In the months before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did an about-face on diet drugs, agency officials participated in a series of meetings at George Washington University.
Among the others in attendance: Drug companies, weight-loss clinics, medical societies and academic physicians specializing in weight loss — what Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, calls the “weight-loss industrial complex.”
The aim: Get new diet drugs on the market.
The group even produced a 24-page report — Obesity Drug Outcome Measures — that encouraged the goal.
“The one thing they all had in common: They needed products to sell,” said Zuckerman, who attended the meetings, which were financed in large part by drug companies.
In all, drug companies have spent more than $60 million in lobbying and other payments since 2010, when they began an intense push to get new diet drugs on the market, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today investigation found.
Much of their effort was aimed at convincing the FDA to start approving new diet drugs again, despite decades of harm caused by diet pills found to be unsafe after approval in the past.
Money also was used to lobby Congress, which prodded the agency to start approving the new products. And money was given to medical groups and doctors that encouraged use of diet pills. […]
Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, said the meetings underscored industry’s influence on the approval process. The organization is a nonpartisan group that promotes health and safety, including working to get unsafe medicines removed from the market.
“There was enormous pressure on the FDA to approve weight-loss products,” said Zuckerman. “In response, the FDA had an apparent change of heart and started approving drugs with very little benefit and substantial risk.”
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