And Thalidomide wasn't approved in the US whereas it was approved in Europe and Canada. So... your point is stupid.
How about you engage the question of whether the costs and benefits of our current policy outweigh the costs and benefits of a looser policy directly, instead of just tossing a rhetorical hand grenade into the debate ("look! mangled babies!") and running away? It would look something like this:
"The number of thalidomide birth defects estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000 according to Wikipedia. Given the rate of cancer death in this country, a net one year delay applied across all effective therapies compounded across many years almost certainly outweighs your one example. Excessively liberal medicine policy may kill and maim, but so does excessively conservative policy; it's not a pure win by any means. Are you so sure that our policy is really the best policy?"
This isn't a question you can actually determine the best answer to with a series of anecdotes. You have to actually do a statistical analysis. I have not done this statistical analysis, so all I can say is something like "I'd bet money we're being too conservative", or "My libertarian leanings lead me to say we should have a more liberal acceptance policy on the grounds of personal freedom", but just screaming about deformed babies with no other analysis like this is an emotional tactic that should be replaced with something better. Too many people's lives are on the line for this debate to be shut down with "won't someone please think of the babies?"
But that's not quite the issue in question, eh? My understanding is, you can't get the unapproved anti-venom even if you are conscious and you are about to die without it anyway, by doctors opinion.
I personally think that the FDA approval process is bogus too. I'm just trying to expand the discussion a bit.
Yeah, maybe there should be some rules about corner cases like that (what to do with you if you are unconscious and there is nobody to ask about what you'd want to be done to you). And maybe one way to get those rules written and enforced is to have people on government payroll for that. Or maybe we should just leave it to the ER folks. But, frankly, I think it would be nice to fix the obvious big wrongs first, and worry about all this stuff later.
I'm sure this is a debatable 'fact'/statistic.
If you want to cut down the number of people taking dangerous drugs, ban doctors from prescribing non FDA-approved drugs and ban companies from marketing them. However, I have only contempt for people who want to put their fellow citizens in jail for making their own medical decisions.