"How safe and effective is the FDA?"

UChicago lawprof Richard Epstein comments, on the 100th anniversay of the FDA, on how the agency has lost its proper mission.

"The systematic error of the FDA is to overstate the risk of conspicuous losses and to overlook the major, if hidden, benefits forgone by unnamed persons when new therapies are kept off the market and older ones are removed at the first sign of trouble. The vestigial limbs from Thalidomide anyone can understand. The hidden spread of a liver tumor that some drug might have arrested if the FDA hadn't kept that drug off the market does not etch itself into the public consciousness in the same way."