FDA Received 'Minority Report' From Conservative Doctor on Panel - WP

[Burma Jones]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051101812.html


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Soon after the Food and Drug Administration overruled its advisory panel last year and rejected an application to make an emergency contraceptive more easily available, critics of the agency said it had ignored scientific evidence and yielded to pressure from social conservatives.

The agency denied the charge, but an outspoken evangelical conservative doctor on the panel subsequently acknowledged in a previously unreported public sermon that he was asked to write a memo to the FDA commissioner soon after the panel voted 23 to 4 in favor of over-the-counter sales of the contraceptive, called Plan B. He said he believes his memo played a central role in the rejection of that recommendation.

The new information comes from a videotaped sermon in October by W. David Hager. On the tape, he said he was asked to write a "minority report" that would outline why over-the-counter sales should be rejected.

Speaking at the Asbury College chapel in Wilmore, Ky., Hager said, "I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA. For only the second time in five decades, the FDA did not abide by its advisory committee opinion, and the measure was rejected."
<snip>

[Nothing Without Hope]

1. Terrible. Science and medicine are suppressed, careful advice is ignored,

and a charlatan's solicited and totally biased opinion is used as a "justification."

Outrageous. Like a pharmacist refusing to fill a birth control prescription.
Recommended.

[pnorman]

2. HAGER???

There's another R/W "Moral Values" CREEP:

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According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the sex that was so horrible."

Not once during the uproar over Hager's FDA appointment did any reporter solicit the opinion of the woman now known as Linda Davis--she remarried in November 2002 to James Davis, a Methodist minister, and relocated to southern Georgia--on her husband's record, even though she contributed to much of his self-help work in the Christian arena (she remains a religious and political conservative). She intermittently thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect for her adult children. It was Hager's sermon at Asbury last October that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak about their divorce when he took to the pulpit.>
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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050530&c=2&s=mcgarvey

pnorman