Sydney Lupkin, Kaiser Health News and Daily Beast: November 3, 2019.
After unanimously voting to recommend a miraculous hepatitis C drug for approval in 2013, a panel of experts advising the Food and Drug Administration gushed about what they’d accomplished. What the panelists didn’t know was that the FDA’s drug quality inspectors had recommended against approval.
They issued a scathing 15-item disciplinary report after finding multiple violations at Gilead’s main U.S. drug testing laboratory, down the road from its headquarters in Foster City, Calif. Their findings criticized aspects of the quality control process from start to finish: Samples were improperly stored and catalogued; failures were not adequately reviewed; and results were vulnerable to tampering that could hide problems.
[…]
Against that backdrop, the FDA has repeatedly found a way to approve brand-name drugs despite safety concerns at manufacturing facilities that had prompted inspectors to push to reject those drugs’ approval, an ongoing KHN investigation shows. This happened in 2018 with drugs for cancer, migraines, HIV and a rare disease, and 10 other times in recent years, federal records show. In such cases, how these issues were discussed, negotiated and ultimately resolved is not public record.
[…]
Problems with drugs can take years to discover ― and then only after patients are injured. So, many health researchers say, more caution is warranted.
“They’re doing so few of these [FDA] inspections pre-market,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research. “The least they can do is listen to the ones they’re doing.”