Unfortunately, Right to Try appears to be helping very few people. The “incredible” transformation that Trump described in Louisiana is a fantasy: Right to Try mainly succeeds at giving its political backers a cheap public relations victory, even as they exploit the hopes of dying Americans.
Proponents frame the statute as a triumph for the freedom of patients to take sensible risks if they are essentially out of options. Under the law, if a drug has completed a Phase I clinical trial, which determines the highest safe dose of a new intervention (whose effectiveness has yet to be proved), then pharmaceutical companies may make their experimental therapies available to extremely ill people who request them. These patients don’t have to ask the FDA for permission, drug companies can bypass ethics boards that normally monitor drug tests and the companies are shielded from lawsuits.
