If you’re confused and alarmed by all the headlines about packaged meats being recalled in the United States because they contain shards of glass or E. coli, you might not be aware of the fact that the FDA suspended food inspections when COVID hit.
Biden named Janet Woodcock, MD, to the acting commissioner’s job at the FDA hours after the inauguration. She should be a big improvement.
And the story gets worse. During the Trump administration, the FDA was run by a guy named Stephen Hahn. Wikipedia reported in April of 2020 that . . . “Hahn instructed FEMA administrator Peter Gaynor “to distribute hydroxychloroquine to pharmacies nationwide,” even though the emergency use authorization (EUA) issued by the FDA did not provide for outpatient use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.[19] Hydroxychloroquine was later linked to multiple deaths of COVID-19 patients.
So the Trump folks at the FDA – the agency that didn’t or wouldn’t inspect meat and totally failed with vaccines – decided to set their sights on CBD.
“We see significant promise in small, targeted projects that improve data methods in the near-term and point to future opportunities for collecting and analyzing data on CBD products and, potentially, other types of products in the future,” the FDA stated at the time.
Marijuana Moment posted a story on how the FDA in 2021 has pledged to use the necessary resources to fill in all those “research gaps” with real data. Let’s hope this is true. Read it here.
And let’s hope the Biden folks can revitalize all our regulatory agencies including the FDA that Trump and the Republicans worked so hard to destroy.