Pharmaceutical Consultants Detect Criminally Convicted Doctors Working With Food And Drug Adminsitration
The Food and Drug Administration has been heavily criticised by pharmaceutical consultants working for the US Government Accountability Office or GAO, for hiring doctors to supervise clinical trials who had been previously charged with criminal activity. 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.
GAO officials have publicised their records which show that it takes the FDA an average of four years to debar convicted medical practitioners from working with them. This is despite the fact that the administration is required by law to disqualify doctors who have been found guilty of fraud or other crimes. The FDA seems to be ignoring these laws to such an extent that one doctor worked at the FDA for 11 years even though he had been previously charged with 53 counts of criminal activity.
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 many critics are calling for a wide reform of the whole health care regulatory system. There should be no room for a company executive to move into a senior role at the FDA, drug companies and the FDA should not think of each other as friends but the FDA needs to be seen as a regulatory body with the power to punish the companies; On top of this, doctors who have been found to break the law should be prosecuted and excluded from the health profession entirely.
Tags: drugs, Healthcare, illness, medicines, pharmaceutical consultants