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The U.S. Congress has reached agreement on a House / Senate compromise regarding the recently passed FDA reform legislation that aims to improve the safety of pharmaceuticals. The bill will now move to the White House where it is expected to be signed by the President.

While this new FDA reform bill still lacks crucial safety provisions for U.S. consumers (such as banning direct-to-consumer drug advertisements), it at least kept two key provisions intact that may help prevent drug companies from engaging in the routine deceptions that have propped up industry profits at the expense of public safety:

1) Big Pharma will not have immunity to lawsuits brought by consumers harmed by dangerous prescription drugs. As you may know, drug companies (and even the White House and FDA) have lobbied for granting drug companies blanket immunity from all injury lawsuits. This would have been the ultimate insult to American consumers, but a huge victory for drug companies (whose products arguably are the most dangerous products currently being consumed by Americans, with the exception of tobacco products).

2) Drug companies will eventually be required to publicly disclose the results of drug trials by publishing them on the internet. As NaturalNews reported in an article published yesterday, the White House strongly opposed this provision, and drug companies, of course, are terrified by the idea that they might actually have to disclose the results of their drug trials. They would rather keep consumers ignorant of the safety of pharmaceuticals, it seems. But this new agreement by the House and Senate will, it is claimed, require drug companies to start publishing these clinical trial results online.

Of course, all this doesn't mean that drug companies won't find some new way to game the system, deceive consumers and block meaningful FDA reform. Nearly every clinical trial published today is already rigged to deliver results that favor drug companies, and it is a well known fact in the drug testing industry that individuals and companies who don't deliver favorable results quickly end up jobless or blackballed from the industry. Thus, there's a huge flaw in this idea that publicly publishing clinical trial results will instantly make drug companies honest. The science is dishonest in the first place, and clinical trials are rigged from the start to produce favorable results while minimizing the emergence of dangerous side effects.

Not much reform in the FDA reform bill

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Related Articles: • Reputation of the FDA in shambles after Vioxx scandal; calls for wholesale FDA reform gain momentum • FDA tyranny to become law: HR.2900 analysis by Richards and Adams • FDA named "Fraud and Drug Administration" by consumer health advocacy group	Take Action: Support NaturalNews.com Email this article to a friend Share this article on: NewsVine | digg | del.icio.us Permalink to this article: http://www.NaturalNews.com/022048_FDA_reform_America_drug_companies.html Reprinting this article: Non-commercial use OK, cite NaturalNews.com with clickable link. Embed article link: (copy HTML code below): <a href = "http://www.NaturalNews.com/022048_FDA_reform_America_drug_companies.html">Senate, House agree on FDA reform; key provisions remain but FDA remains threat to America</a>