"By 1967, British scientists had conclusively linked the pill with thrombosis, but they did so relying largely on epidemiological data. This increasing reliance on statistical evidence supported and advanced a more analytical and less communally determined drug approval process. This change in the risk-benefit equation calculations of a new drug, of course, may have been inevitable and had been initiated with an earlier drug, chloramphenicol, but it was the stature and novelty of Enovid that propelled it forward so dramatically. In the United States, concerns about the safety of the pill before 1967 led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administrations ”first permanent advisory committee, further changing the nature of the drug approval process and initiating what Jasanoff would later call the “fifth branch” of government in the United States."
January 1, 1970