The FDA likely needs a data team if they don’t have one already to monitor Amazon for ongoing compliance. Similar to the SEC’s data team that monitors capital market data flows for anomalies that would indicate illegal behavior.
My two cents: good market to be looking for good data folks who might want a (potentially remote) federal agency data job with shakiness in tech.
If Amazon fails to comply with the auditing requirements imposed by law, their entire retail shipping business could be closed by the US federal government. The FDA need only prove that Amazon has a pattern of negligence in their product auditing duties under law, in order to impose severe penalties, up to and including shuttering Amazon FBA. The FDA is not required to perform inventory assessments as a free service for Amazon in order to reach that final outcome. This letter is the first, necessary, step towards doing so.
I assume it's still a move with lots of politicking involved, so they need to stand on solid grounds, proof and all, I don't think they would every take lightly closing down vone of the biggest companies of the country (and the world).
If it ever happened, I can already see the endless coverage by Sean Hannity and similar about how it's governmental overreach that risks destroying an important US company with X thousands employees...
However, I don't think it will ever happen, in the end it's one of the richest men, Jeff Bezos behind Amazon with significant influence on news reporting, who seems to be on good terms with both the Republicans and Democrats, and the regulatory agencies in the US just didn't show a pattern of going too hard against US companies.
I definitely don’t have a well-formed opinion on how likely such an outcome is, but I absolutely believe that discussing that outcome as a serious concern is necessary discussion to have.
Let’s assume that the FDA doesn’t shut Amazon down.
When that happens, what would it take to convince you that the reason for the FDA’s decision is Amazon’s compliance with the law, rather than Jeff Bezos’s influence over the government and news media?
Well, how much information about Amazon's behavior prior to this are you allowing us to take into account in that determination?
Sure; if the only piece of information under consideration is "the FDA did not shut Amazon down," Occam's Razor says that we should expect that to be because Amazon did not do anything that would lead to them being shut down.
But if we get to bring in all the information we have about what Amazon did do, much of which certainly appears to be conduct that would lead to some kind of regulatory penalty...well, then, it seems like it might be reasonable to consider alternative explanations for the outcome.
It's a good thing that regulatory actions are slow going and difficult to prove under the law, otherwise the commons would be subject to powertripping leaders above clouds far more than they are already.
It also means that if things do get to such a point, then the action will come down swift and heavy in a manner generally agreeable to the majority of the commons.
If you've ever been with a startup that needed a 510k, you'd know that the FDA regularly monitors everyone for compliance. At least in my narrow domain of medical imaging and treatment planning devices they do. I'd be surprised if they didn't have similar mechanisms in place in every area of their 'jurisdiction'.
It doesn't really hurt the Amazons, they're just distributors. Doesn't really even hurt me. If RTP is a part of my software product I should be under a microscope. It's going to be small people who try to market supplements who will get trounced now. Because every report will, by law, have to include the source of the product. And that source company or individual is in for a long year. Even shutting down won't end their legal obligations in a lot of cases.
On the other hand, that was, in part, the original point of the FDA. To stamp out the snake oil salesmen. So, yeah. I guess they're just carrying out that mandate in new and updated ways.
As someone who worked at a startup that grew to a significant size in the "Nutraceuticals" industry (the fancy name for supplements), I can tell you that the FDA has nearly zero regulation or monitoring of supplements.
I'll omit brand names here, but I can tell you some sketchy stuff happens in supplement manufacturing all the time. During the ~6 years I worked there, only one letter came from the FDA after a whistleblower at a competitor's company came forward. The FDA sent a warning letter out to several of the large competitors in the industry to "don't do it or else" and never followed up again. The company that got in trouble got a few hundred thousand dollar fine for using mislabeled and toxic ingredients. They had one follow up inspection about 6 months after the warning and that was the end of it. For comparison that company was making ~$600M a year at the time of the fine and is now making $1B+. We carried on and never heard from the FDA again despite being equally guilty in our own company.
The guilt is what eventually led me away from the cash cow, where I went on an 18 month sabbatical to get away from any corporate greed for a little bit. I legitimately had nightmares that I would be complicity guilty of several crimes if I stayed there long enough.
I promise you, there is no oversight in supplements. There are a handful of posted guidelines. If a whistleblower comes forward the FDA might react to that single case, but they are so understaffed; the team that manages nutriceuticals is marked in the "tens" of people, not the thousands dedicated to proper medical equipment and medicines.
It seems like a bizarre gap between food and drugs that shouldn't exist. If it's meant to be eaten, the FDA should definitely be regulating it thoroughly.
> It seems like a bizarre gap between food and drugs that shouldn't exist. If it's meant to be eaten, the FDA should definitely be regulating it thoroughly.
The FDA did try regulating supplements. They were legally prohibited from doing much.
You can thank Senator Orrin Hatch (who was the longest-serving Republican senator in history until recently) for preventing the FDA from regulating supplements back in 1994. [1] [2]
> Because every report will, by law, have to include the source of the product.
I don't think it's an undue burden that if you're going to sell things people are ingesting, you have to know and communicate where they came from.
And I feel like small people that try to market supplements won't be especially damaged by this. It feels like as much as anything this would "hurt" small people that try to start a supplement manufacturing cottage-venture on a shoe string, over which I don't expect to lose any sleep.
> It doesn't really hurt the Amazons, they're just distributors.
I'm doing my first FDA-monitored automation project at a local brewery, and am quickly becoming familiar with the abundant controls that the FDA puts on domestic producers.
But the FDA is an American organization. Amazon or Ebay or Aliexpress or whoever may be just distributors, but they're international distributors. They're fully-automated self-service distributors for manufacturers in China and Russia and Indonesia and India who aren't subject to FDA jurisdiction, who sometimes aren't subject to any oversight at all.
The only entity that the FDA can go after here is Amazon, so this should hurt Amazon.
Yes, the FCC should be going after Amazon as well. I have more experience with that as an electrical engineer who's just getting into FDA-adjacent work.
But the FCC's position is that if I as an electrical engineer want to sell my neighbor here in the US some custom PCB with an antenna, I need to go through testing that costs many thousands of dollars.
If an EE in Shenzhen wants to sell my neighbor the same PCB over Alibaba, Aliexpress, Banggood, Wish, Temu, Shein, Gearbest, or whatever new discount importer is hot I can't keep up anymore, or Ebay/Amazon/Target/Walmart.com, they're just going to create a listing and import it. The FCC simply cannot keep up.
What I don't understand is how they're getting through Customs and Border Patrol. If I want to ship a spare off-the-shelf PLC digital input card for a machine to one of my customers who has a satellite facility in Mexico, there's a 50% chance it gets held up for a month or more. Meanwhile these big distributors have no issues with air-freight shipments of a GPS jammer or raw testosterone direct to American doorsteps in 3 days.
Edit: it seems obvious to me that the CBP should be partially responsible verifying that stuff going through customs subject to FCC or FDA jurisdiction complies with FCC or FDA regulations, or at least to forward the question to the appropriate agency.
Customs is only barely about checking for prohibited items. It's primarily about collecting the proper revenue for goods. The US isn't very protectionist so customs is extremely loose. In Mexico they are far more concerned about collecting revenue from customers of US businesses so the customs is more thorough. Based on my experience importing there's about a 2-3% chance any sort of inspection is done at all and that's generally just cursory to compare with the stated manifest classification. Not a search for contraband.
I am not unsympathetic to the disparity you mention, but am advocating that distributor gorillas (like Amazon, but others as well) need strong controls (both regulatory and technical) due to their incentives to not be compliant and the potential negative outcomes (illness, perhaps death even, depending on material and consumer) from non compliance.
Everyone pays. Amazon for their part. The producer for their part. Anyone that is provably in between is held accountable as well. Usually it's the producer that gets hit the hardest. Not disagreeing with that. That's what should happen. Just listing another in a litany of reasons that it's far worse for the producer/manufacturer than for the distributor. Think about it, your grocer rarely suffers the same consequences that a poultry producer does in the event of a poultry recall for instance.
They do not for supplements. Supplements fall under the office of the Director, which is not funded by PDUFA / MDUFA. Supplements are basically the Wild West.
My two cents: good market to be looking for good data folks who might want a (potentially remote) federal agency data job with shakiness in tech.
https://usajobs.github.io/microsite-data-science/