FDA Employees Fear Shutdown Could Be Deadly
Furloughed FDA employees told CNN 1/8 they feared the partial government shutdown at the agency could cost lives. The network quoted FDA Detroit laboratory chemist Geneve Parks as saying "With the shutdown, surveillance is not effective. They are doing the bare minimum to get by." She said she loves her work but is furloughed along with about half of the 34 to 40 people who work in her lab. Now, CNN reported, she estimates that there are only five people in the chemistry division.
“It's terrifying. What if there's an outbreak?” Parks asked. “What would the agency do if something happened and they don't have the staff to handle it?” She thinks the agency is doing the best it can with the smaller staff but believes that its reaction time will be much slower and says that could put Americans at risk. Deaths are “always a concern. When you don’t have enough funding, then it becomes a life or death situation,” Parks told CNN. “It’s scary.”
CNN reported that Cheryl Monroe, Parks’ furloughed colleague in the Detroit lab, worries that the short staffing will have an impact. “If someone calls and says they've had a bad reaction to a drug, we can't analyze it,” Monroe said. With only a couple people left in her part of the lab, she said there is limited routine analysis of drugs and she believes there is no ongoing surveillance in pharmacies. “Things happen. There are times we pick up pain medication to check it for milligram dosage, and sometimes it's wrong. It could cause death,” Monroe said.
In another CNN report, the mother of a six-year-old boy suffering from a degenerative disease, Sara Doerr, said she had been told he could not get into a clinical trial of a new drug that might save him because trial researchers had told her the FDA officials they were working through had been furloughed. After the segment, CNN panelist Rick Santorum said he had just been contacted by FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb asking him to ask CNN to “have Sara Doerr contact me – nobody should be unable to access a compassionate use drug owing to the funds lapse.” Santorum said it was his understanding that Gottlieb believed the shutdown had nothing to do with the Doerr situation.