The Department of Defense’s Bitter Pill to Swallow
Published December 9, 2024
@ 12:38 pm
By Phil Goldberg
U.S. servicemembers deserve the best America has to offer, particularly when it comes to their health and safety. In setting last year’s budget, Congress instructed the Department of Defense to assess the risks to its pharmaceutical supply chain and create assurances that the medicines sold to the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs met proper standards.
The program makes sense. But the department’s choice of vendors to carry out this mission —Valisure Laboratories— has raised eyebrows in the legal and public health communities.
Valisure may not be known to most people, but it is to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and federal courts—both of which have raised concerns with Valisure’s testing methods.
Questionable testing methodologies
Over the past few years, Valisure has made headlines for testing medications and other household products and claiming some of them cause harm. However, in assessing Valisure’s claims, the FDA found Valisure used testing methodologies that were not “appropriately validated” or “suitable”—they failed to establish their “accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and reproducibility.” A federal judge echoed these findings, stating Valisure’s methods were “unreliable” and lacked “substantiation” and “objective science-based standards.”
https://defenseopinion.com/the-department-of-defenses-bitter-pill-to-swallow/792/
