On the evening of September 29, 1994 Reginald Green and his wife Margaret were driving on the A3 motorway while vacationing in Southern Italy. Their two young children, 7-year old Nicholas and 4-year old Eleanor, were asleep in the backseat when tragedy struct. Two men thought to be members of the Italian mafia mistook their rental car for one belonging to a jeweler. They followed closely behind Green’s rental car and then pulled alongside. Their faces masked, they shouted at Green in Italian. Green accelerated to get away. When Green didn’t pull over the men fired shots into the back of his rental car striking his son Nicholas in the head. Although mafia violence was not uncommon in Southern Italy the fact that a young boy was killed while vacationing with his family shocked the nation. The police spared no expense hunting down Nicholas’ killers. Francesco Mesiano and Michele Iannello were arrested three days later and ultimately convicted of his murder.
Category: Policy & Legislation
Failing to Save Lives: Why Old Drugs Don’t Get Approved for New Uses
There are literally thousands of old, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs that may have other potential uses besides the conditions for which they were approved. The trouble it: nobody has the profit motive to fully investigate them. Even when there are studies the FDA is suspect. The agency understands there will be little monitoring or follow-up studies reviewing long-term efficacy.
Wokeness Invades the Doctor’s Office
This is Dr. Stanley Goldfarb in the Wall Street Journal:
The National Library of Medicine database shows more than 2,700 recent papers on “racism and medicine,” which generally purport to show physician bias leading to racial disparities in health outcomes. Yet the most commonly cited studies are shoddily designed, ignore such critical factors as pre-existing conditions, or reach predetermined and sensationalized conclusions that aren’t supported by reported results. These papers in turn are used to source even more shoddy research.
Will The FDA ever approve OTC hearing aids?
It’s been nearly five years since President Trump signed into law the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act. The bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), was intended to make hearing amplification devices much cheaper and more readily accessible. The Act gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) three years to formulate a guidance proposal and an extra six months to collect comments and issue final guidance. Then COVID got in way. Or was it bureaucratic inertia that got in the way. Perhaps it was both.