Well before some functionary, with career advancement too much on his mind, decided I could be held criminally negligent for my sons’ use of seat belts and the precise dimensions of their car seats when they were under a certain arbitrary height and weight…
“I don’t want you to forget, or think of it as optional, because then you won’t have done it when it might matter. I want you to get to the point where I trust you to follow the rule, and I won’t have to check to see if you’ve done it. My job is to get you there.”
That’s how I explained to my sons, then 8 and 10, why they had to fasten their seat belts when we were only driving a couple of miles. Their response, and the cause of the glitch, “Mom doesn’t make us do that!”
“Well,” I said, “Mom and I agreed before that you should always do it, and she’s wrong if she lets you off. I just told you why she’s wrong.”
After a couple of dozen seconds sitting silently in the unmoving car, they complied. I didn’t have to remind them again after that, and soon stopped checking.
But what happens when some functionary applies that principle to free adults?
The FDA happens. They never stop checking. Checking is what they get paid for. So they constantly find new things to check and more ways to check the old things.
Bureaucrats aren’t concerned about YOUR welfare, they’re concerned about their own. Uncertainty is their friend – because, unlike an actual parent, they aren’t interested in having nothing to enforce.
It’s Time to Track the FDA’s Death Toll Emphasis mine:
The Food and Drug Administration helped turn the coronavirus from a deadly peril into a national catastrophe. Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the FDA continued blocking private testing. The FDA continued forcing the nation’s most innovative firms to submit to its command-and-control approach notwithstanding the pandemic…
Dr. David Kessler, who became FDA commissioner in 1990, quickly sought to intimidate the companies that his agency regulates. A laudatory Washington Post article concluded, “What he cannot accomplish with ordinary regulation, Kessler hopes to accomplish with fear.” Kenneth Feather of the FDA’s drug advertising surveillance branch boasted: “We want to say to these companies that you don’t know when or how we’ll strike. We want to eliminate predictability.”…
The FDA’s stonewalling of new medical devices was sometimes politically motivated. A 1994 report by the Medical Device Manufacturers Association noted, “It is not unusual for [FDA] reviewers to express the position that excessive requests [for additional information] are made because of a concern or fear about how a particular member or members of Congress will react” to the approval of a new device. Sacrificing lives was a small price to pay for bureaucrats to avoid bothersome interrogatories from Capitol Hill…
[I]n 1991 Dr. Kessler prohibited pharmaceutical companies from informing doctors of new uses for approved drugs. He announced that the FDA would enforce the ban with seizures, injunctions, and prosecutions. Though the agency never finalized its proposed regulations, it warned companies that they would face its wrath if they violated the draft proposals. Dr. Kessler, in a speech before the Drug Information Association, said: “I would urge all members of the pharmaceutical industry to take a long and hard look at their promotional practices. I do not expect companies to wait until this guidance becomes final to put their advertising and promotional houses in order.” The question of off-label treatments is becoming a key issue again as doctors search for effective treatments for the COVID-19 coronavirus…
Dr. Kessler declared in 1992: “If members of our society were empowered to make their own decisions…then the whole rationale for the [FDA] would cease to exist.” Kessler derided “freedom of choice” as an illusion unless people are presented only with government-approved choices. But the FDA “liberated” people by shielding them from information, devices, and drugs that could have saved their lives.
How far removed from Constitutionality and actual legislation is a DRAFT proposal from a government agency managed by mandarins and staffed with non-elected officials?
The FDA’s mission is to protect the power of the FDA. Not your ignorant, childish ass.
RTWT
Also:
The COVID-19 Crisis Is the Result of Decades of FDA Misrule
The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing how the US Food and Drug Administration puts Americans at increased risk of sickness and death. Decades of killing medical innovation and forcing industries offshore made this inevitable.
…The real debate should be over how best to downsize or abolish the FDA, which contributed greatly to the vulnerable state in which America now finds itself…
[T]hanks largely to its treatment in the media, many Americans have never imagined how the country might benefit from doing away with the bureaucracy. That may change now.
Imagine there’s no bureau
It’s easy if you try
No hell in freedom
Above us, an ally
Imagine all the people living for themselves