NO, BUT IT’S SHAMEFULLY SLOW: Is the FDA sexist? The Agency’s delay in approving the “female viagra,” flibanserin, highlights the FDA’s frustrating, seemingly perpetual sluggishness:

So why the delay? For the most part, flibanserin isn’t a great medicine. Across three randomized clinical trials, the drug shows modest benefits while producing side effects such as low blood pressure, drowsiness, fainting and nausea. As many as 60% of women in those studies said they benefited from more sexually satisfying events, but the FDA says to adjust for the placebo effect the true number is merely 10%. . . .

[A] feminist pressure group called Even the Score—funded in part by Sprout—besieged the FDA with accusations of sexism. Other political organizations like NOW and NARAL joined in, while Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other Democratic Congresswomen accused the FDA of perpetuating “a gross disparity” of 24 approved treatments for male sex disorders and zero for women. . . .

But the real problem is that the FDA (whose former commissioner and pharmaceuticals division chief are both women) isn’t so much sexist as it is sociopathic. The paternalists who run the FDA are far more obsessed with phantom risks and protecting their own bureaucratic control over health care.

In this case they are instructing adult women that they should not be allowed to make their own informed choices about whether flibanserin is worth the potential side effects. If the drug is marginal, it is still better than the status quo and will help some subset of women. Feminists are right to be indignant about the delay, even if the FDA blockade is far worse morally in similar cases involving terminal or rare diseases.

I wrote about the need to privatize the FDA’s drug review process back in 1996. But absent privatization, there are numerous ways to break the FDA’s monopoly that would benefit patients waiting for access to new drug therapies, particularly drugs for terminal diseases and conditions such as cancer. A female viagra, even if only beneficial for 10 percent of women, would improve many lives.