Abolish the FDA
After the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, Newt Gingrich launched a sustained attack on the FDA. The radical House Republicans made a series of wild claims about the products being kept off the market by the FDA, and the lives supposedly lost as a result. Each and every example they used was completely false. Their audacity is awe-inspiring, but the campaign eventually petered out as the New Right itself lost steam.
Cry Wolf Quotes
Mr. Gingrich recently denounced the FDA as a 'Stalinistic' agency. While Mr. Gingrich's comment may be hyperbolic, there are some interesting parallels between Dr. Kessler's responses to the FDA's problems and Josef Stalin's response to the problems of the Soviet planned economy…. Dr. Kessler, like Stalin, instead of fixing the obvious problems, has issued one denunciation after another of those who opposed or disagreed with him…. Stalin sought to solve the problems of defects and crashes among advanced Soviet Air Force fighter planes by executing some of the aircraft engineers; Dr. Kessler has responded to the occasional problems of new medical devices with a de facto regulatory pogrom that is exiling the industry.
When it comes to FDA regulation, one encounters claims…that are virtually identical to the claims now recognized as discredited in relation to socialist central planning of the whole economy.
If a murderer kills you, it’s homicide. If a drunk driver kills you, it’s manslaughter. If the FDA kills you, it’s just being cautious…Our own federal government’s bureaucratic and apparently unaccountable Food and Drug Administration [blocked drug approvals while Americans] died in agony from a disease other nations controlled for years.
Kessler has overseen an unprecedented expansion of regulatory interference and meddling by the agency…zealotry seems a weak term for the intrusive and deadly bureaucracy of Kessler’s FDA.
