The US was a world leader in this sort of thing for a while, before losing interest, is a reasonable way to think about it.
I wonder how much of an influence thalidomide was. The US failed to authorise thalidomide essentially because one person in the FDA put up a huge fight. This was, in retrospect, clearly correct, and would have given a lot of political cover for introducing safety regulations (in the thalidomide aftermath the FDA was a leader in introducing more modern safety requirements, say).
The stuff you’re talking about is old, though. It’s more difficult to find areas where the US is _still_ leading on this. For better or for worse, the EU is increasingly the world’s regulator (in much the same way that California is the US’s regulator on certain matters; when a really big market regulates, it tends to drag everyone else along with it).
On food, in particular, the US has a slightly weird approach; certain things which would clearly never be approved today are allowed if they’ve been around long enough. The US is virtually the only place to allow use of potassium bromate in food, say; if it was submitted today it would likely be barred as a carcinogen, but it predates the ban on carcinogens in food.
Incidentally, as to _why_ this is, I suspect that it's
(a) because safety, as a concept, has somehow become highly politicised in the US (albeit recently in weird directions; bundling of anti-vax-ism into the far-right and increasingly the mainstream right has lead to the odd situation where the traditionally anti-safety faction are pushing for _higher_ regulation in one narrow area) and
(b) because the US's regulatory apparatus is much more politically influenced than that in most developed countries, due to how the US civil service works.
I wonder how much of an influence thalidomide was. The US failed to authorise thalidomide essentially because one person in the FDA put up a huge fight. This was, in retrospect, clearly correct, and would have given a lot of political cover for introducing safety regulations (in the thalidomide aftermath the FDA was a leader in introducing more modern safety requirements, say).
The stuff you’re talking about is old, though. It’s more difficult to find areas where the US is _still_ leading on this. For better or for worse, the EU is increasingly the world’s regulator (in much the same way that California is the US’s regulator on certain matters; when a really big market regulates, it tends to drag everyone else along with it).
On food, in particular, the US has a slightly weird approach; certain things which would clearly never be approved today are allowed if they’ve been around long enough. The US is virtually the only place to allow use of potassium bromate in food, say; if it was submitted today it would likely be barred as a carcinogen, but it predates the ban on carcinogens in food.