The Trump administration has posted an update to its plan to reopen the U.S. economy, this time with a slightly different twist on testing. This plan not only calls on local governments to administer tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but also calls for two antibody tests per person under some circumstances, an approach that should beef up both the positive and negative predictive values compared to a single antibody test.
President Donald Trump has issued an executive order enabling the Defense Production Act, which gives the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services broader leeway to conscript industrial production to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak.
The much-maligned medical device tax was finally laid to rest Dec. 20, as President Donald Trump signed a spending bill that included a permanent repeal of the tax. The 2.3% excise tax on devices was brought into the statute via the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and its repeal brings much-needed breathing room to small device makers.
The FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) issued 62% more warning letters under the first part of the Trump administration than it did during the last few years of the Obama administration. But the number of warnings for medical devices, food and tobacco products fell sharply under President Donald Trump, according to an investigative report being published in the July 5 issue of Science.
Now that the dust is still swirling over the news that Scott Gottlieb will leave the FDA, it’s time to conduct a hasty post-mortem on his tenure at the agency, or perhaps more to the point, his lack of tenure. While it’s tempting to frame the question that way, it might be more salient to ask about the nature of the FDA commissioner’s job and whether it is still sufficiently politically insulated to do what is asked of it. Gottlieb had been on the job...
