Trust your doctors and their medicines?
[b]Think again![/b]
Unlike other safety-critical sectors, medicine safety is managed in relative terms, not absolute. Take aviation for example. Aircraft are designed to meet absolute safety targets such as the number of fatal incidents per million flying hours. In contrast, MHRA do not set safety targets for licensed medicines like ‘no more than x deaths or y serious adverse events’. Instead, MHRA licenses a medicine if the clinical trials data indicate that "the benefits outweigh the risks". That’s a charter for collateral damage to start with.
It gets worse. In 2014, Patrick Vallance (then working for GlaxoSmithKline) told Health Ministers that “In the future, medicines will come to market quicker with less data, with more research being conducted in the post-license phase.” Imagine Airbus or Boeing telling the Transport Secretary that they intend to ignore absolute design safety targets, do less testing on new aircraft and then find the missed safety problems once they’re in service. Or nuclear power plants. Or oil/gas rigs. It would be ridiculous, but bizarrely, it’s okay for medicines.
[i]This is FACT. Don't waste my and your time by asking who wrote it, the source, etc.[/i]
Unlike other safety-critical sectors, medicine safety is managed in relative terms, not absolute. Take aviation for example. Aircraft are designed to meet absolute safety targets such as the number of fatal incidents per million flying hours. In contrast, MHRA do not set safety targets for licensed medicines like ‘no more than x deaths or y serious adverse events’. Instead, MHRA licenses a medicine if the clinical trials data indicate that "the benefits outweigh the risks". That’s a charter for collateral damage to start with.
It gets worse. In 2014, Patrick Vallance (then working for GlaxoSmithKline) told Health Ministers that “In the future, medicines will come to market quicker with less data, with more research being conducted in the post-license phase.” Imagine Airbus or Boeing telling the Transport Secretary that they intend to ignore absolute design safety targets, do less testing on new aircraft and then find the missed safety problems once they’re in service. Or nuclear power plants. Or oil/gas rigs. It would be ridiculous, but bizarrely, it’s okay for medicines.
[i]This is FACT. Don't waste my and your time by asking who wrote it, the source, etc.[/i]
