Despite Conflicts, Drug Judges Continue to Vote Yea or Nay

By John M Grohol PsyD
April 26, 2006

The bad news: the FDA doesn’t care that professionals may have ties to the industries or drugs they’re asked to consult about.

The good news: it doesn’t matter, as the outcome of FDA review meetings would be the same if you removed those unscrupulous professionals from the voting.

Why does the FDA tolerate these conflicts of interest to begin with? — that’s the real question! It’s not enough to disclose them, why ask professionals to vote on drugs where they have a specific and sometimes significant financial interest in the drug’s success? If the FDA were some industry group, that would make sense. But as a supposedly neutral government agency, funded by the taxpayers, it makes no sense.

Medical experts who sit on FDA drug advisory committees frequently disclose financial conflicts of interest, but those disclosures rarely result in the members being disqualified from voting, a public watchdog group here reported.

However, even if members with financial conflicts were barred from voting, it would not substantially alter the decisions of those advisory panels, according to a review of FDA meeting records by members of Public Citizen, a Washington-based watchdog group. The results appeared in the April 26 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

At best, excluding members who disclose financial conflicts from voting up or down on new drug applications would simply change the margins of approval or disapproval, wrote Peter Lurie, M.D., M.P.H. and colleagues.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.