“Lurie has earned the reputation of being an industry antagonist,” says former FDA associate commissioner Peter Pitts, now at public relations company Porter Novelli in New York. “When you're at the FDA, you need to look at each individual circumstance agnostically. If you go into the job as an advocate, you are doing the agency and public health a disservice,” he points out. But the general response to the most recent appointment is positive, even among those who don't necessarily agree with Lurie's positions. Don Hannaford, senior vice president of Levick Strategic Communications in Washington DC, says, “It can't hurt to have smart people—who may be a little controversial—in government. People [in government] can go into this deep inertia of making only small, incremental movement...you can take [Lurie's] energy and his desire to improve the process to help move things forward.”
Lurie, a physician, will be the third person with ties to Public Citizen to be engaged by the FDA. Sidney Wolfe, former head of Public Citizen's Health Research Group and editor of Worst Pills, Best Pills (http://worstpills.org/; Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 149, 2008) has been a member of the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee since 2008. Also Joshua Sharfstein, the FDA's current principal deputy commissioner, has early ties to Public Citizen from an internship in 1992. Before joining the FDA, Sharfstein developed a reputation as a reformer and an industry critic through his advocacy work in the field of HIV/AIDS and his efforts to limit marketing of pediatric cold remedies.
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