Sherrod Brown: “Mr. Speaker, colored and patterned contact lenses can be a fun way to express one's sense of style. Noncorrective…”

“Mr. Speaker, colored and patterned contact lenses can be a fun way to express one's sense of style. Noncorrective contact lenses that are manufactured responsibly and worn under the supervision of a qualified eye care professional are useful and a perfectly safe commodity. For years, the FDA saw it that way too and properly classified colored contact lenses as medical devices. In fact, just over a year ago FDA issued an official notification noting that noncorrective contacts 'present significant risks of blindness and other eye injury if distributed without the involvement of a qualified eye professional.' But in April, for whatever reason, and we have seen an FDA that has become more and more politicized in the last couple of years, but for some reason the FDA flip-flopped deciding that colored contact lenses were not medical devices and were instead cosmetics. This quiet, but important, policy change opened the door to a new public health threat.”