The Case Against the FDA

New podcast episode & my own thoughts

Ep. 8: The Case Against the FDA

Stranded Technologies Podcast by Niklas Anzinger

In this episode, I talk to Raymond J. March from fdareview.org. They have made an impressive collection of arguments, history and studies on the FDA.

I can strongly recommend those, my episode with Jessica Flanigan and the work by Mike P. Sinn who wants to build a decentralised FDA DAO.

I would summarize my own arguments against the FDA in three parts.

1) Denying potentially life-saving treatment is a violation of rights.

2) You need to pass a very high bar to violate some people's rights to save others.

3) That bar is not met in reality, which makes it unjustifiable

In detail:

1) I can’t see how this is even controversial. The movie “Dallas Buyers Club” does a great job of depicting the real situation of HIV patients in the 1980s.

HIV patients were denied life-saving treatment that was successfully used and approved in France, Germany, Japan etc. and 10.000s died as a result.

2) What did they die for? The only argument I can think of is: to save others.

Without “default No” approval regulations, lots of patients would take bad drugs that kill them. That’s when you hear about sulfanilamide, thalidomite etc.

Analogy: you’re a doctor and can save five people’s lives, but only if you kill and harvest the organs of one healthy person.

Is it okay to kill one innocent person to save five people?

No, that seems cruel and wrong.

What if you save … like all of humanity for some convoluted reason? You save 1 million people's lives, 10.000 …

I don’t know if there’s a magic number, but it seems you could argue that you could do it to save a large number of people.

However, if you do it you better be very certain that you do. You can’t kill the person and then say “ooops, that didn’t work out.”

Seems also uncontroversial, right?

3) What could we use as a bar? How about the ratio of lives lost due to lack of treatment vs. lives saved from keeping bad drugs off the market?

If anything it could well be that the ratio is negative. Ray from FDAReview.org shows studies by economists that show we’re killing MORE people than we save.

But regardless of what you think the studies say, it’s hard to deny the evidence is mixed or controversial. And what should you do if you’re faced with the decision?

Don’t do anything.

It’s not okay to kill people if it’s not entirely clear that you do save lots of others. My favorite philosopher Michael Huemer has a great paper on that.

I rest my case.