From 2004-2005, John Abraham was Special Expert Advisor to the House of Commons Health Select Committee in the UK Parliament during which he was centrally involved in the Committee’s 8-month Inquiry into the ‘Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry’. This was the most extensive, sustained and comprehensive parliamentary investigation of the pharmaceutical sector in the UK since 1914. It culminated in a two-volume Parliamentary report of over 650 pages published in 2005.
During the 2000s while John was conducting international comparative research on drug safety, in collaboration with Dr Courtney Davis and the Public Citizen Health Research Group, he changed the US Food and Drug Administration’s freedom of information policy on release of the agency’s non-clinical/pre-clinical toxicological data on pharmaceuticals that had entered FDA review but were not marketed in the US. Before John’s protracted appeals over several years, the FDA had insisted that release of such data was not in the public interest because no US citizens were exposed to any risks from such drugs. However, John Abraham and his collaborators successfully argued: (1) that, in fact, some US citizens were exposed because some of the drugs in question went to clinical trial stage in the US even though they were never marketed there; and (2) that the FDA had international obligations to the safety of citizens outside the US. As a consequence of John and his collaborators’ efforts, citizens/researchers can now obtain access to data pertaining to why the FDA never approved drugs on to the US market, if those drugs are subsequently withdrawn from other markets around the world on safety grounds. This is important because the FDA is the largest and best-resourced pharmaceutical regulatory agency in the world, so its evaluations matter globally.
From 2006 onwards, John has periodically been an Expert Speaker to the House of Lords UK All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Corporate Responsibility, as well as an Expert Speaker to various other House of Commons APPGs as recently as 2023.
John has been invited to present expert evidence to various parliamentary inquiries and most recently presented evidence to the 2020 Baroness Cumberlege Independent Inquiry on Review of Medicines and Medical Device Safety.
Following the success of John’s book on Regulating Medicine in Europe published in 2000, in 2004, he was invited by the European Commission to conduct a review of the first ten years of the EU’s supranational pharmaceutical regulation (established in 1995).
In addition, John has delivered many public lectures to legislative bodies, pharmaceutical regulatory agencies, the World Health Organization, and the European Commission.