Health and Well Being
Corruption in medical ‘money’ science - About Health | Blog
It’s the day after the US election, and I have just lost a third consecutive bet, this time on whom could name the most states in the USA (I did reach just over 40…not good enough though) and so I thought I would cheer myself up by finding the biggest pharmaceutical company fines for fraud and other illegal behaviour. I decided to do the top 7 recent cases.
Before I get to the list, I would like to explain why I studied science. I studied it for the right reasons. I was, am, and have always been interested in how everything works. More importantly, I never would have studied any area of science where the ‘results’ were either political or financially motivated. The very definition of a good science experiment is one that can be repeated.
I believed that science was good, and that it was the ultimate study of the truth, and sadly now I simply don’t. That is not quite true, as real science (like physics) is still the study of the truth, but ‘money science’, as in all medical research, is the exact opposite.
In Science, money doesn’t just talk, it screams!
And money only cares about one thing, more money. Drug trials are often carried out at organisations like medical schools, or government and private research organisations. These organisations often need that pharmaceutical dollar to pay for other areas of their operations, and the drug companies know it. This creates a massive conflict of interest; the incentive is to keep your drug company paymaster happy by producing favourable results, that is, if you want more work. The list of ways this deceit is perpetuated covers every possible area of dishonesty. Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Pharma highlights a few. ‘Drugs are tested by the companies that manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients and analysed using methods designed to exaggerate the benefits of treatments’. It doesn’t stop there, they cheat and look at supposedly blind trials part way through, if the results are favourable, they can stop the trial (before things have a chance to turn bad). The researchers who try and speak out are intimidated and contractually banned from publishing results. When all else fails, the most common tactic is simply suppression of negative trial data, that’s why published research is demonstrably biased in favour of who pays for the research. So, how could this situation occur in a world with democratic governments that are there to look after us? It’s easy, and the US presidential election yesterday will serve as an example. We have just seen the people of the United States get out and exercise their power to decide how the USA will be run for the next four years. ‘Power to the people’, ‘n’ all that. Ah, no actually. The election yesterday will have very little real effect on the things that really matter. The really important stuff is paid for already, by big business. The election is just a sideshow, no one who votes will be listened to. There are many hundreds of lobbyists in Washington, and no one has more lobbyists than the drug companies. The lobbyists facilitate drug company donations to campaign funds in exchange for favourable legislation. The word ‘lobbying’ is one of the great American euphemisms. It’s a euphemism because when you lobby someone by giving them a political donation, we already have a word for it, bribery. Congressmen spend around 40% of their time raising money for campaigning, and drug companies are big donors. This is why the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) is setup the way that it is, it is an utterly corrupt, completely compromised, useless regulator. They get huge fees from pharmaceutical companies when drugs are on the market, so the incentive is to get drugs on the market. They view these drug companies as their ‘clients’. Ask yourself, do you feel like a ‘client’ of our regulatory authorities? like the IRD? Tried taking your business somewhere else? These organisations are meant to be there to enforce. This has huge ramifications for us because Medsafe is our version of the FDA, and they have not got, and never will have the resources to replicate any of this work on drug efficacy and drug safety. Nor will they have access to drug trial data, so we get all that US corruption second hand. Dr Marcia Angel (Former Editor in Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine) wrote a book about this corruption, The truth about drug companies: how they deceive us, and what to do about it! A review article citing the book asked ‘Is academic medicine for sale?’ and someone wrote ‘No, the current owner is very happy with it’. There is much more to this story waiting to be told, but I will finish off today with the recent Top 7 list of drug company fines for various illegal practises, including outright fraud. In previous articles I have stated that this behaviour is across the board, that it is the rule and not the exception, and I wanted to prove it by showing you a list of companies that have been busted (at least the US Department of Justice is waking up). Most of cases below are for encouraging doctors to prescribe drugs for reasons they were never approved or developed for, with no proof they either work, are safe, or worse still, secretly knowing they are unsafe. They have used some of the most immoral and despicable methods imaginable and specifically targeted the most vulnerable. But it is not just the pharmaceutical companies. For years US doctors have been receiving lavish gifts from drug companies, five star holidays, spa treatments, exorbitant speaking fees …all for selling out their patients and prescribing drugs developed by the company that offers them the most. Everyone is in on it, corrupt regulators, corrupt scientists, corrupt politicians and a media that knows where their next advertising dollar is coming from (they spin negative drug company stories). Someone once said to me, ‘It’s not a gravy train Dan…It’s a gravy super-tanker – and there’s room for everyone!’ God Bless America, leader of the free world, yee haa. Daniel King MSc (hons)Dans Note:
We get desensitised by huge numbers, I grew up when the six million dollar man was on TV. Everyone wondered what they would do if they had a million dollars. These fines are thousands of times larger, to put it in perspective (purely for fun) if the GlaxoSmithKline fine was for speeding, you would need to be travelling over 200 million kilometres per hour over the speed limit, or perhaps more achievably, forget to put money in an Auckland parking meter for around 20,000 years… Yeah OK, sometimes I get bored.Top 7 drug company fines
Figures below are from the website, FiercePharma.com. 1. Glaxo Smith Kline: 2012, $3,000,000,000 Paxil, Wellbutrin, Avandia Notes: encouraged prescription of antidepressant Paxil (paroxetine) to depressed children, off label, despite knowing trial data indicated no benefit, but worse still, that it may increase risk of suicide in young people. 2. Pfizer: 2009, $2,300,000,000 Bextra, Geodon, Zyvox, Lyrica, Notes: Also fined $430,000,000 in 2004 for its Neurontin marketing, promised it would never do it again, it did. 3. Johnson & Johnson: 2012, est up to $2,200,000,000, Risperdal, Invega, Natrecor, Levaquin. Procrit Notes: Fine figures as reported by press as settlement pending. In 7 years Risperdal alone generated $20,000,000,000 in sales, most illegally. 4. Abbott Laboratories: 2010, $1,600,000,000 Depakote, Notes: Abbot Laboratories specially trained sales force sold this dementia drug into nursing homes for patients who became aggressive, despite no evidence it was safe or that it even worked. It had even stopped a trial due to ‘adverse events’. 5. Ely Lilly: 2009, $1,400,000,000 Zyprexa, Notes: antipsychotic drug. 6. Merck: 2011, $950,000,000 Vioxx, Notes: My personal favourite, unlike other drugs on this list, this was not for off label prescribing, but for allegedly exaggerating the drug’s safety and downplaying the risks. The drug was pulled in 2004, the US Department of Justice was just getting warmed up, and the fine is probably lower because of that. Merck has never admitted liability. Vioxx was a drug for arthritis pain relief, and unfortunately caused heart attacks and strokes. The death toll for this drug alone is estimated at between 60,000 and 120,000 people. 7. Serono: (now owned by Merck) 2005, $704,000,000 Serostim, Notes: offered to cover expenses to Cannes, France, for doctors who wrote 30 prescriptions. Revenue per prescription was $21,000, nice little earner.
November 8, 2012
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