Er, no.
http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/HowDrugs...
"The goals of the New Drug Application are to provide enough information to permit FDA reviewer to reach the following key decisions: * Whether the drug is safe and effective in its proposed use(s), and whether the benefits of the drug outweigh the risks."
Also http://www.fda.gov/drugs/resourcesforyou/consumers/ucm143534... : "It's the clinical trials that take so long -- usually several years". I'm afraid I can't find any actual figures for the typical length of the clinical trials at present.
...
"Most academics believe..."
Absolute rubbish.
For one thing, you've cited only one academic (as "the River" is by a journalist, not a scientist), and he attributed it to "well-meaning European doctors and nurses"... so, er, not the US, and not the government.
But, more importantly, there's plenty more academics who think that theory is completely wrong:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11405925
Hmm?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088471/pdf/TB0...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088472/pdf/TB0...
The other, I Googled the title -- the fourth result (after some pages on nature.com) had a PDF of that one:
http://www.aidsorigins.com/content/blogcategory/29/51/
http://www.aidsorigins.com/content/blogcategory/28/50/
Also, while clinical trials usually do take 10 years or so, the actual patients don't necessarily receive the drug for more than a few weeks. The reason it takes so long is because you need to do preclinical research, secure patents, secure funding, get IRB and FDA approval for each study, design the methodology and acquire the resources you need, recruit hundreds or thousands of volunteers, wait for the drugs to get manufactured, run all the studies in each phase, analyze the data, get FDA approval to transition from phase I to phase II and from phase II to phase III, then wait for actual approval, etc.
Regardless, I maintain it's very far from the case that "most academics believe...". That's all.
Thanks for keeping this civil. Disagreement on HN remains a refreshing experience. :)
The connection between cholesterol and fat intake is tenuous at best. You're likely to be able to cut your total cholesterol levels by less than 15 points through a low fat diet plus exercise unless it was ridiculous to start with. In my family a healthy diet results in a total cholesterol level of around 250, while a strict low fat diet will bring it down to 235 or so, far above the recommended level.
As far as blood pressure is concerned, nearly everyone develops hypertension eventually.
- The safety standards for getting new drugs approved are incredibly lax. All you need to show is that it helps the person in some measurable way for the first six weeks. You don't need to show that the drug is safe or effective for longterm use, even if the drug is designed for longterm use. And you don't need to show that the person's overall health and wellbeing is improved, just the one condition the drug is designed to treat. So if an acne drug causes liver failure it will still get approved as long as it's effective at treating acne.
- The government has been caught many times injecting political dissidents and others with fake vaccines, most recently in the case of the Bin Laden family.
- Most academics believe that the US government was responsible for starting the AIDS epidemic by running vaccination programs in Africa. [1] [2]
- The government has repeatedly shown that they don't take evidence of safety and quality problems seriously at best, and actively prosecute whistleblowers at worst.
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/health...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-River-Journey-Source-AIDS/dp/03163...