Very interesting when people complain about "corruption" when money suddenly cannot buy favors.
It's not entitled for approval. It's entitled to have an unbiased approval process.
By all means, if there's a good test that's lacking or clear problems that can be demonstrated I absolutely want the FDA to use it's power to stop a drug from coming to market or even pull and existing drug from the market.
The problem I have is that when the FDA acts in an illegitimate manner, it opens the doors to questions like "do we even need this institution" or "should the power of the FDA be reduced." Both of which are things that are both bad and dangerous.
The FDA doesn't need it's powers curbed, it needs competent leadership that will follow the data.
And NO this is not about "money suddenly cannot buy favors". This is about illegitimate denial of even a hearing because the person occupying the agency's chair promotes idiotic conspiracy theories in order to cultivate a particularly stupid slice of the voting base. The corruption here is political.
The ONLY argument I am making is:
1) The govt agency should AT LEAST give a fair review of all applications, especially when the same agency previously gave guidance, which the applicants followed, on how the studies should be run.
2) The govt agency should NOT be issuing rare "Refusal To File" denials based on an obvious and unsubstantiated bias against a particular technology (in this case mRNA) because the leader of the agency is a conspiracy theorist.
If you aren't going to read the article before commenting, at least read the comment before replying.
The article was basically economists saying the way FDA is doing things is bad for business.
Which is also what you said as well.