Can the FDA & CDC Recover from Recent Politics?

By Wayne Koberstein, Executive Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @WayneKoberstein

Some issues refuse to go away. Five years ago, speaking for an article in our December 2016 Industry Outlook issue, a half-dozen biopharma CEOs “foresaw difficulty under Clinton but probable disaster under Trump.” And here we go again, not revisiting the same topic but still fathoming it. We continued every year since then to explore rising concerns about apparent attempts by the previous president and his administration to force the FDA and the CDC into decisions and policies that would serve his personal interests. Besides Trump’s populist bluster about controlling drug prices, biopharma’s biggest worry was, and is, what damage would those institutions suffer even, or especially, if they resisted.