openfda

name	openfda
description	Query the FDA's public openFDA APIs for post-market drug data — FAERS adverse-event reports, Drugs@FDA approval and submission history, Structured Product Labels including boxed warnings, the National Drug Code directory, recall enforcement reports, and drug shortages. Use this skill to check what a regulator has already concluded about a molecule or its class, to date an approval and count its efficacy supplements, to read an approved indication or boxed warning, and to score a drug-event pair for disproportionate reporting with PRR, ROR, and chi-squared. Also trigger on openFDA, api.fda.gov, FAERS, Drugs@FDA, SPL, NDC, pharmacovigilance, boxed warning, adverse event report, drug recall, or safety signal.
license	MIT
allowed-tools	Read Write Edit Bash
compatibility	Requires Python 3.10+ and outbound HTTPS access to api.fda.gov. The bundled scripts use only the Python standard library. No key is needed, but the anonymous quota is 1000 requests/day; set OPENFDA_API_KEY (free, from open.fda.gov) to raise it to 120000/day. Data is public domain (CC0). FAERS publishes quarterly and lags by three months or more.
metadata	{"version":"1.0","skill-author":"K-Dense Inc.","openclaw":{"emoji":"🏛️","homepage":"https://open.fda.gov","envVars":[{"name":"OPENFDA_API_KEY","required":false,"description":"Free openFDA key; raises the daily quota from 1000 to 120000 requests."}]},"hermes":{"category":"research"}}

openFDA

The FDA's own post-market record, served as a public REST API: 20.6 M adverse-event reports, every drug application since 1939, and the full text of approved labels. It answers the question that comes after the biology — what has already happened to this molecule, or to its class, in people — and it is the cheapest safety evidence available anywhere.

Base URL: https://api.fda.gov — REST, no key required. Docs: open.fda.gov/apis · field reference Checked against: the live API, August 2026; FAERS data current to 2026-07-30.

Read references/api-reference.md before writing a query by hand, references/endpoint-fields.md before trusting a field name, and references/disproportionality.md before reporting any signal — that one is judgement, not syntax.

The three scripts

Script	Answers
fda_adverse.py	What has been reported against this drug, and is any of it disproportionate?
fda_approvals.py	When was it approved, by whom, and how many indications has it gained?
fda_labels.py	What does the approved label actually say?

Zero results arrive as HTTP 404

This is the single thing to get right. A search that matches nothing returns:

HTTP 404  {"error": {"code": "NOT_FOUND", "message": "No matches found!"}}

That is a successful query with an empty result set. Any client that treats non-200 as failure turns "this drug has no reports" into a crash, and — worse — makes a typo indistinguishable from a real zero, because a misspelled field name also returns 404. get() in scripts/_common.py converts NOT_FOUND into an empty payload; when a count comes back empty, check the field name against references/endpoint-fields.md before believing it.

The other two surprises: limit above 1000 returns 403 API_KEY_MISSING (a key raises the daily quota, not the per-request cap — lower limit instead), and is hard-capped at , so a search matching 500 000 reports has 25 000 reachable records. Partition by to go deeper.