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# Reporters Urged to Probe FDA Transparency
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/reporters-urged-to-probe-fda-transparency/
- Published: 2022-09-26T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T18:00:38.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Drugs, #legacy-id-D5152812

The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) is urging is journalist members to look deeper into FDA’s use of advisory committees in their regulatory decision making and the transparency about the agency’s decisions on when to seek expert feedback and instructions to its advisory committees.

A 9/23 [*blog post*](https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2022/09/how-and-when-the-fda-seeks-outside-advice-on-drug-approvals/?ref=fdaweb.com) cites two recent medical journal papers that offer recommendations for improving FDA’s use of its expert panel. Writing in the *New England Journal of Medicine*, three Harvard Medical School researchers said there are steps FDA could take to become more consistent in its use of advisory committees to increase public confidence in the agency’s regulatory processes (see ***FDA Webview*** [story](https://www.fdaweb.com/ways-to-improve-fda-advisory-committee-process/)). They suggested the agency issue a guidance explaining how it decides whether to convene advisory committees, for example, with accelerated approvals, and establish a procedure for publicly explaining regulatory decisions that run contrary to advisory committee recommendations, among others.

The other recommended paper is a May *Health Affairs* piece by the same researchers who said the percentage of drugs referred for advisory committee review has dropped from 59% in 2011 to 6% in 2021 (see ***FDA Webview*** [story](https://www.fdaweb.com/more-transparency-in-advisory-committee-use-needed-researchers/)). They further noted that the decade-long drop in referrals to advisory committees suggests the agency needs specific criteria for how it chooses to subject new drugs to external scrutiny. “Publishing referral criteria would improve accountability by allowing the public to compare FDA’s referral decisions in individual cases against preexisting standards,” they said.

Additionally, AHCJ’s blog post offered tips from one of the papers’ authors for reporters covering advisory committee transparency such as “paying attention to how the FDA develops the questions posed for its advisory committees” and examining “reported conflicts of interest of advisory committee members over time, to monitor voting patterns.”