'Meant I couldn't have known about data manipulation'
'Never demanded approval or interfered in review'
Kim Seung-won, nominee for minister of justice, clarified Tuesday that his remark "I'm a liberal arts person" — made during his National Assembly confirmation hearing in response to questions about the efficacy of a COVID-19 treatment — was not meant to dodge responsibility. His preparation team said the comment was intended to convey that he lacked the expertise to detect internal data manipulation at the company in question.
After some media outlets highlighted the remark as an attempt to evade accountability, Kim's confirmation hearing preparation team pushed back. "Some press reports have singled out the expression 'I'm a liberal arts person, so I couldn't know about the treatment's efficacy' and portrayed it as responsibility-dodging, but that misrepresents the intent of his answer," the team said.
The team added that Kim's answer was meant to convey that assessing a drug's efficacy and the authenticity of submitted data is the job of the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, a specialized agency, and that he could not have known about the internal manipulation of experimental data at the company.
The team also said Kim had only passed along a civil complaint asking that the review process for a domestically developed COVID-19 treatment not be unfairly delayed, and that he had never demanded a specific approval outcome or interfered in the subsequent review.
The clarification came after Kim was questioned at the hearing about allegations of animal-testing data manipulation at Genencell, a natural-product pharmaceutical firm at the center of allegations that he had lobbied for approval of a new drug clinical trial. "I'm a liberal arts person," Kim said at the time. "I have no way of knowing about things like a treatment's efficacy."
Kim later addressed the remark directly. "When I said earlier that I'm a 'liberal arts person,' it was never meant to avoid responsibility," he said. "I meant that I lacked expertise in the field and was therefore unable to examine the details more carefully."
th5@heraldcorp.com
