FDA official slams Kalshi app for letting users bet on the lives of cancer patients
You can bet on anything these days, with the likes of Kalshi and Polymarket letting you gamble on everything from whether Matt Damon will win an Oscar for The Odyssey to chances that Donald Trump will run for a third term.
Kalshi is back in the news after a former FDA official slammed an apparent 'breach of scientific conduct' for being able to bet on the outcome of clinical cancer trials.
There are plenty of bets made just for 'fun' on Kalshi and Polymarket, although some have been called out for their grim subject matter and ability to bet on the health industry. In April 2026, lawmakers slammed a 'disgusting' Polymarket bet on whether downed U.S. warplane pilots would be rescued from Iran.
Things got worse when a U.S. Special Forces soldier was arrested and charged over allegations he used classified data to make over $400,000 due to insider trading over the USA's intervention in Venezuela.
Kalshi under fire for cancer trial bets
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Kalshi has been drawn into its own controversies, with a video editor for YouTuber MrBeast being fined and suspended from the prediction platform over suspected insider trading. There are also complaints that Kalshi is capitalizing on humanitarian issues like whether the Palestinian population would be suffering from food shortages.
As reported by The New York Times, former FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf has called out Kalshi's drug trial success bets, saying: "Turning loose a betting market in an ongoing randomized clinical trial really is a breach of scientific conduct."
In July 2026, Kalshi announced a controversial pilot program that lets you bet on pending FDA decisions and the results of clinical cancer trials. Powered by AppliedXL, these new markets reveal drug-development odds for the first time. Kalshi defended its venture, explaining that based on the FDA's April 2026 figures, 30% of trials that were required to report their results hadn't complied.
This comes with potential problems, as critics have suggested participants could drop out of studies or administrators might unconsciously alter behavior over public prediction markets declaring a trial is going to fail.
Kalshi spokesperson Jack Such reiterated that the company has measures in place to safeguard the research process, with steps like verifying where traders work and not allowing bets to be made until studies have finished enrolling patients.
Such argues that prediction markets aren't adding any new concerns that haven't already been raised by decades of stock market investing in drug companies. He added: "This is an incredibly important, incredibly sensitive, incredibly impactful subject matter area...This is why the people making decisions need to have the best possible information available, and the avenue for the best possible information is traders on Kalshi putting money where their mouth is.”
Cancer patients call out 'death market' betting
Kalshi’s stance isn't enough for 43-year-old Walter Ingaharro Jr., with the metastatic pancreatic cancer patient adding: "We’re literally trying to stay alive. It’s not a game. The introduction of gambling into the process really creates an ethical mess."
It was a similar story as Joshua Pederson wrote for The Guardian and slammed the idea that you can bet on the future of his 12-year-old son, who has a cancerous tumor growing inches from his heart.
With Pederson's son's cancer returning, he admitted that picking from the numerous different trials was a "terrifying experiment for which we feel ill-prepared." He said that the idea of turning to a prediction market to help make that decision would be 'preposterous' and vented: "The possibility that somebody out there might be wagering against my son, hoping that the treatment fails so they can make money, is enraging. How is this not just another type of “death market” – like markets for war or assassination – that even Kalshi says it won’t abide?"
Despite the controversy, Kalshi seems to be sticking to its guns, with defiant CEO Tarek Mansour concluding: "Drug development is one of the most important and most information-constrained industries on earth...The data that determines which drugs advance and which don’t is largely locked away from the people who need it most."