President Trump made an excellent choice on Friday in nominating Dr. Scott Gottlieb to be Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Gottlieb, a medical doctor and former FDA deputy commissioner, knows from experience how FDA’s culture and its ever-increasing demands for more extensive clinical testing delay access to life-saving treatments.

If confirmed, he has an opportunity to shake up a system that has lost sight of what its goal should be — to help patients receive access to better drugs, sooner, at lower cost.

FDA’s primary goal appears to be to avoid risks of adverse side effects from approved drugs. This is the classic reaction to the lopsided incentives FDA faces; if it approves a drug that later shows undesirable side effects, the victims are visible and its officials get dragged before Congress and pilloried in the press.

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