I commented now mainly because this is one of those few times where I know a lot about the issue and wanted to share what I know about what's going on. The research really does show little effectiveness at treating the cancer and causing serious liver damage. The assessment was made by a panel of practicing physicians at schools and hospitals from all over the country. They don't work for the FDA and they aren't paid.

I'm all for calling out the government for wrongdoing, but there isn't any here. I think that wrongfully accusing the biomedical community with doing something sinister is not helpful.

I'm a cancer researcher, so please believe me when I say that this is not rationing. Recission of approval on drugs happens all the time, and here's why:

When people with a terminal disease (like metastatic cancer) are likely going to die given current treatments, drugs hoping to help those people are "fast-tracked" by the FDA, which means that a full assessment of effectiveness and safety isn't carried out so the FDA can get the drug to the patients as quickly as possible. These fast-tracked approvals always require that researchers go back and determine if the drug does, in fact, help and not do more harm than good. In this case (as with many drugs over the years), research showed that Avastin does more harm than good for these patients, so it shouldn't be given.

Decisions like these aren't new, it's been part of the drug approval process for years. There's nothing overtly political about it (well you could argue that the FDA approval process has been "influenced" in the past, but that's another debate, and I don't see anything about this case that looks like that).