When I see “the FDA has stated…” I automatically think it is probably a corrupt conclusion bought by some powerplayer to maximize their own profit instead of having to do with whether the statement is true or not. I’ve always viewed FDA as basically a council of a bunch of power players on boards of Big Capitalism companies like Pepsi that make decisions based on control and market share rather than health.
but I see posts now about how trump attacking FDA equals bad. So is my view of FDA wrong? Are they noncorrupt? Are they a necessary evil? Should they be thrown in a volcano and remade?
Is the FDA good or bad?
This is a false dichotomy.
Are they a necessary evil?
Framing things in moralistic terms just further obfuscates things.
The FDA is an enormous organization. It contains contradictions. It contains multitudes. Yes it is in a variety of ways compromised by the capitalist class, but that doesn’t mean the entire enterprise is without value. Black and white thinking isn’t going to cut it here.
Should they be thrown in a volcano and remade?
If you remade the FDA from scratch under capitalism, the result would be roughly the same, because the structures of political power would still be the same.
I think you’re confusing “false dichotomy” with “question”. You could argue this if they were talking more in depth about the organisation. But that’s not what’s happening here
A question framed as having a only two possible answers is a dichotomous question, and if the answer doesn’t fit that framing then the framing is false. It’s the wrong question to ask.
Ahh, I don’t think the question is to be taken that literally. And if you look around in the responses, you see plenty of people with more nuanced answers.
However, you can still have an opinion about the overall organisation regardless of the nuance.
Ideally the FDA should not be swayed by business interests, but everything controlled by our government is. That said, you want the FDA to exist and protect us from bullshit snake oil products and keep corporations from lacing our food with cheap poisons and carcinogens.
Trump gutting the organization makes it go from “could do better” to “actively subverting its own purpose.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration provides some historical context.
You can also read The Jungle by Sinclair
Without the FDA, you’re going to get sawdust in your bread and worse.
I’d like to specifically highlight the Swill Milk Scandal also.
The New York Times reported an estimate that in one year, 8,000 infants died from swill milk. The milk from swill-fed cows, produced in dense urban areas and often priced as low as 6 cents per quart, was affordable to most of New York City’s poorest residents. Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once farmers tied them, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases.
Sound familiar?
The Tammany Hall politician Alderman Michael Tuomey, known as “Butcher Mike”, defended the distillers vigorously throughout the scandal—in fact, he was put in charge of the Board of Health investigation… Tuomey assumed a central role in the ensuing investigations and … shielded the dairies and turned the hearings into one-sided exercises designed to make dairy critics and established health authorities look ridiculous.
Sound familiar? However people were so enraged that eventually laws passed regardless, and then finally at the federal level.
Most people don’t know about it, but this was basically THE incident that led to the modern FDA. It keeps coming up too. Recently we’ve had the raw milk fad, but also various melamine adulteration incidents (melamine is used to fool modern protein assays, but is basically the 21st century version of swill milk). There’s also occasional “grass roots” efforts to loosen the regulation on milk labeling, ostensibly for plant based milks, but I am suspicious this is astroturfing by the dairy industry because it’s exactly what they’ve been fighting for since the Pure Food and Drug Act passed.
Dr Harvey and his Poison Squad are a great read as well
Let say, hypothetically, a regulatory agency like the FDA, lets 50% of bad thing get approved.
Well what happens without the FDA?
100% of the bad things will be legal to sell.
So do you still want an FDA even if they are corrupt and let 50% of bad things go through?
And the FDA lets way less than 50% of bad things go through (I don’t have an exact number tho).
This is what people fail to take into account. Yeah, there are some departments that are going to be ran by incredibly incompetent people with almost no sane idea. But, that’s disregarding the people who’re not them who are still managing things and keeping said department from totally going batshit.
It’s innately good, but currently it’s swayed by corporations to allow things that are questionable. Corporations want it gone so consumers have no protections and they have the ability to use any cost cutting processes, harmful or not. Think hydroxychlroquine and Ivermectin during covid. Things like sugar pills could be sold as a cure for hypertension and people will die.
Your ability to question anything Trump says is a good thing. Usually, just go by the opposite of what he says.
