The Food and Drug Administration is no stranger to political interference. Special interests have played as much of a role as actual data in the approval of questionable cancer drugs and faulty medical devices for almost as long as the agency has existed.

Yet the latest breach of principle by the F.D.A. feels far more perilous than earlier ones — in part because of the number of lives and livelihoods at stake, but also because it’s part and parcel of a systematic undermining of the nation’s premier scientific institutions.

On Sunday the agency granted an emergency authorization for the use of plasma from people with coronavirus antibodies to treat Covid-19 patients, absent substantial evidence that the treatment actually works or a definitive sense of who might benefit from it.

Last week, regulators appeared to …continued .
[Source: New York Times]