FDA hires consumer advocate

Written byBob Grant

| 1 min read

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has added a vocal consumer advocate to its policy team. Peter Lurie, former director of the health research group at Washington, DC-based watchdog group Public Citizen, will be serving in the Office of Policy helping to "develop strategies to facilitate medical product availability to meet critical public health needs," Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (CMPI) and former FDA official, wrote on the CMPI's linkurl:Drugwonks;https://drugwonks.com/blog_post/show/7021 blog on Saturday (Oct. 17). Lurie played a role in raising early alarms about several commercial drugs -- such as Pfizer's Bextra, GSK's Avandia, and Merck's Vioxx -- and in voicing concern about publishing practices in the pharmaceutical industry (see __The Scientist__'s linkurl:story;https://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55671/ about the phony "journal" published by Elsevier and funded by Merck). The FDA also appointed attorney John Taylor, who most recently served as executive vice president for the health division at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, an industry trade group. Taylor will serve as counselor to FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and will oversee the agency's crisis response measures.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:More regulatory science: FDA chief;https://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55984/
[17th September 2009]*linkurl:Merck published fake journal;https://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55671/
[30th April 2009]

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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