Drug brakes: is a slow FDA a safe FDA?

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Citings - Brief article

EVER SINCE Congress helped speed up the Food and Drug Administration's rate of drug approvals in 1992, critics have complained that the relatively quick approval times put patients in danger. So when Merck's Vioxx was shown to cause heart attacks in 2004, a chastened agency slowed the process considerably. In September The New York Times reported that the 2005 approval rate was the slowest in a decade.

So what's the correlation between approval times and drug safety? According to a 2005 report by the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development, there isn't one.

Researchers say the percentage of drugs withdrawn for safety, reasons was 3.2 percent in the 1980s, rose slightly in...