Health advocate says FDA must walk a ‘fine line’ to ensure affordable drugs are safe

Public health advocate Dinesh Thakur said in an interview that aired Wednesday that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is walking a fine line between making medicines affordable while ensuring they are of high quality. 

“The FDA walks a very fine line between trying to get affordable medicines to everybody who needs them, while also ensuring the quality,” Thakur told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on “Rising.”

Thakur discussed cases where the FDA has had to crack down on drug companies even amid worries about the supply of medicines.

“For the last several years we’ve seen significant shortages of drug supplies, specific medicines we consume, there are shortages primarily because we rely on one or two sources primarily overseas,” he continued. “So clearly the FDA doesn’t want to create a public health panic by trying to sort of limit the import of these drugs from overseas.”

But at the same time, they’ve also sort of taken very public and punitive actions telling these companies that what you guys are doing is fraud,” Thakur added. “The kind of behavior that is documented in the FDA’s observations, things like running an undisclosed quality control lab.”

Lowering prescription drug prices has become a rare point of bipartisanship in Washington as polls show a large majority of Americans are frustrated with the current cost of most drugs in the U.S. 

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released earlier this year found that 80 percent of voters said they thought drug prices were “unreasonable.” 

— Julia Manchester