Disgraced Former FDA Official Now Marketing Lilly Drug

As a 33-year-old Wall Street insider known for recommending hot medical stocks, many were surprised when physician Scott Gottlieb was named FDA deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs in 2005.”

Gottlieb has an orientation which belies the goal of the FDA,” said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”The appointment comes out of nowhere,” said former FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy.

“Anything but a reassuring signal,” said Time magazine.

As critics feared, soon after assuming the number two FDA position, Gottlieb had to recuse himself from resource planning for a possible bird flu epidemic because of financial ties to Roche and Sanofi-Aventis. He also had to bow out of work related to Eli Lilly, Proctor & Gamble and five other drug companies.

When three people in a multiple sclerosis drug trial lost blood platelets and one died, he called stopping the study “an overreaction” because the disease not the drug might be to blame.

The truth is, the FDA’s required trials reveal limited information,” Gottlieb wrote presciently in an oped in the Chicago Tribune in 2005. “In many cases, it is only after…drugs are on the market for many years and given to thousands of patients that their true benefits (sic.) are revealed.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/27/6024/