Tuesdays are a busy day @ FDA

3 non-colinear points define a plane...and 3 Tuesdays in a row is enough for me to jump to 2 conclusions, but I think the first conclusion is correct and the 2nd conclusion has a good chance of being right, too.

Conclusion 1. The FDA updates its warning letters database by hand every Tuesday morning.

Why do I think so?
I have an automated ‘bot’ that fetches new FDA warning letters from FDA.gov daily, but recently (when I bothered paying attention to it) I noticed that most days it doesn’t retrieve any new warning letters.

Then I started paying attention, and for the past 3 weeks, my bot only fetches new letters on Tuesday mornings (EST).

Not Monday night (I checked).

Not Tuesday at 6 AM (I checked).

Only Tuesday mornings between ~9 and ~11AM.

So, this smells like a human who has a Tuesday morning to-do list. Task # 1? Push out last week’s warning letters.

Why this can’t be automated on a daily basis? Beats me.


Conclusion 2. Updating of clinical trial data @ clinicaltrials.gov is done by the same person/entity/thing at FDA. This conclusion is far more tenuous, but hear me out.

(admittedly weak) Reasoning?
Every day, I have another bot that fetches new clinical trials data.

Every day, the bot finds updated data around 10AM--Except on Tuesdays when the new data show up around 11:30AM.

Tuesday’s task # 2? Push out new clinical trial data.