Pharmaceutical Consultants Discover Criminally Convicted Doctors Working At Food And Drug Adminsitration
The US Government Accountability Office GAO has used pharmaceutical consultants to look into people working for the FDA and the results are a damning criticism that the Food and Drug Administration hires criminally convicted doctors to work for it in clinical trials. 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 even three doctors who continue to work with the FDA despite knowledge that each of them have a criminal conviction.
One of the main charges that the doctors had been found guilty of was falsifying clinical trial data. They made up statistics for non-existent participants, did not follow the research plan of the trial or failed to gain the informed consent of trial participants. There is also a contentious issue over doctors who have been found to break the law over medical devices. 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.
With the FDA already breaking rules and laws with no regard for the consequences, there seems little point in simply applying new regulations. Instead, they propose a wide reform of the whole health care system in America. 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.
Tags: drugs, healthcare, illness, medicines, pharmaceutical consultants