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It's swings and roundabouts. Bodies such as the FDA were set up because before that, in the unfettered and unregulated world of the free market, businesses were happily poisoning their customers. Then people got accustomed to "medicine is safe and indeed is a wonder drug" so any adverse effects were clearly somebody's fault and had to be paid for in punitive damages, which led to concerns by government bodies that "if we pass a medicine that later turns 1% of the population blue, we are gonna get slaughtered" and so caution became the watchword.
And now we're stuck between drug companies trying to get a return on their very long, very expensive, product development process where the bad examples are things like Aduhelm, and the calls by people who are (to be blunt) dying and desperate for Hail Mary cures so they want the FDA to rush through and license "this might extend your life by three weeks and it'll cost $5 million" drugs, where of course the cri-de-coeur is "every week of delay means another 1,000 people die!" (not considering that those people might die anyway because the cure is only speculative even if they go on the drugs or the treatment protocol).
I mean there’s good risk and stupid risk. It’s not good to release a drug with very serious side effects or that don’t work. I don’t think anyone is calling for that anyway. On the other hand, there are drugs that are clearly working (and in some cases approved for use in other countries) that are still required to go through decades of testing to prove that they work just as well here as they do in other places. That doesn’t help anyone. If the drug works in Russia and has been used for decades, it’s probably fine.
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