Pharmaceutical Consultants Discover Criminally Charged Doctors Working With FDA

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 2:42 pm

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. This is a damning indictment of the FDA who has even been found to be breaking their own rules when they fail to debar these personnel when they are discovered to hold a criminal record.

On average, GAO found that it took the FDA an average of four years to get round to debarring doctors with a conviction. And this comes even though the FDA are required by law to immediately disqualify any doctor who has been charged with fraud or any other type of crime. One dramatic case was that of a male doctor who had been convicted of a 53 criminal counts but went on to work for the FDA for 11 years.

Prescribing medicine without a license, fraud and lying during clinical trials were other charges that doctors had been committed of. Three doctors continue to work for the FDA even though they have public criminal conviction charges.

The most common charge that the doctors had committed was that of falsifying criminal data. They created participants to bulk out data, faked the consent of some participants and neglected medical histories. There is also a contentious issue over doctors who have been found to break the law over medical devices. Under present FDA rules, a doctor who has been convicted of a criminal offence is not prohibited from practicing in the medical device industry, which could be putting the lives of millions of people at risk, especially since inhalers used to treat asthma are thought of as a medical device.

With the FDA already breaking rules and laws with no regard for the consequences, there seems little point in simply applying new regulations. New reforms should instead be applied so that there is no room for these laws to be broken. Prosecutions for doctors found to be breaking the law, company executives barred from senior roles in the FDA and a stricter relationship between the FDA and drug companies.

Share and Enjoy: