FDA faces mounting criticism over Alzheimer's drug approval

Conspiracy believers are always saying how all the regulation agencies and every scientist are actually in a global conspiracy to sell worthless or dangerous drugs to the people just for profit, and that this is the reason why nobody complains ever about things that are supposedly bad for your health.

This is a perfect example why this is nonsense, the issue is heavily debated by scientists, and since they are using valid scientific evidence nobody is calling them anti-science, on the contrary this is being used as an example of how science should work.

The drug may be useful, but at this point the main reason it was allowed to be sold is that people want any hope against a terrible disease, even if that hope is false. The FDA is being criticized because the pressure from the patients is not supposed to be one of the parameters to take into account to approve things.

Conspiracy believers are always saying how all the regulation agencies and every scientist are actually in a global conspiracy to sell worthless or dangerous drugs to the people just for profit, and that this is the reason why nobody complains ever about things that are supposedly bad for your health.

All regulation agencies and all scientists? I don't know any "conspiracy believer" that says that. What many of us do say is that pharmaceutical companies have too much influence on many regulation agencies, scientists, and journals. In fact, Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies have been convicted several times for bribing officials, falsifying data, and more.

What these agencies should do is provide the best (most honest) information possible and then get out of the way and let doctors and patients decide. In many places, we had very safe medicines that were already prescribed for certain treatments or were available over the counter. And these meds were suddenly prohibited because the agencies did not want people to use it to treat covid19, despite studies showing they have very positive effects.

All regulation agencies and all scientists? I don't know any "conspiracy believer" that says that.

Of course they do, when confronted with the fact that no regulation agency nor any of the scientists working for them and that are in charge of safeguarding the efficacy and safety of the drugs of vaccines oppose, for example, the use of the COVID vaccines the answer is the same, they are all on it.

What many of us do say is that pharmaceutical companies have too much influence on many regulation agencies, scientists, and journals. 

As long as examples like this exist that means the problem is not equivalent to automatic approval of things without scientific evidence, this is not even something dangerous or unsafe, it is simply something that was approved without clear, strong evidence of efficacy against the disease, and that is supported by huge pharmaceutical companies, if this was not enough to make the people in charge just automatically support it (much less the less of the scientific world) then other much more clear things (like a vaccine that is not supposed to be safe, or failed drugs that are supposedly effective but were rejected) are simply nothing realistically possible.

What these agencies should do is provide the best (most honest) information possible and then get out of the way and let doctors and patients decide. 

That does not work, because there will always be doctors that have no ethics and want to profit (economically or in other ways) from naive patients that do not understand what it means that something have demonstrated to be useless, like Raoult does with HCQ. In order to stop unethical people from putting their patients at risk there is a need for regulation, so nobody can take bad, manipulated or limited studies as "proof" to sell them something when much more and better evidence say the contrary.