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Comment by geggam | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, Me and most of America think the FDA approves things according to the highest bidder. This is one of the biggest contributing factors to the anti vax movement. |

The trust in our govt and all govt agencies is simply gone.

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If you keep posting unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN, we will ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Banning someone for expressing opinions you disagree with falls in line with some very bad history.

My comment wasnt unsubstantive by any definition of the word. There are countless examples of the govt doing things to lose trust and that is the root cause of many of societies issues.

Banning people from a forum for expressing that thought seems counter to the guidelines you post.

The issue isn't agreeing or disagreeing. I don't have the energy to agree or disagree with most comments that get posted here. If that sounds odd, imagine how weary you'd be after doing this thirty thousand times, which apparently I have by now.

The comment was against the site guidelines. Provocative, grandiose claims on controversial topics are flamebait.

You pay hardly anything to the agency -- their fees are a rounding error compared to all your other costs. And while it's valuable for some jobs to have on your resume that you used to work there, so many people have done so over the years that it doesn't raise any salaries; it's merely that for certain regulatory roles it's good to have someone who knows what it's like to receive the filings so you can make them clear.

It's utterly unlike the legislator->lobbyist revenue model or, say, the Department of the Interior where the regulators were doing drugs and having sex with employees of the companies they were regulating. It's more like "oh, you worked on DevOps at $LARGE_COMPANY_X, our needs are similar to theirs." Not the magic path to riches.

When employees at the FDA leave and take positions at one of the companies they had a hand in approving something for, at an increased salary. The appearance of impropriety is blatant.

Regardless of it actually happening or not it looks terrible. This should never happen

> Regardless of it actually happening or not it looks terrible. This should never happen

I understand the problem you're describing, but consider what you're asking for: people with competence and experience should be barred from taking jobs that require competence and experience? Non-competes have the same problem.

Think of it like a judge. You should be recusing yourself of anything that looks improper.

Public servants have a higher standard they need to adhere to and they simply aren't, it is endemic in the public space.

Public servants are not compensated for that higher standard.

I’m not “compensated” financially when I pick up litter I encounter when walking around but that doesn’t dissuade me from doing so.

When picking up trash substantially impacts your lifetime earnings, that might matter.

I am not in this field, but I guess that as an employee at the FDA you approve drugs for all the big pharma companies, which aside from the FDA are the major employers that value their skillset. It may be that if you prohibit FDA employees to transition to one of the big pharma companies, you're telling them that they can either work at the FDA forever or have to leave their field

Yes, there is a price to pay for being a public servant.

You realize they're not actually servants, right?

"Take a job with the Fed, sign up for a lifetime of lower income so that HN can nod sagely about avoiding the appearance of impropriety" is a recipe to get no one to ever work for the government.

The attitude they aren’t servants to the public is part of the problem

“Hand in approving” is an important factor: approval is such a complex process no one person is really decisive, except possibly at the very very beginning.

Drug companies used to hire multiple trucks simply to deliver their submissions.

> Me and most of America think the FDA approves things according to the highest bidder.

Why do you think this?

Here is one example

https://ivn.us/2013/02/11/the-revolving-door-fda-and-the-mon...

Revolving doors between regulators and industry can raise conflict of interest concerns, but this is not at all the same problem that you alluded to above.

Sure it is. Stocks and salaries are definitely financial incentives.

Highest bidder of what?

That really isn’t the truth though. What should be done?

Transparency, in all levels of government.

And quit equating money to speech. Lobbying is legalized bribery and everyone knows it.

No, the trust is not gone, and the opinions of an uneducated fringe groups such as the anti-vaxers do not represent the majority in any way. The only reason they get any coverage is because of the perverse click-bait atmosphere of news. Its the tabloidization of news.

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