Sadly I'm left trusting none of them. I rely on my own judgement, which is mostly informed by looking at motivations and past behaviors.

It's simply inconceivable that any organization of that size, that wields that much power, wouldn't attract abuses of power. Which means that failing to ever find any would be suspicious in the extreme. And, for that matter, in an organization of that size and complexity you're also pretty much guaranteed to have some good old-fashioned fuck-ups. Life has a distressing tendency to just happen sometimes. I can't really come up with any plausible scenarios for how an organization like the FDA could consistently avoid public embarrassment that wouldn't involve far worse corruption than any of the scandals they've experienced in my lifetime.

what about conflicts of interest? who is the main person heading drug approvals? ex pfizer exec

https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrizia-cavazzoni-2752071b1/?tr...

Yes, there's lots of money involved in FDA approvals. Yes, there has been and will continue to be corruption. But over my short life, the access to information has gotten better. The knowledge has gotten better. Most medicines have gotten better.

There was the opiate crisis. There was the nutritional pyramid nonsense. There was the ignorance of sugar and erroneous focus on fat. There was also the shingles vaccine, hep C treatments, fixes to the nutritional recommendations and acknowledgement of problems with sugar.

But I do not have a better option. I certainly am not capable of understanding the human machine by myself. My only hope is that multiple organizations consist of multiple people who are mostly good and mostly right most of the time. And that is something, I think, Americans can be proud about with regards to their civilian agencies.