Pharmaceutical Consultants Come Across Rule Breaking Doctors Working At The FDA
The Food and Drug Administration has been heavily criticised by pharmaceutical consultants working for the US Government Accountability Office or GAO, for hiring doctors to supervise clinical trials who had been previously charged with criminal activity. By failing to debar anyone with a criminal record from work activities with the FDA, the Administration is breaking its own rules.
It takes the FDA an average of four years to debar anyone working for them with a criminal conviction as shown in the results of the GAO enquiry. This is sensational when you consider that the FDA is required by law to disqualify any doctor who has been criminally charged in the past. In one case it took the FDA 11 years to disqualify a doctor who had been convicted of 53 charges including covering up a patient’s suicide during a clinical trial.
Prescribing medicine without a license, fraud and lying during clinical trials were other charges that doctors had been committed of. There are also major concerns over the fact that three doctors continue to work with the FDA even though they are known convicted criminals.
presenting false data at clinical trials was the dominant charge amongst the doctors. Participants were made up, they had their consent forced on them and some of the doctors failed to stick to the research plan entirely. And medical devices are one of the most contentious issues in this whole affair. At present there are no laws to prevent doctors barred from medicine to work in the medical device industry which means that they could be endangering the lives of millions of people, like asthma sufferers.
Critics do not see any benefits of introducing new rules as the FDA has already flouted many of the laws that currently govern it. New reforms should instead be applied so that there is no room for these laws to be broken. Proposals include that no company director should be allowed to hold a senior position within the FDA and those doctors who break the law should be prosecuted.


