Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story

I.

In my recent post on the FDA, I mentioned a story about a fish-oil-based infant nutritional fluid called Omegaven. The FDA took too long to approve it, and lots of infants died.

I plucked that from the anti-FDA blogosphere, where it had been floating around for a while in various incarnations. I tried to check it before publishing, but only enough to confirm the basic outline. A concerned reader sent me a Cochrane paper suggesting that the fluid was no better than previous treatments, which would potentially exonerate the FDA. This was concerning enough that I decided spend a longer time trying to figure out the specifics.