These quotes are taken from the April 29, 2008 hearings before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearings, see: The Heparin Disaster: Chinese Counterfeits and American Failures
For more, click here: http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-oi-hrg.042908.Heparin.shtml
Regina Brown of the FDA was questioned in those hearings by U.S. Representative, Jan Schakowsky:
Question by Schakowsky: There was no person with special knowledge of Heparin at the firm to guide decisions made by the quality unit. So Ms. Brown, I would assume that if a plant was making Heparin API, it would want to have a person with “special knowledge” of that product, in case deviations from any manufacturing process were observed, wouldn’t you agree?Unbelievable. SPL is manufacturing a drug that is going to be put in to the veins of our sickest people and they don’t have anyone on site with specialized knowledge as to how to make Heparin? How could Baxter have allowed this? Any superficial investigation would have determined that Changzhou SPL didn’t know what it was doing. Such a breakdown in the process of making an intravenous pharmaceutical is outrageous and is an institutional catastrophe.
Answer by Brown: They had a quality unit there, which consisted of four people, they were trying to track what was going on with the firm. The person with the special knowledge I mentioned, because when I arrived, management was aware that there were Baxter recalls, and that there were adverse drug events and deaths in the United States. It was middle of February, the general manager of the firm, Mr. Wong, was the one who described the process to me and how he thought that impure materials were removed from the crude heparin to make it into the heparin API and he said he wasn’t a heparin expert. And so, he was really the person who gave me my fullest extent of knowledge during the inspection.
Q: So, neither he nor the others had any special knowledge, he had the most knowledge?
A: I believe so, yes.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
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