Pharmaceutical Consultants Hunt Out Criminally Charged Doctors Working At FDA
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. 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.
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. 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. 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 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. Instead, they propose a wide reform of the whole health care system in America. 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.