It still amazes me that anybody believes the government hires the best and brightest to ensure food, drugs, and other consumer products are safe for public consumption. That’s not how government works, government works by hiring people who agree with the state hive mind. You’re unlikely to get a position in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unless you believe in man-made global warming, you’re unlikely to get a job in the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) unless you believe people should have violence brought against them for using drugs not approved by the state, and you’re unlikely to to get a job in the Department of Agriculture unless you’ve sided entirely with Monsanto. The state also watches those in its employ to ensure they don’t dissent, which is what the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was caught doing:
A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.
[…]
Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.
[…]
The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.
A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”
Scientists working for the FDA became a hinderance to granting approval for medical devices because they had credible concerns about the safety tests being inadequate. Instead of investigating these claims, as an organization supposedly tasked with protecting the safety of individuals would, the FDA moved against the dissenting scientists but putting them under surveillance and, in some cases, outright firing them. We cannot rely on the government to protect us because they have no interest in protecting us. They hold their beliefs and nothing, including credible evidence, and shake their faith in those beliefs. Often their beliefs are based on monetary or political gain and I’m guessing the manufacturers of the mammogram and colonoscopy devices in question have some very good connections high up in the FDA.