This is Matthew Holt from The Health Care Blog getting in a piece that I meant to publish while I was guesting last week:
It's time to dip into the murky waters of the FDA once more. This is a classic tale of politics intruding into an agency that should have science as its prime motivator. Here's the story summarized so far.
The FDA has barely had a full time official commissioner since the start of the Bush Administration. Mark McClellan was officially head for a brief while in 2003, but he barely had time to look embarrassed on 60 Minutes when asked why Canadian drugs weren't safe enough for Americans before he nipped off to the rather more rarefied atmosphere of CMS -- where he's much better suited.
Meanwhile before, after (and basically during) McClellan's time at FDA, the acting commissioner has been Lester Crawford. Some cynics have noticed that there are a few clouds over Crawford. He was involved in some pretty close to the wind activities when he was in charge of Food Safety (ironically this weekend, there's more suspicion about the Administration covering up a second case of Mad Cow). But more recently there's been much fuss over both his personal affairs (i.e. was he or wasn't he abusing his power to forward the career of a female colleague with whom he was having a close relationship) and, much more importantly, about his being behind the non-approval of Barr Labs' Plan B emergency contraceptive.
Robert Steeves has written convincingly on Why Plan B went down.
