[ravar]

Avoiding another thalidomide is not the only objective in drug discovery. Arguably the pace of progress[1] in medicine has been made slower because of the extreme cost of regulation. How many thousands are dying because they will be treated by drugs that could have been but are not because of regulation. I don't know, and I doubt anyone does. Ultimately this is problem with a regulatory body who's incentives are tied (or more tied) to only one of two competing bad outcomes. Its really easy to never have another thalidomide, but we should aim higher than that.

[1] One example of this is dietary treatments for disorders. It is very difficult for these to become standard of practice, because no company will want to fork over the $$$ to do a clinical trial to prove that a specific dietary intervention improves outcomes. When after its all done people can just do the intervention on their own and not pay the company money. This biases treatment towards pills that can be prescribed and patented.

Earlier I said think of the thousands of lost lives, but it might truthfully be millions considering the damage caused by type II diabetes which pharmacological interventions are relatively impotent to treat.