FDA ‘not trusted’ by Americans
pharmafile | March 19, 2014 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | FDA, JAMA, MMR, US, america, conspiracy, yougov
More than one-third of Americans in a new survey think the Food and Drug Administration is holding back new cures for cancer because pharma does not want the regulator to allow them to market.
According to the online poll by YouGov, 37% of respondents believe that the FDA “is deliberately preventing the public from getting natural cures for cancer and other diseases because of pressure from drug companies”.
The survey, published online this week on the medical website JAMA Network, also found that a fifth of Americans are sure that health professionals are conspiring to cause significant harm to children through the treatments they recommend.
Twenty per cent of respondents agreed with the statement: “Doctors and the government still want to vaccinate children even though they know these vaccines cause autism and other psychological disorders.”
This suggests that the fallout from the MMR vaccine scandal is still lingering.
Conspiracy theories on anything from the true cause of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to US government knowledge of extra-terrestrial life have long had currency, with the ubiquity of the internet helping people to disseminate their beliefs.
While these are usually dismissed as the views of oddballs: health authorities, the FDA and pharma itself are likely to be concerned that so many people in the US appear to have views which clearly conflict with their stated mission to protect public health.
In the YouGov survey, 20% of respondents also agreed that health officials know that mobile phones cause cancer but are doing nothing to stop this because ‘large corporations won’t let them’.
The survey – which aimed to see whether such beliefs correlated with health behaviours – suggests that people who are more prone to believing medical conspiracy theories tend to buy organic foods and natural remedies, and avoid annual check-ups or influenza shots.
For example, 20% of the total sample said they use herbal supplements, whereas 35% of ‘high conspiracists’ do.
Adam Hill
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