Dr. Chuck Bennett, a physician who treats end-stage cancer patients, recently reported on terrible happenings at the FDA that should destroy any trust we still have in that organization. Every year prostate cancer kills 30,000 Americans, and “in the last 45 years just one drug has been approved by the FDA for the treatment of these terminal patients, and that is a chemotherapy that is so marginally effective and wrought with devastating side effects (sometimes lethal) that most men either don’t want it or refuse it altogether. Then along came Provenge, an immunotherapy to treat prostate cancer that has demonstrated safety and efficacy in all of six studies and has virtually no side effects.
Dr. Bennett reported that on March 29, 2007 an FDA advisory panel consisting of outside experts reviewed Provenge for the FDA and overwhelmingly recommended approval of Provenge. “What followed appeared to border on the bizarre. Two of the 17 panel members who had been placed on the panel under suspiciously orchestrated circumstances carried out an unheard of public and visceral campaign against Provenge, sometimes with factually incorrect data. These two doctors, it turns out, had conflicts of interest that for some reason they failed to disclose on their conflict of interest waiver application as required by federal law.
“Provenge is an immunotherapy and not a chemotherapy. This is the first time a treatment for end-stage disease was recommended by an FDA expert advisory committee but rejected by the FDA. If this is graft, it is not garden variety by any means; tens of thousands of American men are suffering and dying. After the FDA declined to approve Provenge, I watched strong, grown men cry. In private, I wept, remembering family members, veterans of World War II, sturdy men withered by prostate cancer, then ravaged by the meager treatments available to them,’ wrote Bennett.
The FDA is at the top of the pyramid in the medical industrial complex and this story shows the utter corruption there that can affect your life. Beware, enter this complex with care.
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