Free Republic

On March 21, 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted out a plea to the CDC and FDA to allow doctors to treat COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin (AZT). Both are cheap and effective medications that the medical community had decades of experience using for various illnesses. Recently, another study demonstrated increased survival rates when HCQ was given in combination with AZT to those who were severely ill with COVID-19.What should bother Americans is that this is not the first study that demonstrated the effectiveness of HCQ. According to a website that has been tracking studies on early treatments for...

Something like 20 years ago the FDA overhauled its drug approval process for cancer patients. Hospitals had new experimental drugs, but were forced to withhold them from study control group patients while watching them die. The revised rules said oncologists can test drugs on terminally ill patients without feeding placebos to control group participants. Trump further changed the rules to allow experimental cancer treatments which have only been tested safe, not effective, to terminally ill patients. Trump overruled the previous FDA reasoning which said that we can't feed experimental drugs to terminally ill patients because it could kill them. Today...

Making Drugs Safe and Available without the FDA January 1997 Executive Summary There is widespread agreement that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needs reforming. The drug approval process in the United States is too slow, too expensive and too restrictive. The FDA delays the introduction of new drugs for up to 12 years and does not publish standards of safety or effectiveness that any drug can meet to ensure its approval. As a result: Thousands of patients die because lifesaving drugs and medical devices available elsewhere are not yet approved for use in the United States. Surgery,...