Karen De Coster
Activist Post
This story in the Wall Street Journal barely made a splash last week – “FDA Panelists Had Ties to Bayer.”
Three advisors who had financial ties to Bayer AG were invited to serve on a “safety committee” for the FDA to assess the safety of four Bayer AG birth control drugs. All three individuals were either paid consultants, researchers, or speakers. Here’s a paragraph from the article:
Jill Hartzler Warner, an FDA official who oversees advisory committees, said the agency is ‘prohibited from giving the public any information contained in a financial disclosure’ from committee members. When picking committees, the FDA weighs ‘whether a meeting would affect the financial interest’ of a panelist. The agency also does ‘look at whether past relationships would give the appearance of being a conflict,’ she said.
Apparently, having worked for Bayer and getting paid by the company does not qualify as a past relationship that would give the appearance of being a conflict. Business as usual at one of the government’s largest and most invincible criminal organizations.
Another article in The Atlantic (be forewarned, the writer is a dedicated leftie) believes the FDA has failed because American industrial food interests still use antibiotics on animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
Roughly 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to healthy farm animals to foster rapid growth and make up for unhygienic living conditions. Many bacteria that live on animals adapt and transfer to humans, spreading superbugs that are often resistant to treatment.
Print
Email
Get news updates by email. Enter your email address below to subscribe: 
