After the deal on filibusters and Newt and Hillary's unlikely pairing on health IT, politics resumed more or less as usual this week in Washington. That wasn't necessarily good news for the pharma industry. The "safe" choice for the FDA, Lester Crawford, finds his confirmation still on hold despite apparently not being a naughty boy on the taxpayer's dime. FDA gadfly David Graham won widespread support for suggesting that the new drug safety overview process was deeply flawed, and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley joined with a Democrat to criticize the entire relationship between big pharma and doctors. Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson, previously thought of as being the purest big pharma out there, was discovered to be fudging on its own drug safety issues.
If big pharma can't get exactly what it wants out of this current adminstration and Congress, it's unlikely to get a more receptive audience in future. Perhaps it's time for big pharma to show a little leadership and come up with a path to the future on drug safety that we can all agree is reasonable. - Matthew