The FDA Can’t Win

Recently, the FDA has been under fire for being too lax in its approval of drugs. Now comes this article which takes aim at an FDA warning that is too stringent. As usual, when dealing with uncertainty, people (and in this case the FDA) can’t win. Ultimately this is a choice between a potential false negative (e.g. with Vioxx) or a false positive (e.g. with this new warning about Aleve). Rest assured, whoever deals with uncertainty and predicts incorrectly will be blamed for it.