The Washington Post reported that major pharmaceutical companies funded a “scientific panel that shaped the federal government’s policy for testing the safety and effectiveness of painkillers.” The drug makers “paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to affect the thinking of the Food and Drug Administration, according to hundreds of e-mails obtained by a public records request.” According to the emails, the companies “paid as much as $25,000 to attend any given meeting of the panel, which had been set up by two academics to provide advice to the FDA on how to weigh the evidence from clinical trials.” The Post notes that patient advocates argued that the emails “suggest that the regulators had become too close to the companies trying to crack into the $9 billion painkiller market in the United States.”
From the American Association for Justice news release.
