How badly has the FDA been lagging?

As a Johns Hopkins scientist who has conducted more than 100 clinical studies and reviewed thousands more from the scientific community at large, I can assure you that the agency’s review can be done within 24 to 48 hours without cutting any corners. They just need to work harder.

Contrary to popular belief, the FDA process is not hands-on—it does not interview vaccine trial patients or look under a microscope at the immune cells. It’s doing a statistical analysis and looking at data. For the vaccine trial, the data set is small and straightforward. If my research team, normally tasked with analyzing data on millions of patients, was asked to review the smaller Pfizer vaccine study of 43,000 patients, it would take about one hour.

The FDA also reviews manufacturing data from Pfizer on how they made the drug. But not only can that data be reviewed in a few hours, it should have been done months ago when it was available. While the FDA was waiting for Pfizer’s long-term vaccine results to come in, the agency should have anticipated this step and done it early.

The final step of the FDA review is to look at the outcomes of the study volunteers, including rates and severity of infection and side effects in the vaccine and placebo groups. Again, there is no plausible reason why this basic analysis cannot be done in 24 hours. The FDA and external scientists have a simple task: confirm or reject  the review already conducted by the trial’s independent data safety monitoring board before FDA submission.

That is from Marty Makary, who also details an ongoing history of FDA delays during the pandemic, starting with the very first Covid testing attempts from the University of Washington, which the FDA tried to nix, but continuing throughout.  And:

FDA insiders say the agency and its approximately 17,000 employees were dark for the four-day Thanksgiving holiday, including those working on the vaccine approval.

For those of us who lived through the 2008 financial crisis (agencies other than the Fed were not on the ball in response), or who have studied (and indeed practiced) the economics of bureaucracy for forty years, or who know the extensive literature on how the FDA operates, will not be surprised by a lack of urgency.  Or from the NYT:

Dr. Fauci said the politicization of the pandemic in his own country had led regulators to move a little more cautiously than the British, to avoid losing public support.

Sorry people, but I read that as “for political reasons we did not go more quickly.”

Here from Statnews journalists Matthew Herper and Nicholas Florko defend the FDA, going into considerable detail, do read it.  Here is one excerpt, in direct contradiction to some of the above:

The agency’s staff “were eating turkey sandwiches on Thanksgiving while reviewing documents,” Peter Marks, who heads the FDA center conducting the vaccine reviews, said on a Thursday webcast run by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Additionally, members of an FDA advisory committee that will convene Thursday to review the data and issue its recommendations, have expressed no desire to meet sooner. STAT spoke to four members of the panel and all said the agency should not try to move any faster.

My view is this: if your agency is saying “usually we move five to ten times more slowly,” it is highly unlikely their current procedures are optimized for speed.  It is fast organizations that are good at moving fast, right Usain Bolt?

We’re now at the point where Covid-19 is the single leading cause of death in this nation.

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