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All seven of the FDA’s recent commissioners agree it should be independent — but not on how to accomplish it

A bipartisan crew of former FDA commissioners are pushing the agency to break free from its political supervisors at HHS. But Hamburg, Califf, and others told STAT it’ll be an…
Former FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg

WASHINGTON — Nearly every person who’s run the Food and Drug Administration in recent history agrees the agency should break free from its political supervisors — a rare consensus from commissioners who served under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

In published Monday, all seven of the FDA’s most recent commissioners wrote that the current setup — in which the agency is a mere subdivision of the Department of Health and Human Services — interferes with the ability of its scientists to protect the health of the public. They described a situation

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