Often the worst of Washington is a bipartisan affair, but late last night a solid Democratic voting block stopped legislation that would allow terminally ill patients the ability to seek help from non-FDA approved treatments.
Needing a two-thirds vote to expedite right to try legislation, 140 Democrats voted against patient rights. Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the senior Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, defended his vote by saying "By defeating this bill tonight, we protected patients and supported F.D.A.’s continued role in approving experimental treatments that may help save a patient’s life.”
Yes, in the twisted world of Washington politicians limiting the choices of dying patients is "protecting them."
While Democrats desperately clung to the narrative that non-FDA approved drugs represented "false hope", we are given examples every day of how absurd this notion truly is. Rather than being some sort of scientific seal of approval, the FDA approval process is a bureaucratic nightmare, taking years of testing and millions of dollars to complete. The numbers of lives lost due to the FDA's actions is incalculable. As Timothy Terrell has noted:
The American public tends to think of the FDA as a protector against dangerous side effects, as we saw with Thalidomide decades ago. But how many Americans have died because of lags in approval? A five-year delay in bringing the antibiotic Septra to the US market may have cost 80,000 lives. A lag in the approval of beta blockers may have cost 250,000 lives.1 The FDA's ban on advertising aspirin as an effective preventer of first heart attacks may have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year. But because it's easy to identify those harmed by side effects, and difficult to identify who might have been saved by earlier introduction of Septra to the marketplace, the FDA tends to be over-conservative in its regulatory process.
In spite of yesterday's vote, this right to try legislation isn't dead yet. Legislators supporting the measure have made it clear that it will be reintroduced and go through the standard voting process. Of course this delay, coupled with what will be required to get it through the Senate, could prove fatal for many of Americans who could possibly benefit from medical freedom.
