Thats still 1366 people every day worldwide.
Think about that... If the committee whose job is approving this medicine get results in on Friday, but don't sit down to approve it till the following Monday, then 4098 people die unnecessarily.
Think about that... If the committee whose job is approving this medicine get results in on Friday, but don't sit down to approve it till the following Monday, then 4098 people die unnecessarily.
As soon as we have compelling data some discovery (medical or otherwise) might help lots of people, it should be almost a manhattan project type effort to get it into the hands of everyone worldwide asap.
For example 780,000 people died of polio between 1988 and today. Yet for all that time there has been a cheap, low risk, well tested, near 100% effective vaccine (many in fact). And polio is probably one of the better cases because governments and charities have been pushing it pretty hard.
Edit: Also, polio eradication efforts where a Manhattan project style heroic effort.
The system is actually really fast at getting promising cancer therapies into the hands of patients, especially when there aren't good alternatives.
Even if something isn't yet approved and the patient is ineligible for a clinical trial, an intervention can be offered to patients under compassionate grounds/special access.
regulations that are too loose may cause suffering and death while regulations that are too strict will delay or block prevent helpful treatments.
regulating healthcare is extremely difficult and largely a thankless job.
one solution is to approach national healthcare like national security and let people volunteer for treatments like volunteering for the army.
in short, overstate risks but let patients decide.
adopt cigarette-simple consent forms that state in bold words that an experimental treatment is likely to cause death or crippling side-effects like paralysis, blindness, stroke, Alzheimer's, or worse.
perhaps require multiple signatories from family members to guard against irrational behavior.
this protects the FDA while minimizing barriers to innovative therapies and treatments.
Then you have to battle the people selling highly marked up snake oil as an 'experimental' treatment - when every expert could tell you this treatment is already well known to be ineffective.
on the one hand, you may throttle promising treatments and on the other hand, you may increase useless treatments.
publishing results is one way to mitigate snake oil, though this obviously doesn't eliminate the problem.
the general framework is to maximize transparency and freedom.
letting people volunteer for national healthcare like they can for the national army increases freedom, but we must also increase transparency to combat snake oil.
Isn't that easily solved by requiring all experimental drugs and procedures to be provided free of charge with the cost footed solely by the provider?