Last week the Center for Public Integrity reported that "Through an apparent loophole in agency rules the Food and Drug Administration has allowed its employees to receive more than $1.3 million in sponsored travel since 1999 from groups closely tied to pharmaceutical and medical device companies."
The center also identified ten FDA officials who took more than 25 trips each, often serving as speakers at the events they attended. The FDA safety board, created after the Vioxx debacle, appears to be in particular trouble. Seventeen of the board's 29 members have taken more than a combined 160 privately sponsored trips.
Today, CNN revealed that "Big Pharma could land billions of dollars in annual sales that it would have lost to generic competitors thanks to a Food and Drug Administration backlog of applications for generic drugs."
The reason for this is that the FDA's Office of Generic Drugs, which reviews applications for generic drugs, apparently faces a bottleneck of some 800 applications.
I can't help but wonder if more generic drugs wouldn't get approved if Big Pharma didn't pay FDA staffers to stay away from their desks . . .
But of course, they would never do something like that, would they?
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