Simple, voluntary, compassionate, and potentially life saving, everything the FDA fears.
Free to Choose Medicine would allow patients, in consultation with their doctors, to try known safe treatments not approved by the FDA when there are no alternatives, or the approved alternatives have been exhausted. In return, the treatment and results would be placed anonymously in a database so the experience with the treatment could be shared and evaluated by drug makers and other doctors contemplating their use.
This would be not unlike Phase 3 efficacy testing on a volunteer basis, and could be done in parallel with conventional Phase 3 testing.
Under this system, we would have known for certain by June in HCQ was a help pr not, and under what treatment regimens. We could have started vaccinating those willing to take the chance in October, and be near done by now as we would have been testing with hundreds instead of tens of thousands.
It’s such a good idea the bureaucracy will never let it happen.
To my thinking, it is astonishing that “Free to Choose Medicine” should even require invention.
As a practical matter, of course it must be. As a cultural matter, the necessity is a sign of the times. We are not free.
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