- Joined
- Jun 18, 2018
- Messages
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- Political Leaning
- Progressive
"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has had a long love affair with junk science... In a Senate Committee hearing, he cited a report that few scientists would recognize as science in order to justify an FDA safety review of the drug mifepristone, which is used in the majority of abortions in the United States. ...the top U.S. health official is prepared to rework—based at least in part on a poorly designed report that has not undergone scientific review—the government’s official guidance on a widely used drug.
The report that Kennedy cited was posted late last month to the website of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank focused on “pushing back against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives,” according to its website. The study’s authors, Jamie Bryan Hall, EPPC’s director of data analysis, and Ryan Anderson, the organization's president, are not health experts, and neither seems to have a record of publishing scientific research through peer review. Their methods deviated wildly from what is standard in the world of health research, and so, predictably, did their conclusions: In sharp contrast to dozens of trials conducted around the globe over decades, the EPPC report determined that mifepristone is a danger to women.
...When, in the past, the FDA has evaluated mifepristone’s safety—which it’s done several times since mifepristone’s initial approval, in 2000—it has expanded access to mifepristone rather than curtailed it. If the agency evaluates mifepristone again, and its staff are allowed to independently assess the science, the FDA could loosen its rules for mifepristone even more, Elizabeth Raymond, an ob-gyn and a researcher who specializes in mifepristone safety, told me. Plenty of data support using mifepristone later in pregnancy than is currently approved, for instance. But Upadhyay told me she worries that FDA Chief Marty Makary—who has previously claimed that fetuses can “resist” the tools of abortion by 20 weeks of gestation—or Kennedy could put their thumb on the scale to restrict mifepristone access, regardless of what FDA staff recommend."
Link
The Kennedy family must be retching.
The report that Kennedy cited was posted late last month to the website of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank focused on “pushing back against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives,” according to its website. The study’s authors, Jamie Bryan Hall, EPPC’s director of data analysis, and Ryan Anderson, the organization's president, are not health experts, and neither seems to have a record of publishing scientific research through peer review. Their methods deviated wildly from what is standard in the world of health research, and so, predictably, did their conclusions: In sharp contrast to dozens of trials conducted around the globe over decades, the EPPC report determined that mifepristone is a danger to women.
...When, in the past, the FDA has evaluated mifepristone’s safety—which it’s done several times since mifepristone’s initial approval, in 2000—it has expanded access to mifepristone rather than curtailed it. If the agency evaluates mifepristone again, and its staff are allowed to independently assess the science, the FDA could loosen its rules for mifepristone even more, Elizabeth Raymond, an ob-gyn and a researcher who specializes in mifepristone safety, told me. Plenty of data support using mifepristone later in pregnancy than is currently approved, for instance. But Upadhyay told me she worries that FDA Chief Marty Makary—who has previously claimed that fetuses can “resist” the tools of abortion by 20 weeks of gestation—or Kennedy could put their thumb on the scale to restrict mifepristone access, regardless of what FDA staff recommend."
Link
The Kennedy family must be retching.