- Inadequate testing of pharmaceuticals
- Withdrawal of harmful medicines
Nature
The systematic literature on drug withdrawal shows that serious adverse reactions often become clearer only after broad exposure; and that withdrawals have historically been inconsistent across countries and sometimes delayed.
Incidence
Recall of drugs include those drugs whose risk-benefit profile changed after marketing, drugs whose harms emerged only after mass exposure and drugs whose cultural meaning shifted from breakthrough to embarrassment.
Claim
Drug promotion depends on forgetting. Every new class arrives dressed in the confidence of the present. Yesterday’s failures are treated as primitive mistakes made by less sophisticated regulators, less precise science or less careful clinicians. The cases differ in mechanism, severity, culpability and regulatory context. But they share a pattern. The drug entered public consciousness through the language of progress. It exited, or was sharply narrowed, through the language of caution.