One of my favorite subjects

One of my favorite subjects of scorn, those bastards at the FDA, are still being bastards according to drug companies in this Wall Street Journal Story.

In no surprise to anyone who watches the industry, the FDA bastards have slowed down the drug “approval” process. So it takes longer — and costs more money — to get life-saving, life-prolonging, life-improving drugs to market. All in the name of protecting the helpless consumer from the all-evil, predatory, malicious drug industry.

Now, let’s look at this rationally for once. Executives at drug companies owe their livelihoods to saving your life. If the drugs don’t work, they don’t get sold. If the drugs are deadly, the drug companies get sued into the Stone age. FDA bastards owe their livelihoods to avoiding bad headlines. One case of one drug hurting one person can ruin a bureaucrat’s entire career, so it pays for him to delay making a decision. But the poor slob who died because a better drug wasn’t yet approved doesn’t make the headlines at all — it’s not news when a drug that’s not on the market doesn’t do a job it hasn’t been approved for yet. You’ve never seen in the paper, “Air Traffic Controller Forgets to Tell Airplane It’s Safe to Land, Plane Lands Safely.”

Says Fred Hanssan of Pharmacia in the WSJ story, “We are now beginning to see some new innovations that are approved earlier in Europe than in the U.S. This drug lag is not good.” That’s right, folks — the Brusselscrats are jumping ahead of us in medicine. It’s a good thing we don’t have an FCA to approve new computer chips — we’d be blogging on 386s. New 386s.

FULL DISCLOSURE: VodkaPundit lost his father to a blood clot. At the time, the FDA bastards were keeping a superior blood-thinning agent off the market. The drug in question had been proven 99% safe, but those bastards at the FDA still chose to sit on their hands and wait for more data.