Saint Tom (Regan) has a terrific ally
and statistician in (Former TPA Loon O’ The Month Award Winner) Derek Nash,
doesn't he?
Digging a little to uncover the
depth of Derek's clumsy, inept lying has revealed that Saint Tom, and all "ARAs"
who rely on the GAO's 1990 report on the FDA's drugs testing procedures, are
lying by omission FOUR - count 'em, 4 - times.
Here is Saint Tom's citation of the
GAO's 1990 report, in his book co-authored with Carl Cohen:
Professor Cohen surely must know that many drugs that have cleared animal
tests are later found to be toxic for humans. A 1990 report issued by the
General Accounting Office found that approximately 50 percent of the
FDA-approved drugs investigated either had to be taken off the
market or relabeled because of their toxic effects on the people who were using
them.
Big Lie #1:
The first instance of
"AR" lying is the most well known: they omit to say that the
withdrawn/relabeled drugs were tested on humans in addition to being tested on
animals. If the later determination of unsafety of a drug is said to
invalidate animal testing, it
necessarily must be seen as invalidating the human testing phases
(plural), as well.
Big Lie #2:
The second big lie concerns the
absolute number of drugs that are withdrawn or relabeled, choosing to focus
misleading attention on the percentage that this
represents of all drugs that are
investigated for adverse drug experience (ADE). 50% sounds like an
alarmingly high number...until you obtain information from the FDA itself that
reveals that from 1981 through 2000, 543 new molecular entities were approved
for
marketing, and only 14, or 2.6%,
were withdrawn for safety reasons.
By omitting to mention the absolute
number of drugs investigated and then withdrawn or relabeled, "ARAs"
are again lying. In fact, as the FBR page reveals, quoting Neal
Barnard of PCRM, only 198 drugs were investigated in the 10 year period
(1976-1985) covered by the GAO report, and only 102 of those were
withdrawn/relabeled.
Lie #2 is somewhat a lie of commission:
Saint Tom the Untruthful begins his passage by saying that "Professor Cohen
surely must know that many drugs that have cleared animal tests are later found
to be toxic for humans." There are two lies of commission here:
first, in saying that "many" drugs later have problems; second, in
saying that they are later found to be "toxic". In fact, Saint
Tom doesn't know that they were found to be "toxic" at all; and since
only half of the drugs investigated are withdrawn or relabeled, and
most of those are relabeled, his
claim that the drugs are found to be "toxic" appears to be a lie.
Big Lie #3:
Saint Tom, and his trusty
statistician Derek, and other "AR" liars basing their lies on the GAO
report next lie by omitting to say that of all the drugs that are withdrawn or
relabeled, the overwhelming majority are relabeled and remain available for use.
The relabeling might be something as relatively innocuous as "don't use
this drug if you are already taking drug 'X'." But drug 'X' might not
even have been on the market, or even conceived, when the relabeled drug was
tested earlier.
Big Lie #4:
Finally (or maybe not), Saint Tom
and other "AR" liars omit to tell the listener or reader that
The recommendations made by GAO at
the end of its report had to do with better ways to use information from
clinical trials, not the animal tests that precede them.
http://www.fbresearch.org/scapegt.html
Four colossal "AR" lies of omission, all contained in ONE miscitation
of the GAO report.
Predictably, PeTA repeats the same tiresome, false claims based on the 1990 GAO
study, with a novel and intentionally misleading twist of their own.
Drug Testing: Pain, Not Gain
More than 205,000 new drugs are marketed worldwide every year (1), most after
undergoing the most archaic and unreliable testing methods still in use:
animal studies. The current system of drug testing places consumers in a
dangerous predicament. According to the General Accounting
Office, more than half of the prescription drugs approved by the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) between 1976 and 1985 caused serious side effects that
later caused the drugs to be either relabeled or removed from the market.
Drugs approved for children were twice as likely to have serious post-approval
risks as other medications.(2)
http://www.peta-online.org/mc/facts/fsae11.html
Their source for the 205,000 figure
is something called "Naked Empress: Or the Great Medical Fraud", by
someone named Hans Ruesch. In a side note, this figure, along with the
standard sleazy misrepresentation of the GAO's study, turns up all over the
Internet. But Ruesch's book was published in 1982, while the GAO report
was published in 1990. The appearance of this number as part of a
deliberately false interpretation of the GAO
report is the classic example of
what I mean when I refer to dishonest activists simply copying one another's
pages as their "sources".
But the obvious problem with the 205,000 figure is that it is intended
deliberately to overstate the magnitude of the falsely claimed
"failure" of testing on animals. In fact, the U.S. FDA, and all
other national drug certification agencies, approve molecular compounds,
not branded products. And according to the FDA's own pages, the number of
compounds approved over a 20-year interval was only 543:
During the period 1981 to 2000, we approved 543 new molecular entities.
Fourteen of these, or 2.6 percent, were withdrawn for safety reasons after joint
FDA-manufacturer review. The record of withdrawal of drugs approved in recent
years is similar to previous periods when we were criticized for taking too long
to review drug applications. Nonetheless,
the increased number of drugs and the large number of patients taking multiple
drugs have created the potential for more drug safety problems.
http://www.fda.gov/cder/reports/RTN2000/RTN2000-3.HTM
- DrugRecallsandWithdraw
For the rest, PeTA is just doing
the garden variety "AR" lying by omission, first failing to point out
that any withdrawn or relabeled drug also passed at least three phases of
testing on humans before being approved by the FDA, and also omitting to point
out that the overwhelming majority of the drugs that had problems were relabeled
and remained available for prescription to humans.
There's another point I'm curious
about. In the U.S., the FDA also exercises approval authority over
veterinary drugs. I would be very interested to know if any of the drugs
referred to in the 1990 GAO study were veterinary drugs.