Parliamentary Petition to "review" the MHRA: it isn't just about Covid!

 Firstly, here is a link, not just to the petition to request a review of the MHRA's performance and fitness to meet the nation's future needs, but also to the Government's infuriating mandatory "response" to that petition once it reached the first milestone of 10,000 signatures.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/652008

The response manages to be arrogant, smug, dismissive, amazingly complacent and alarmingly ignorant, all at the same time! Gentle Reader, if, previously, you weren't convinced of the need to at least review how well the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority has been working in recent years (even ignoring the pandemic era as some sort of special case even though emergencies tend to punish rather than reward shortcuts) then simply reading the government's official response, and afterwards considering that this is how the UK government sees the MHRA after a long and steady stream of healthcare scandals with medicines, other products or procedures all regulated by the MHRA, might very well cause you to have another think, if for no other reason than to test whether even the government really believes its own position!

Failures of healthcare product regulation in the UK go back to the nineteen seventies and the contaminated blood products scandal, the origins of which predate the MHRA in its current form, but the cover-up and fallout from that scandal overlap with the MHRA as it is now constituted and the government is still determined to delay compensation to the victims until such time as nearly all, or perhaps even every last one, is dead.

In the meantime, numerous other dangerous products (pelvic mesh implants, for example) have slipped through the MHRA; there probably are too many instances to list them all. However, and this is crucial: no-one is publishing any data which links all the separate victim-led campaigns and class-action lawsuits together in a statistical manner which might allow Parliament or the public any insight into how well the MHRA does its job. Which begs the important question: if there is no data available to Parliament and the public allowing the performance of the MHRA to be scientifically measured in terms of how often patients are harmed by products it has approved, how can the UK government possibly know that everything is rosy in the MHRA garden?