Pharmaceutical Consultants Find Law Breaking Doctors Working For 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. 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. 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.
Other cases involve medical professionals who have committed fraud or prescribed medicines without a license. There are also major concerns over the fact that three doctors continue to work with the FDA even though they are known convicted criminals.
One of the main charges that the doctors had been found guilty of was falsifying clinical trial data. They created participants to bulk out data, faked the consent of some participants and neglected medical histories. There is major concern over criminal doctors’ involvement in the criminal device industry. Doctors who have broken the law can move their work into the medical device sector without breaking the law because there are no rules to stop this, and this puts the lives of millions of people at risk including those who suffer from asthma.
Because the FDA is already breaking its own rules and laws governing it, there seems little reason to implement new regulations. Instead, they propose a wide reform of the whole health care system in America. There should be no room for a company executive to move into a senior role at the FDA, drug companies and the FDA should not think of each other as friends but the FDA needs to be seen as a regulatory body with the power to punish the companies; On top of this, doctors who have been found to break the law should be prosecuted and excluded from the health profession entirely.
