Five Considerations Necessary | |
NEW YORK, November 16 – In a new report aimed at rebuilding trust in health care and science, leading experts urge the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to adopt five reforms to rebuild public trust amid controversies around vaccine approvals.
In Securing the Trustworthiness of the FDA to Build Public Trust in Vaccines, Leah Z. Rand, Daniel P. Carpenter, Aaron Kesselheim, Anushka Bhaskar, Jonathan J. Darrow, and William B. Feldman recommend the FDA consider five major factors to maintain its trustworthiness as an organization and to enhance public trust in its decisions, including:
“The pandemic revealed that the FDA must navigate political interests, and its responsibilities to be accountable and make evidence-informed decisions, with missteps leading to a lack of trust,” said Leah Rand, one of the authors who is a research scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The authors state that “these five conditions, both procedural and substantive, are necessary for FDA trustworthiness, particularly when it conducts reviews and issues approvals, given that it is a government agency subject to political control.” “The scientific community must rebuild trust, and the authors of this article have given us five clear conditions for the FDA to regain the confidence of the American public,” said Gregory E. Kaebnick, a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center and an editor of the report. The essay is part of a new special report, Time to Rebuild, published by The Hastings Center, the ethics institute. The report explores the causes of the decline in trust in health and science and proposes pathways to rebuild in a series of articles. The report was edited by Lauren A. Taylor, assistant professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, Kaebnick, and Mildred Z. Solomon, president emerita of The Hastings Center. The special report is the product of a collaboration between The Hastings Center and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation Building Trust initiative, with support from The Gil Omenn and Martha Darling Fund for Trusted and Trustworthy Scientific Innovation and by the ABIM Foundation. For more information, contact: Susan Gilbert or Mark Cardwell The Hastings Center |
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