Nearly 2,000 drug manufacturing plants are overdue for FDA inspections after COVID delays, AP finds

Nearly 2,000 drug manufacturing plants are overdue for FDA inspections after COVID delays, AP finds.

FDA staffers have not returned to pharmaceutical manufacturing firms to conduct surveillance inspections since before the pandemic.

The plants make hundreds of critical medicines, including antibiotics, blood thinners and cancer therapies.

FDA halted all but the most “mission critical” inspections in March 2020 .

Nearly 90% of FDA ’s foreign inspections in fiscal 2023 were announced in advance, according to FDA correspondence with Congress obtained via public records requests.

The FDA currently has 225 vacancies on its inspection workforce, nearly four times as many as before COVID-19 .

The agency could seemingly address its inspection backlog by hiring more investigators or assigning extra work to current staffers.

The slowdown in inspections has attracted scrutiny from lawmakers and raised new questions about whether FDA ’s decades -old approach is working.

House Republicans have peppered the agency with dozens of inquiries about the program since 2023 .

A pilot program requested by the U.S. Defense Department takes an alternative approach to monitoring the drug supply.