When former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford suddenly and unexpectedly retired late last week, many observers were relieved. Crawford had developed a well-deserved reputation for following the Bush model of allowing ideology to dictate policy. In Crawford’s specific case, that meant disconcerting FDA policy on everything from emergency contraception to drug reimportation to regulation of the pharmaceutical industry.
With Crawford gone, the administration finally had a chance to set the FDA on the right track, right? Well, they may have had a chance, but they decided to stick to the standard game plan. As Nico at Think Progress noted today, Bush is replacing one FDA commissioner with a reputation for rigid adherence to an ideological agenda with another.
[Dr. Andrew] Von Eschenbach is currently the director of the National Cancer Institute. Within months of his appointment in 2002, the institute abruptly altered a fact sheet on its website “that for years stated the absence of a link between abortion and breast cancer.” Under von Eschenbach, the language was changed to suggest that tests disproving the abortion/breast cancer link were “inconclusive.”
This sent the scientific community into an uproar. Numerous studies, including a massive New England Journal of Medicine study of 1.5 million Danish women, have discounted any connection between abortion and breast cancer. Yet right-wingers continue to push the link as a way to frighten women considering having an abortion.
After enormous pressure, and a statement by 100 institute scientists, von Eschenbach backed down. Yet von Eschenbach’s promotion shows that the days of ideology trumping science at the FDA aren’t over. (Now it’s time for the media to pay attention — not a single mainstream story on the FDA personnel changes has mentioned this controversy.)
Sounds like Von Eschenbach will fit right in.