USFDA still struggling to conduct pending drug inspections after Covid

Federal regulators responsible for the safety of the US drug supply are still struggling to get back to where they were in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic upended factory inspections in the US and across the world, The Associated Press has found.

An AP analysis of Food and Drug Administration data shows that agency staffers have not returned to roughly 2,000 pharmaceutical manufacturing firms to conduct surveillance inspections since before the pandemic.

The firms that are overdue for safety and quality inspections represent about 42 per cent of the 4,700 plants that are currently registered to produce drugs for the US and previously underwent FDA review before May 2019, the AP found.

Most of the overdue plants are in the US, but more than 340 are in India and China, countries that together make up the largest source of drug ingredients used in low-cost US prescriptions.

Generic drugmakers are under intense pressure to cut their costs and some will do that by cutting quality, sa