Since 2005, the FDA has approved the death instrument of 786,000 people. That’s more than the population of Seattle, DC, or 4 entire states! Action Alert!
Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that nearly one third of drugs approved between 2001 and 2010 had major safety issues after being made available to patients. This isn’t just the discovery of innocuous new side effects; 71 of 222 drugs approved during that time were either withdrawn from the market, required to carry a black box warning (the strictest warning a prescription drug can carry), or had a safety announcement issued about new risks from the drug. This means, your odds would be far better playing Russian roulette than putting an FDA approved drug into your body.
Part of the problem, according to the researchers, is that many important drug trials used for approval involve fewer than 1,000 patients and last six months or less. Others add that patients used in clinical trials are often cherry-picked to produce the best results for the drug.
This is yet another piece of damning evidence showing that our drug approval process is broken and responsible for death and hardship for millions of Americans. Worse, the drugs that won’t kill or sicken you probably won’t give you any benefit at all.
At the center of this broken drug approval system is the systemic corruption that the FDA’s own scientists have lamented, where sound science and safety concerns are ignored in order to rush blockbuster drugs to market. This crony feeding-frenzy has devoured roughly 3x more lives than were lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet is drawing little attention from lawmakers. The full figures are detailed on our FDA Death Meter page.
The facts are clear. Nevertheless, our politicians talk of speeding up drug approvals and increasing the fees Big Pharma pays to the FDA—putting the agency deeper into industry’s pocket!
The death toll and complications from FDA approved drugs is a sharp contrast from the record of supplements. One report from the Government Accountability Office found that there were an average of 1,575 adverse event reports (AERs) related to supplements per year between 2008 and 2011. When you factor in that about half of Americans (157 million people) take supplements every day, this means that only one-hundredth of one percent of all supplement users ever experience any problems at all.
Despite the safety of dietary supplements, there is a pending proposal from the FDA that threatens to eliminate thousands of products from store shelves. Send a message to Congress and the FDA urging them to fix this guidance and turn their attention to the drug industry—the real danger to the American people.
