“NEWS FEED”: Supplement Sneak Attack This Weekend

Read the Urgent Notice from the Alliance For Natural Health.

Senator Durbin (D-IL) is planning to include an amendment to a must-pass appropriations bill that would give the FDA enormous power to eliminate food supplements we need to stay healthy, especially during the pandemic. His deadline is early next week, so we have no time to lose. Urgent alert! Senator Durbin’s goal is to create a mandatory product listing with the FDA, which seems innocuous but is far from it. The problem is that FDA is separately completing a process to eliminate every supplement from the market that doesn’t meet “new supplement” notification requirements, which are akin to new drug requirements, and the FDA needs Sen. Durbin’s list to locate and pull an estimated 41,700 supplements from the market. Such notification requirements may seem reasonable, even laudable, but they will restrict consumer access to supplements. Drugs can afford these types of requirements because they are patentable in a way natural food supplements are not, which means that supplements do not have the ability to recoup the costs of complying with additional regulations. This will either force companies to go out of business or it will make supplements so expensive that they are priced out of the market. This is also a solution in search of a problem since we know that supplements have a consistently sterling record of safety. It’s particularly sneaky to pass legislation this way. Because the funding bill as a whole has to pass for the government to continue operations, any ancillary provisions buried within it must pass too, even if they couldn’t stand on their own. Durbin knows his provision wouldn’t stand a chance as a standalone bill: we have beaten him back every time he has tried to do this. Our inside sources indicate that he plans now to resort to sneaking his language into the bill, hoping no one will spot it until it’s too late. If we can prevent him from doing so, he will have to introduce it as a standalone bill, and we will have a better chance of defeating it.