> Many people died during that golden age
I've written about this before. Basically, the FDA's position is that it's better for 10,000 patients to die of neglect than have 1 patient die of quackery.
Drug development is in shambles because the FDA requires >99.99% confidence that pharmaceutical companies are not selling quack cures. Do we need that level of confidence? Especially for cancer, is that degree of confidence warranted? Is the process efficient?
There's legitimate fear of quack medicine -- and then there's whatever the FDA is gripped by, which seems to me a lot like insanity.
> PFAS
Not exactly something that goes through the usual drug approval process. What other problems come to mind?
There's a lot of quackery around these days, especially with regard to tech and finance.
There's quite of bit of quackery just with nutritional supplements, too. And people and companies try to bypass the FDA all the time with fake cures, the COVID-19 epidemic was just the latest version of that.
The FDA is over-zealous with their testing requirements. However, without them we will see an explosion of fake cures for everything. The legitimate pharma companies will lose money, or otherwise start cutting a lot of corners in the pursuit of profit.
We need something like the FDA to keep things in check.