FDA Regulations Kill

Paul Howard and Yevgeniy Feyman in Health Affairs:

Meningitis is a terrible disease that can kill its victims in a single day. About 4,100 new cases are diagnosed annually in the U.S., with a mortality rate of more than 10 percent. Even with treatment, survivors are often left with serious side effects that can include brain damage and limb loss…

Swiss drug manufacturer Novartis has developed a vaccine — Bexsero — that specifically targets this strain of meningitis; the drug has already been approved for use by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the European Union’s equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And within about nine months the FDA allowed Princeton University to offer the vaccine on campus to its students.

But the drug is not available elsewhere in the U.S. And it won’t be until Novartis completes a costly phase III trial. The authors ask:

The natural question to ask is why the FDA shouldn’t just approve a product already approved for the European Union, Canada, and Australia, while monitoring the vaccine (as all vaccines are already monitored — Bexsero is being actively monitored in the E.U.) through postmarket surveillance records? (Indeed, the more than 5,000 patients vaccinated at Princeton are close to the total number of patients tested in the EMA required trials.)

[Cross-posted at Psychology Today and John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog]

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For more on the health hazards of current FDA practices, see FDAReview.org. For the pivotal alternative to Obamacare, please see the Independent Institute’s widely acclaimed book: Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman.