Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology purports to show that Temodar for Injection is equivalent to Temodar capsules.

Stone and his FDA colleagues might never have realized Cetero was engaging in misconduct if a whistleblower hadn’t stepped forward.

That last line is absolutely critical. Without a whistleblower we would never have found out about what was going on at Cetero. That makes the FDA’s war on whistleblowers that much more disturbing. WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Full article here.

In Liberty,

Michael Krieger

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