A few weeks ago, if you’d been scouring the ever-expanding mass of digitized federal paperwork, you might have noticed a contradiction.
On the one hand, the Food and Drug Administration issued a letter stating that what an Arizona distributor was selling as stem cell therapies were “unapproved” and posed “safety concerns.” On the other, a National Institutes of Health database — clinicaltrials.gov — went right on listing the same merchant’s studies, with a link to the company’s website and the word “Recruiting” displayed invitingly in green.
Similar scenarios have been popping up like fungi after rain. When a judge ruled last week that the FDA could stop the work of U.S. Stem Cell, the firm’s trials remained on clinicaltrials.gov; the postings were no longer actively enlisting patients, but they didn’t mention that the company’s injections had blinded at least four people, either.
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