Har­vard profs main­tain that the FDA's re­cent ac­tions on Covid-19 de­val­ue the gold stan­dard and threat­en pub­lic trust

The FDA’s de­ci­sion to pro­vide an emer­gency use au­tho­riza­tion for a pair of sus­pect malar­ia drugs threat­ens to de­rail the US’ well-known gold stan­dard for drug eval­u­a­tions while erod­ing the pub­lic’s re­spect for the agency — es­sen­tial for main­tain­ing con­fi­dence in the ef­fi­ca­cy and safe­ty of ther­a­pies put on the mar­ket.

That’s the bot­tom line from a pair of Har­vard pro­fes­sors — Ben­jamin Rome and Jer­ry Avorn, a fre­quent FDA crit­ic — who tack­led the FDA in an op-ed for its re­cent work on Covid-19 drugs in the pages of the New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine.

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