Ehhh, Right To Try has some very valid criticisms. It is largely a political move to reduce the oversight of the FDA. We already have the Expanded Access Programs, and Right to Try removes oversight and liability of treatment, which is dangerous when patients are desperate. There’s also no requirement to report about outcomes from Right To Try, so if you get unfavorable results you can just hide them away and only present the good ones - changing how it looks.

Expanded Access is required by law to be approved or denied in under 30 days, and approves 90% of applications, and requests changes on the rest. It is rarely fully denied.

Right to Try is the first step in trying to remove federal oversight from medicine. It removes any right of patient or family to sue should malpractice occur (a right you retain in Expanded Access).As I said before there’s no reporting requirements. It has no agency running the program, so no one to go to for complaints. Expanded Access requires experimental treatment to be provided at cost, Right to Try technically has the same rule, but with no reporting requirements and it specifically having no government agency to enforce its laws can easily price gouge desperate people for something unknown to work without worrying they’ll get caught.

I’ve got multiple chronic illnesses. It’s unlikely I’ll make it to retirement. Laws like Right to Try scare me because I could very well wind up desperate for experimental treatment, and taking steps to remove oversight puts me in danger. There are already politicians clamoring that if Right to Try works, we should officially remove FDA from oversight of experimental treatment and do away with Expanded Access.

Right-to-try is a niche law championed by the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank. Contrary to what Goldwater suggests, right-to-try only covers a small number of niche therapies, namely: last-line personalised medicines (based on analysis of an individual's genetics) for terminally ill patients.

It doesn't have much bearing on medicine though, because the overwhelming majority of such drugs already fall under FDA's compassionate use regulations, and patients access these drug under those existing guidelines.

There have been a few niche cases where right-to-try allowed someone to buy an experimental drug that they would not have otherwise been allowed to buy under compassionate use guidelines. But I want to emphasize that the numbers are tiny.

Like anything in politics, most of the Goldwater Institute's arguments for right-to-try are pure propaganda, although I do think there is an interesting philosophical debate to be had on right-to-try. Nonetheless, the reality is this law has no virtually effect on the landscape of medical science.