Thanks for sharing your post!
Pharmaceutical companies won’t go and release hundreds of dud or dangerous drugs just because they can. That would ruin their brand and shut down their business.
I briefly skimmed through the wikipedia list of withdrawn drugs. I looked at those withdrawn in the US or worldwide since 2007 (only eleven).
As far as I could tell (and I easily could have missed something) none of the associated pharma companies seem to have been financially ruined. The only ones who no longer existed (Wyeth and Celltech) were bought out by other pharma companies for princely sums (Wyeth by Pfizer for $68billion and Celltech by UCB for £1.5billion) before the recalls happened.
I guess doesn’t seem clear to me that pharma companies face threatening risks of ruining their brands and shutting down their business if they produce more inefficient or even more dangerous drugs than already. Even thalidomide didn’t destroy its parent company (Grünenthal).
I’m sure someone who knows more can correct me, but the only example of this happening in recent times Purdue Pharma.
I appreciate the effort to make the general consensus around trust towards EA-orgs more legible.
Given the criticism that the three mentioned receive (much of it directed towards CEA), it’s interesting (and IMO good) to see that most people emailed are broadly trusting of them.