OLMSTED ON AUTISM: THE FDA RISKS YOUR KID'S LIFE EVERY DAY

By Dan Olmsted

Now there's a sensational headline! Only a blogger would get away with printing something so palpably unfair to one of the premier federal agencies, an agency with a long tradition of protecting the public's health. Right?

Well, here's the recent headline from The New York Times: "Advisers Say F.D.A.'s Flaws Put Lives At Risk." I just took out the attribution -- because in effect the FDA is saying that about itself through the expert panel it created -- and made it personal: not "lives" in the abstract but YOUR KID's life.

The advisers' report, The Times says, "concluded that the F.D.A. is poorly equipped to protect the public health." Other than that, things are just fine.

Now, mind you, this is not fundamentally the FDA's fault, according to these reports. Congress has happily underfunded and hamstrung the agency for years in partial payment for the largesse of their pharma friends, leading to such debacles as Vioxx.

Then there's the other V -- vaccines. The FDA blew it bigtime on mercury in vaccines, as the famous quote from an FDA official lamented: Health authorities could be accused of "being 'asleep at the switch' for decades by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products." (It's hard to see how that is a funding issue, given that one person could do the calculations in a few minutes.)

To review: The FDA cannot be counted on to protect us or identify even a blatant threat to public health like organic mercury in childhood vaccines, according to the FDA itself. Yet it approves vaccines and, along with the CDC, monitors reports of adverse events. The CDC cannot be counted on either, because it is the same agency that recommends the vaccine schedule -- a conflict so blatant that Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., keeps introducing legislation to take safety review away from the agency. But what does he know -- he's just a medical doctor whose constituents all of a sudden started talking about all their children with autism.

So, who exactly is it in the United States government that can be trusted with the job of figuring out whether vaccines are safe and effective -- SAFE and effective, the criteria for approving drugs and allowing them to stay on the market?

Exactly no one.