Comments on: Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy

By: Marksman2000

Marksman2000 — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:25:27 +0000

And this is the guy who headed up the agency that will decide how safe male birth control pills are? The pills you people are so crazy about?

Okay.

By: belledame222

belledame222 — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:48:26 +0000

Just marvelling again at the turnover rate in this administration. people come and go so quickly around here…

pity the replacement inevitably is someone just as bad if not worse.

By: Bitter Scribe

Bitter Scribe — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:04:23 +0000

This part of the article left me scratching my head:

[Crawford] gave congressional testimony encouraging manufacturers to relabel serving sizes to give calorie counts greater prominence.

Believe it or not, that was actually a pro-consumer initiative. The FDA was trying to rein in a favorite trick of a lot of food companies, especially salty snack and candy marketers. They put out packages that contain twice or more of the “reference amount”–i.e., the federally determined serving size–but give the calorie count just for the reference amount. This is dishonest because most consumers will scarf the whole bag at once, which these companies know damn well.

Don’t get me wrong–this Crawford seemed perfectly useless, and I’m glad he’s getting at least a little embarrassed. But implying that his testimony in this matter was a conflict of interest is off base, I think.

By: Frumious B

Frumious B — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 17:39:18 +0000

FDA answerable to the people? Now that scares me as much as an industry influence. DSHEA is bad enough, you want to do away with all clinical trials? ‘cuz that’s what’ll happen.

By: Asher Abrams

Asher Abrams — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:44:51 +0000

What a pig. Good riddance to him. I wish I thought the FDA corruption stopped there. The corrupt, industry-driven culture of the FDA needs a thorough housecleaning. We need an agency that’s answerable to the people, not to industry lobbies.

By: Kristjan Wager

Kristjan Wager — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 05:52:33 +0000

I was initially shocked to read the article – such things would be easy to find out with a minimum of background checks. However, then I remembered that we are talking about an official appointed by the same administration that has a Vice President that still receive a huge paycheck from a company that gets a number of lucrative government contracts.