What the FDA Won’t Tell You About Your Medications
5/14/202639 min
For years, the Food and Drug Administration told the public that generics are just as safe and effective as brand-name medications. But ProPublica reporters uncovered reports from the FDA’s own inspectors detailing everything from pigeons pooping onto boxes of sterilized equipment to evidence of a factory cheating on quality testing. Even though the FDA knew about these reports, it let some of those troubled factories overseas keep shipping their drugs to the U.S. — some of which might have ended up in your medicine cabinet.
This episode details why and how a secretive group inside the FDA made the decision to keep this information from the public and how you can find out where your own medications are made.
Reporters: Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose
Read More: https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-drug-loophole-sun-pharma
Look up your own drugs: https://projects.propublica.org/rx-inspector/
Support our journalism by donating at propublica.org/donate.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJessica Lussenhop· Host0:00
[upbeat music] ProPublica, investigative journalism in the public interest. Hi, my name is Jessica Lussenhop, and I'm an investigative reporter at ProPublica. [upbeat music] If you've never heard of us, we've been around since 2007. We're an independent, non-profit newsroom, and investigations are our bread and butter. It's all we do. We have reporters all over the country. Special shout-out to the Midwest Bureau, where I have been the Minnesota correspondent for the past several years. Midwest is best. But we're also in the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, in California, in Texas, and the South. When people in power abuse your money, your time, your trust, that's when we show up, possibly in your backyard. And on this show, I wanna share with you this feeling I get all the time when I'm talking to my colleagues. They tell me what they're working on, and it just breaks my brain. It makes me look at my life differently. And the investigation we're gonna tell you about on this episode is a perfect example. It starts with something you probably have in your house right now, a generic medication.
Speaker 2· Soundbite1:25
Meet Blue. Blue's not feeling well. The prescription?