Thalidomide was never finally approved by the FDA, but they allowed it to be used on over 20,000 test victims in the US.
{...
The drug was not approved in the United States in the 1960s, but as many as 20,000 Americans were given thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s as part of two clinical trials operated by the American drug makers Richardson-Merrell and Smith, Kline & French.
...}
A trove of archival records shows how in the early 1960s the Food and Drug Administration investigated the use of a drug that caused severe birth defects.
www.nytimes.com
Actually the federal government has no medical authority at all, and the problem is they pretend they do and that we are protected by them.
The reality is they do nothing if it would effect corporate profits, like the agricultural use of glyphosates that they do nothing about.
Mask and inoculations very likely only make things even worse, and most likely the best thing would have been if all the young/healthy volunteers would have deliberately contracted covid last March, and ended it in a month.