An Introduction to Big Pharma
By Larry Romanoff, February 12, 2022
Large
corporations have taken over the US government to the degree that corporate
crimes are now considered detached from, and contain no personal responsibility
on the part of, their executives and management. In the many cases like those I
have detailed elsewhere, the companies paid fines but no executives were
charged, in spite of the criminality and sometimes massive death tolls. Medical
crimes and legal claims had become so prevalent in America that the large
pharma companies successfully lobbied the US government for immunity from
prosecution for their crimes. A few years ago, the FDA - the same FDA, it
should be noted, that American corporations use as a health care and food
safety "quality reference" - instituted a new federal policy stating
that FDA approval overrides most claims for damages against medical device
makers and pharmaceutical manufacturers, giving them full protection from
lawsuits. The large pharma companies successfully lobbied Congress to legislate
that they are free from prosecution and any liability for flawed, debilitating
or fatal medications and vaccines even if it is proven that the firms lied
on their FDA applications and falsified all their test data. American
consumers who experience serious health consequences from unsafe medications or
faulty medical devices now have little recourse.
These
people - and they are people, not corporations - are hardened sociopaths who
don't cringe at high death tolls resulting from their insane pursuit of profits.
It isn't only a few faked test results or a failure to notify the FDA of a
drug's harmful side effects. The American pharma industry has a 100-year
history of committing almost every crime imaginable short of bank robbery and
arson, and I'm not sure about the arson. On the medical side we have: faked and
non-existent drug tests, falsifying drug test results, falsifying manufacturing
records, adulteration of medications, mis-weighing of contents, non-disclosure
of harmful and fatal side-effects, non-disclosure of failed drug tests,
off-label marketing, bribery, false advertising, selling adulterated drugs and
defective medical appliances, illegal medical experiments.
The
above are industry-specific crimes related to the manufacture and sale of vaccines
and medicines, but pharma companies are also multinational corporations and
share a litany of crimes and illegal behavior with their brethren in all
industries. A short list: Illegal political contributions and campaign
financing, political bribery, price-fixing conspiracies, illegal market share
allocations, conspiracy to eliminate competition, bid-rigging, defrauding
Medicare with false claims, environmental crimes, dumping of hazardous
chemicals and waste, financial and securities crimes, insider stock trading,
stock price manipulation, tax evasion, racketeering, obstruction of justice,
witness tampering, destruction of legal records, destruction of evidence.
The
Editor of the Urban Right Healthcare
Weblog wrote that
"The
constant march of legal settlements by, jury verdicts against, and in some
cases criminal convictions of or guilty pleas by, large health care
corporations indicate how common misbehavior by such organizations has become.
Since it is likely that much misbehavior does not lead to publicly announced
legal actions, what is published can only provide a floor for an estimate of
how common it is. The march ... shows how sleazy and often corrupt health care
has become, and how that sleaziness and corruption is prevalent not just among
small players, but among the biggest and richest health care organizations, and
their top leaders. One reason the situation continues to be so bad is that
while the unethical behavior does sometimes result in pontificating by the
civil authorities, and fines that may only be costs of doing business, it
rarely leads to meaningful negative consequences for those who authorized,
directed or implemented it."
In
March of 2012, Kelly Kennedy wrote an article in USA Today that outlined the
difficulties caused by weak regulation, revolving doors and heavy lobbying by
the American pharmaceutical industry. It is well known that the largest US drug
makers have paid many billions in fines during the past several years, but to
no apparent avail in terms of eliminating, or even reducing, the systemic
corruption that is so entrenched in the industry. Pfizer alone has paid
billions in fines in the past few years and has been forced to sign three
separate so-called 'corporate integrity agreements' meant to enforce the
prevention of future fraud, but the company continued to produce new violations
and in fact was initiating and perpetrating new additional frauds while
negotiating financial settlements for prior frauds. You can't be more brave
than that. Baxter, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott and Bristol-Meyers are
the same, being repeat offenders without apparent concern. Certainly, part of
their boldness stems from the total immunity of the firms' executives and
officers to criminal charges, fines and prison sentences, which in turn stems
from the enormous influence these firms have over members of Congress. As with
most regulatory bodies in the US today, notably in the pharma, banking,
defense, and securities industries, there exists a virtual revolving door
between the industry being regulated and the regulator, in this case the FDA. A
third side is that these firms control exclusive long-term patents on hundreds
of medications that are vitally necessary to the US Health Service and the
medical industry, where no suitable alternatives exist. I will deal with the
details of these in subsequent chapters.
The
authorities and government investigators claim they have almost no tools left
with which to perform their regulatory functions, the firms' heavy lobbying of
Congress having created an almost total immunity which results in only small
punishments (to shareholders) for even the most egregious of crimes. The fines
have proven useless in containing the criminal behavior, and the “corporate
integrity” agreements are mostly just ignored. The Health Department has
reached the point where they want to ban these firms forever from the Medicare
supply chain, meaning they would no longer be able to supply medications for
government reimbursement, an act which would cost them half their market. But
the pharma companies have so much power they remain defiant even in the face of
such threats, reminding the health authorities that their medications are vital
to the nation and they therefore cannot be excluded. The Justice Department is
now escalating this conflict with threats to cancel the firms' patents on these
drugs, as a criminal punishment, and open the field to generic production to
fill the nation's needs. In an attempt to create some order by closing the
revolving door, Congress is considering a law prohibiting any individuals from
ever working for the Federal government, if they have been involved with any
pharma company that has committed fraud, but this effort is itself experiencing
intensive lobbying by the firms and their powerful industry association.
In
recent years, leading members of Big Pharma like GSK, Pfizer, Johnson &
Johnson, AstraZeneca, Merck, Abbot, Schering-Plough, Novartis and Eli Lilly
have paid about $30 billion in fines to settle charges of misleading marketing,
illegal off-label promotion, bribes and kickbacks, false claims, Medicare
fraud, inferior and contaminated manufacturing processes, false efficacy claims
for new medications, dangerous and useless vaccines, falsifying test data,
bribery and other crimes. But even a brief examination of these firms' total
revenues and profits prove these apparently huge fines are merely insignificant
marketing costs, and the criminal investigations merely an irritant. For
example, GSK paid $3 billion in fines for criminal activity that produced about
$30 billion in revenue. That's nothing more than a 10% tax. If you're a pharma
company, serious crime is the best-paying job in America.
Almost
every major drug maker has been accused in recent years of giving kickbacks to
doctors or shortchanging federal programs. Prosecutors said that they had
become so alarmed by the growing criminality in the industry that they had
begun increasing fines into the billions of dollars and would more vigorously
prosecute doctors as well. But as an indication of the depth and extent of the
corruption in the American pharma industry, a Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former top
FDA regulatory official who is now a consultant and lobbyist for pharma
companies, said (apparently without shame) that government prosecutors were
increasingly criminalising "what reasonable people might argue is a
reasonable exchange of important clinical information between drug companies
and doctors". Bribery, kickbacks, defrauding Medicare, false advertising,
off-label sales, promotions of medication for illegal and unapproved uses are
now transformed into "a reasonable exchange of important clinical
information". One authority stated, "The U.S. pharmaceutical
industry, long one of the most profitable in the country, with profits last
year of close to $50 billion, has engaged in an unprecedented amount of
criminal activity in the past decade. Unfortunately, the ever-escalating fines
are unlikely to stop drug companies from continuing to bribe doctors because
they represent just a fraction of drug company profits and no one has gone to
jail."
In
late 2011, a prominent editor of a medical journal wrote that medical
institutions should firmly prohibit their faculty from doing research on drugs
when they are receiving lucrative speaking and consulting payments from the
drug industry. He said the only solution was to rid the industry of its
plethora of unethical practices, that disclosure was not sufficient to curb
bad, biased and financially-corrupted science. Investigative health journalist
Alison Bass wrote of the multitude of so-called "drug studies" that
are secretly financed by the manufacturers themselves, that are never properly
peer-reviewed, and are normally done by researchers with deep financial ties to
the manufacturers of those same medications. She wrote "it's not enough to
fine drug companies for deceptive and illegal marketing tactics. There has to
be real reform in the medical research establishment. Until universities and
doctors stop taking money that taints their scientific judgment and refrain
from putting their names on papers they didn't write, how can the American
public trust any health professional when it comes to the safety and
effectiveness of prescribed drugs?" Her comments deserve wide support.
Many so-called studies are written by employees of the pharma company or by
someone paid a great deal of money by that firm. Invariably, they push the
'new, improved' and much more expensive medications that are almost never
better than the lower-margin drugs they are meant to replace. And worse, most
of the studies are either skewed, with the data almost always manipulated and
surprisingly often completely fabricated, and they almost never inform of the
many and often serious or deadly side effects. They are essentially fraudulent
marketing tools, yet relied upon by physicians and the FDA.
The
American practice of permitting these criminal organisations "to neither
admit nor deny" the allegations and charges is itself a seriously corrupt
practice that must cease. No company "agrees" to pay billions of
dollars to satisfy criminal and civil charges if it's not guilty, and this
charade of pretense where firms are permitted to hold press conferences and
publicly state they did no wrong but settled 'to move forward', must be stopped.
Guilty is guilty, and in fact the process of "settlements" - which
are agreements arrived at out of court - are also corrupt and should also be
stopped. Except in unusual circumstances, there should be no out-of-court
settlements, with most cases going to trial.
Big Pharma is a Money
Business, not a Health Business
You
will recall from my articles on capitalism that American industry abandoned
early on its pretense of making high-quality products, as a natural result of
the new mantra of profit maximisation. When American capitalists redefined
"long-term" as three months, making a product to last a lifetime
became a kind of self-inflicted injury, in that if they manufactured a set of
kitchen pots that would last for generations, that purchaser was lost as a
customer forever. The natural corollary was that a poor-quality item would
require repeated disposal and repurchase thereby guaranteeing repeat customers
and higher profits indefinitely, whereupon our greed-driven captains of
industry quickly embarked on a plan to continually degrade product quality and
ensure the necessity of continued replacement. By the 1980s, almost all
American multi-nationals and large corporations had joined the race to the
bottom.
This
important lesson in the economics of greed wasn't lost on the pharma companies,
who realised just as quickly that producing a cure for a disease would have the
same result as that from high-quality pots and pans, which is no repeat
customers and the death by suicide of its own revenue stream. And that means
the major pharma companies are essentially producing what I call 'pain-killer'
medications, drugs which fail to address the root cause of an illness but which
provide temporary relief by masking the symptoms, thereby creating hundreds of
millions of drug-dependent repeat customers. More than a few pharmacists have
confirmed documented reports that pharma companies mostly invest research
dollars into a search for these "control medications" and their
clinical trials, rather than search for actual cures for an illness. The
emphasis is on managing the symptoms while maintaining the disease, very
effectively utilising physicians and hospitals as front-line soldiers to
convert every patient into a long-term cash stream.
I
have acquaintances with some knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry who
confide suspicions that discovered cures have actually been suppressed in favor
of the continued production of control medications, and I have seen some
documentation that provides at least circumstantial evidence to support these
claims. Naturally, industry apologists are quick to dismiss these accusations
as paranoid fantasies and 'conspiracy theories', but their denials appear a bit
hollow and self-serving. I have seen no indisputable proof the pharma companies
have shelved cures, but I harbor no doubts whatever they would do so if
opportunities arose.
To
counter some of the industry defenses, we need only think. There is no shortage
of examples of discoveries and patents that have been shelved because they
threatened someone's revenue stream, one clear example being General Motors
buying and sequestering the worldwide patents for NiMH auto battery technology,
an example that industry and the media still desperately want everyone to
forget. In spite of all the faux moralistic outrage at such accusations, the
pharma companies (and almost every large multinational) are today profit-driven
to an insane degree. When GM or Ford will refuse an auto recall for a $0.90
ignition switch or a $4.00 fix for a flaming gas tank because their
cost-benefit analysis proved the cost of resulting deaths to be less than that
of repair, there is little point in debating the imaginary ethical standards of
big business. And the claims about disease cures being potentially worth untold
billions of dollars to a company and eternal fame and glory for the researcher,
are just nonsense. When a country's national health service can be milked for
$150,000 per year per patient for cancer treatments or AIDS medications that
cost pennies to produce, fame and glory are a weak incentive to research a
disease cure that would serve only to shred the income statement. No pharma
company would be so stupid as to collapse its own multi-billion-dollar revenue
stream for the sake of either humanity or glory.
Big
pharma is in the disease business, not the cure business. A medical cure is a
dead-end road that no pharma company would willingly travel. The only
exceptions to this have been a few instances where epidemic-scale diseases were
threatening to kill unacceptably-large numbers of the white population, as with
the search for a polio vaccine. Then, the industry finds a cure. Professor John
Ashton, the president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, accused the Western
pharmaceutical industry of 'moral bankruptcy' for refusing to research an Ebola
vaccine "because the virus only affects Africans". He wrote that the
same attitude existed for decades with the scourge of AIDS because the virus
was infecting and killing primarily blacks, and we had Dr. Kathy Spreen at
Ranbaxy being silenced on her complaints about substandard AIDS medication in
Africa on the grounds that "Who cares? It’s just blacks dying".
Similarly, as I documented elsewhere, the US government for decades ignored the
disease of Pellagra which was known to be caused by a simple Niacin vitamin
deficiency, watching literally millions of people die needlessly, but failing
to act because the deaths occurred mostly in the poverty-stricken black
population. In fact, during those decades, both the authorities and the pharma
companies ridiculed those deaths, referring to Pellagra as "the slave disease".
Sociopathology at its finest.
There
is another unpleasant aspect to this issue, being that in their frenzied
pursuit of revenue streams the pharma companies have largely abandoned not only
the search for cures, but any path that leads to low profit. One result is that
simple medications, often arising from areas like Chinese traditional medicine,
may not be patentable. This, combined with a low cost to synthesise and with a
corresponding low selling price, will prevent any pursuit in this area. The
pharma companies spend huge sums of money to convince physicians and the public
that only patentable synthetic drugs qualify as "real medicine", and
heavily discourage natural or generic sources. They also invest huge time and
money to cannibalise their own medications, constantly imagining "new and
improved" versions that are seldom better, often worse, almost always with
increasingly more serious side effects, but that will sell at far higher
prices. Drugs like Pfizer's Celebrex and Bextra, promoted as massive
innovations, were nothing of the sort, specialists claiming they were no better
than the old tried-and-true Ibuprofen, but sold for fifteen times as much.
A
further issue is that these firms, again in their single-minded pursuit of
profit, have become psychological marketers in the best tradition of Bernays
and the advertising industry. One clear result is their great interest in
developing what are called "lifestyle drugs", which are designer
drugs for rich Americans for conditions like hair loss and sex drive
maintenance, areas in which large segments of the public can be powerfully
affected by clever advertising. The pharma companies being big business rather
than humanitarian concerns, learned quickly there are far greater profits in
the limp phalluses of rich Americans than in a malaria cure among the Malaysian
poor.
Also
of great concern is what we can call 'pre-emptive medicine', the increasingly
long list of new medications that are not proposed as cures for medical
conditions but rather as preventive measures to forestall such conditions. The
theory sounds good, but the experience gained from practice is truly a
cautionary tale. Merck's Vioxx was promoted as a way to prevent heart attacks
in the over-65 population but instead proved to cause those same heart attacks,
killing much of the population in the process. Statins today are a huge fad,
excessively promoted by the pharma companies as an essentially harmless wonder
drug almost mandatory to protect the world of retired people. These drugs are
enormously profitable and an excellent example of pre-emptive medicine combined
with lifestyle marketing, but let's not forget too quickly that Merck's Vioxx
was marketed in essentially the same way, as a 'preventive' medication which in
the end it most emphatically was not.
Statins
are now proving to be as dangerous as Vioxx, with the pharma companies
desperately trying to minimise the truly devastating side effects inherent in
this range of drugs, carrying a substantial risk of severely debilitating
injuries to a not inconsiderable percentage of users. They have a proven
ability to destroy musculature and render previously healthy patients into
almost corpses. There is no shortage of documented evidence that patients who
have been prescribed statins have suffered permanent and debilitating loss of
their muscle capacity, previously healthy individuals reduced to the point
where they are no longer able to walk more than perhaps 50 meters without
suffering uncontrollable muscle exhaustion and pain. Yet these medications have
all been approved by the 'gold standard' FDA and are being heavily promoted by
all pharma companies as a "necessity" for all those over age 60. The
FDA once more has abandoned its prime responsibility to the public, presumably
telling itself that the public can read the package warnings, competently
evaluate the risks, and make an informed conscious choice. Of course, nothing
could be farther from the truth.
In
June of 2015 the Washington Post was aflutter with excitement about a "new
and improved" class of medication that might eliminate the risk of heart
attacks in America forever - statins. Of course, statins have been around for
some time, long enough that the patents will soon expire and thus generating
another frantic round of absolutely necessary new and improved at ten times the
price. Naturally, fluttering media support is helpful in such cases. In (maybe
questionable) clinical trials, these new statins appear magical, apparently
producing "striking results" on cholesterol but oddly no firm opinion
on whether that will actually reduce cardiac events. Nevertheless, we are
assured the FDA recognises the huge unmet need for this new drug. And what is
driving this huge unmet need? The profits, primarily, since this new and improved
breed will cost each patient about $10,000 per year. If we multiply that by the
almost 50 million US residents over age 65 - the primary victims of this new
medical miracle - we get the nice round number of $500 billion dollars. What
else is there to say, except to note that most of these new miracle drugs in
the past 30 years have had a bad habit of causing more heart attacks than they
prevented. Merck's Zocor was one of these. If you recall, the FDA did a field
trial and discovered that this miracle statin not only failed to prevent
cardiac arrests but in fact doubled their incidence. Vioxx
was the same. But in all the excitement everybody seems to have forgotten.
And
it wasn't only Zocor and Vioxx. As of early 2003, Bayer had paid well over $1
billion to settle thousands of lawsuits worldwide for deaths and severe muscle
deterioration resulting from the use of the company's Baycol cerivastatin
medication. Approved by the FDA in 1997 without proper testing or oversight,
Baycol had to be withdrawn from the market in 2001 due to its dangerous
effects. Pfizer's statin, Lipitor, was also facing a huge wave of lawsuits from
injuries due to serious side effects in spite of being the best-selling
prescription drug of all time, with total global sales of more than $130
billion. With more than 50 million users, Pfizer may have no shortage of
lawsuits. Statins are so profitable and the FDA's approval process so reckless
that pharma companies continue to produce and sell new versions even more
deadly.
Health
Supplements, or simple vitamins, are another category that is thriving from the
massive promotional campaign carried on worldwide, again a preventive medicine
taken not because its needed, but to prevent its need. I believe this is one of
the greatest medical hoaxes perpetrated thus far, since excess vitamins are
simply excreted by the body and are a complete waste of money. Any normal diet has
always provided, and provides today, the necessary vitamin intake for good
health. The few individuals suffering from vitamin deficiencies should be under
the care of a physician rather than spending inordinate amounts of money on
what are almost entirely useless pills. These firms are not marketing vitamins
because the public needs them but simply because they are hugely profitable, in
many cases costing only pennies to manufacture but selling for many tens of
dollars per bottle. No person anywhere should purchase any of these items
unless their physician detects a deficiency that cannot be easily remedied by
other means. This vitamin industry has become so loaded with infatuation and
misinformation that even a soap company like Amway is making billions of
dollars selling re-manufactured pills they probably don't even understand.
Even
worse, most of the 'health supplements' or vitamins offered for sale are not
what they appear to be, a great many of even the best brands being nothing more
than a concoction of what the industry calls "fillers", or ground up
rice, wheat or soybeans with absolutely no trace of Vitamin A or Alpha-Omega or
any other high-sounding health additive. Anahad O'Connor wrote a perfect
article in the New York Times in
November of 2013, detailing the widespread fraud existing in the health
supplement market and noting that DNA tests show that many pills labled as
healing herbs are nothing more than powdered rice and weeds. (1)
The
industry was created in the US by American pharma companies and advertising
agencies, with the benefit of large bribes to the medical profession, to the
extent that Americans now spend nearly $8 billion per year on these pills to no
purpose. Canadian researchers tested 44 bottles of the more popular supplements
sold by many different companies and discovered that most were either heavily
diluted with, or entirely replaced by, cheap fillers like soybean, wheat and
rice. The findings of this study were published in the journal BMC Medicine, (2) and concur with other studies conducted elsewhere that indicate
the health supplement industry is even more corrupt than its pharmaceutical big
brother. There is no question the problems are widespread, the fad having been
created by clever marketing that targets sincere interest in health, then
hijacked by those who value money more than ethics - precisely the same
situation existing in the pharma market generally.
Vaccines
Since
we will soon encounter some vaccine stories, perhaps this is a suitable place
to add a general note on vaccines.
"Vaccines
are designed to trick your body's immune system into producing the antibodies
needed to resist any future infection. However, your body is smarter than that.
The artificial stimulation of your immune system produced by an attenuated or
dead virus simply is not the same as your body engaging with and overcoming the
real live virus." Dr. Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the
National Vaccine Information Center, wrote, "The fact that manmade
vaccines cannot replicate the body's natural experience with the disease is one
of the key points of contention between those who insist that mankind cannot
live without mass use of multiple vaccines and those who believe that mankind's
biological integrity will be severely compromised by their continued use. Is it
better to protect children against infectious disease early in life through
temporary immunity from a vaccine, or are they better off contracting certain
contagious infections in childhood and attaining permanent immunity? Do vaccine
complications ultimately cause more chronic illness and death than infectious
diseases do? These questions essentially pit trust in human intervention
against trust in nature and the natural order, which existed long before
vaccines were created by man." Many physicians believe that "In most
cases natural exposure to disease would give you a longer lasting, more robust,
qualitatively superior immunity".
Off-Label Promotion
When
a pharma company receives FDA approval for a drug, that approval is restricted
to specified intended uses only, and cannot be promoted for any other use or
purpose. Promotion for non-approved uses is known as "off-label
promotion" and is illegal. To quote an article from Forbes:
“In
recent years, the government's response to the practice has culminated in significant
payments for drugmakers caught promoting off-label prescriptions. In 2007,
Bristol-Myers Squibb paid out $515 million to settle various civil allegations
including its promotion of the antipsychotic drug, Abilify. Two years later,
Eli Lilly paid out $1.415 billion in part for its off-label marketing of
Zyprexa. Last summer, GlaxoSmithKline agreed to plead guilty to criminal
charges and pay out $3 billion to settle various government claims, including
the unlawful promotion of some of its drugs, like the popular anti-depressant
Paxil. The amount marked the largest health care fraud settlement in the
nation's history.
J&J's
Risperdal was the latest target on the government's list. (The company's)
marketing efforts paid dividends. Sales of Risperdal skyrocketed from $172
million in 1994 to $1.726 billion in 2005; in 2000, it was J&J's
second-best selling drug, with 75% of the sales coming from off-label
prescriptions, according to court documents. According to some estimates,
off-label prescriptions account for 20 percent of all prescriptions, totaling
more than $40 billion in sales annually. The practice is simply too lucrative
to pass up." And of course Forbes is correct in its statements. Industry
analysts estimated that J&J has gathered in about $25 billion from
Risperdal since it went on sale in 2003. In this light, a fine of $2 billion is
a small sales tax like a VAT.” (3)
Side Effects
It
is becoming increasingly common that what are still called "side
effects" are no longer any such thing but are instead more or less major
features of these drugs and which affect increasingly larger percentages of
users. If this trend continues, we will soon be at the point where any physical
reaction will be considered a side effect if experienced by less than 50% of
patients. Pharma executives appear to perform the same kind of cost-benefit
analysis as do the American auto companies, that is to compare the profits from
the sales of a drug to the potential cost of deaths and lawsuits from dangerous
side effects of whose existence they are already fully aware, leading
inevitably to morally bankrupt marketing decisions. If Merck can make tens of
billions in profit on Vioxx but pay only $4 billion in fines and penalties for
the deaths it causes, that's an easy decision in terms of profit maximisation.
It
is most likely true that physical side effects have always been with us, there
always being perhaps a few individuals whose body chemistry would respond in
unexpected ways to new medications. But it is also true that these side
effects, though sometimes horribly dramatic as with the drug Thalidomide, were
mostly mild and rare, perhaps in part due to the simpler nature of the
medications. Newer drugs are increasingly complex, less well understood in
terms of their potential effects on body chemistry, and increasingly poorly
researched with that research too often misrepresented and even falsified, the
side effects too often dismissed as inconvenient anomalies instead of major
inherent characteristics of these new drugs. It used to be that the normal
range of unpleasant side effects might be experienced by only a fraction of one
percent of the patient population, but the lust for profits has skewed the
equation to the point where a drug will be developed by the pharma companies
and approved by the FDA if even 10% or more than 20% of users experience
harmful results.
These
so-called side effects of new and poorly-understood medications and vaccines
are increasingly cutting a wide swath of death and injury through the
populations of Western countries, especially in the dictatorial politically
Right-Wing countries where big pharma has almost omnipotent influence like the
US, Canada and the UK. These events are now termed "adverse drug
reactions" or, more innocently-sounding, "ADRs", and are
estimated to cause well over 100,000 deaths per year in the US alone, making
them one of the leading causes of death in America. According to the Journal of
the American Medical Association, the incidence of "serious and fatal
adverse drug reactions was found to be extremely high". Researchers at the
University of Toronto performed an analysis of studies at US hospitals for the
past 30 years, to determine the frequency of harmful and unintended effects of
medications, and found that nearly 10% of all hospitalised patients experienced
at least one of these events every year, which would make this the
fourth-largest cause of death in the country. The researchers noted their
estimates are conservative, with no allowance for the administration of the
drugs or other therapeutic failures. In other words, the deaths did not result
from physician or pharmacist error, prescriptions of the wrong medication or
accidental overdoses, but simply due to the already-known and often fatal side
effects.
In a
report by the Centers for Disease Control published in 2007, and reviewed by
Fox News and the Los Angeles Times, another analysis of US drug data found that
the incidence of dangerous side effects and deaths from widely-used medications
had tripled between 1998 and 2005, new potent pain-killers and arthritis drugs
like Vioxx among the most dangerous. Both reports condemned the FDA's oversight
on drug safety, especially noting its criminally-incompetent handling of Vioxx.
One of the authors claimed "This growing toll of serious injury shows that
the existing system is not adequately protecting patients and underscores the
importance of recent reports urging far-reaching legislative, policy and
institutional changes". During the period in question, the researchers
discovered almost half a million serious drug-related complications. The FDA's
response was to say it was aware of the large numbers but had no explanation of
the causes, except to offer the same foolish comment Obama made about blacks
being killed by the police, "They aren't killing more blacks than before.
It's just that more people have mobile phones and communicate more." The FDA
made precisely the same comment, "We aren't killing more people this year
than last year, but so many more people have iphones and Twitter accounts, and
are telling everyone."
As I
noted elsewhere, when we combine these preventable deaths from flawed
medications with the large death toll from hospital errors, we have the largest
single cause of death in the US. Even worse, "heart disease" - i.e.
heart attacks - didn't become the claimed "leading cause of death" by
accident. If we correlate the astonishing increase in fatal cardiac events with
the fallout from Vioxx, Zocor, the statins and all their cousins, we find a
relationship of about 1:1, and that means the alarming increase in the
incidence of fatal cardiac events was in no way a natural development but was directly
caused by these new patented miracle drugs, the "miracle" being that
some patients survive. To add irony to tragedy, most of these drugs are
marketed at least partially on their ability to prevent the heart attacks that
they in fact cause. The pharma companies have conceived a scheme to defraud the
national health systems by killing off half the population while their friends
in the for-profit hospitals reap billions bankrupting the unfortunate
survivors. And yet nobody cares to address this, the FDA, the cowardly and
compromised Congress, and the so-called "watchdog media" being
especially conspicuous by their absence.
In
early 2015 Reuters ran an article by Kathryn Doyle on common heartburn
medications like Prilosec, known as proton-pump inhibitors, which demonstrated
strong links to cardiac arrests. (4)
The article stated that researchers sorted through more than 16 million
clinical records for millions of adults to cross-link the usage of these
medications and cardiac events and risks, and discovered about a 20% increased
risk of heart attack in users of these PPI drugs. These medications are heavily
prescribed for tens of millions of patients, resulting in sales of about $15
billion per year including OTC sales. This class of drugs is just one of many
'new and improved' patented medications that have been linked to greatly
increased cardiac risks. There seems to be little point in disputing the claim
that many or most modern medications are complex, poorly understood, have
lethal side effects, are inadequately researched and tested, are subject to
grossly inadequate supervision and oversight, and are often placed on the
market far too quickly. Moreover, the lethal side effects are far too often
proven to have been known by the drug manufacturers in advance of FDA approval
but that this information was suppressed.
To
my mind, it is the FDA that should be sued in these instances since it carries
the ultimate responsibility for public safety in food and drugs, but appears to
have abandoned virtually all that responsibility to the pharma companies in
spite of the knowledge that they almost always lie, frequently fabricate their
test data, and almost always bury the truth of side effects for as long as
possible. When faced with a situation where a potential 5% of patients might
suffer death or debilitating injury, the FDA's responsibility is to remove a
drug from the market, but its loyalties to the pharma industry outweigh those
to the general public. Even if a medication were so vital for some illnesses that
its use justified the serious risks, it is unconscionable to permit off-label
applications that unnecessarily expose millions of otherwise healthy
individuals to totally unnecessary and severe risks. And if the FDA isn't
policing these concerns, of what use is it?
Clinical Trials of
Pharmaceuticals
By
the 1980s, American pharmaceutical companies began to experience a serious
bottleneck in their headlong rush to bring new drugs to the market, in that
test trials on live human subjects were becoming impossible within the US due
in part to the reluctance of a population to act as guinea pigs for
experimental drugs and to the massive lawsuits arising from toxic medications.
They therefore did what any criminal psychopath would do. They began
outsourcing their clinical drug trials to poor countries on the
financially-sound but morally bankrupt theory that killing Asians and Africans
was better and cheaper than killing whites. They outsourced their live trials
to the poorest and least developed countries with low literacy, insufficient
legal restraints, and an overwhelming but totally unjustified faith in the
ethical standards of Americans. Even better, with these foreign trials, there
is a complete absence of oversight from the FDA and, most importantly, the full
protection of the US State Department when things go wrong. This is more fully
referenced in the Chapters on the FDA and Pfizer.
The
financial cost of testing in these countries is much lower since neither the
laws nor government oversight practices have developed to a level useful for
public protection, and these corporations can easily - and often do - suppress
research that demonstrates harmful side effects, choosing to report only
positive results. In the ten years to 2008, the number of overseas clinical
trials by US pharma companies were in the many thousands, having increased by
20 times. These trials, which are almost never monitored by the US FDA or any
other body, are usually conducted in areas with large numbers of poor and
illiterate people who grant their consent by signing an "X" or making
a thumb print on a form. In a great many cases these tests prove deadly,
resulting in thousands of deaths, especially among babies. In each case, the US
pharma companies simply return home, absolving themselves of any responsibility
for the carnage they leave behind.
In
2012, NBC reported on a year-long study they conducted in India, where
drugmakers are increasingly going to do their human drug testing. (5) (6) When
pharmaceutical companies need a supply of test victims for clinical drug
trials, they turn to human 'recruiters' who are paid about $12 for each person
they bring to the research labs. NBC's study claims that this way the US pharma
companies "save millions of dollars, avoid regulatory scrutiny and tap
into a seemingly endless supply of drug study participants". But the
absence of oversight raises serious questions about the integrity of the firms
and the reliability of their test data. NBC and others claim that most of these
recruits are so desperately poor they disregard the risks, if indeed they appreciate
that risks even exist. The recruiters claim they ignore the side effects of the
drugs because they need the money. The study indicated that subjects can earn
as much as $400 for participation in a long study, an amount that "far
outstrips traditional earnings", and that many participate in numerous
trials simultaneously, which negates the value of the data as well as putting
the participants in mortal danger, but which fact the testing companies ignore.
There are many stories of test subjects suffering serious complications like
losing their eyesight and the failure of internal organs, and of course there
are many deaths, with most of these unpleasantries ignored and unrecorded.
Observers
claim the almost total lack of government oversight "has created a culture
of impunity for drug research companies and the doctors who work for
them", though the US pharma companies hollowly claim that
"international standards" are always followed. The situation seems to
be that these outsourced tests do not fall under FDA jurisdiction, and the
Indian government generally is either unaware of them or turns a blind eye,
even in the frequent event of death. This means, among other things, that the
data are not only unreliable in themselves but are often fabricated to suit the
sponsoring pharma company's expectations. The report revealed the startling
fact that the FDA inspects less than 1% of all drug trial sites, either
domestic or foreign, and that the agency has no clear idea of what occurs
during any of these tests. Yet the FDA depends entirely on the data produced by
these trials for its decisions on approval of new medications, despite the vast
evidence that much of this data - both domestic and foreign - are faked.
As
part of their investigation, NBC News created a fake pharmaceutical company and
sent some of their correspondents to India to investigate the circumstances and
conditions in which American pharma companies execute their outsourced live
drug trials. They produced fake documentation for a drug that was clearly
Vioxx, the Merck medication that was eventually pulled from the market after
being proven lethal. They met with executives of a major 'therapeutic research'
firm that agreed to perform extensive live trials on unwitting subjects - for a
fee of a million dollars. The firm agreed it was risky, but assured NBC they
could bribe a well-connected medical consultant to obtain government approval
for the trials. The firm boasted that the test subjects would be paid a total
of $150 for participation in the entire study, as opposed to a cost of $150 per
day if done in the US.
When
NBC presented these facts and a full video to the FDA, they were told of course
this kind of conduct was unacceptable but appeared to be outside the range of
the FDA's influence even though the test results, in a real situation, would be
used for FDA certification of a new drug. Doug Peddicord, director of an
industry-promoting NGO, defended the pharma industry, claiming, "the
clinical research enterprise is amazingly safe and amazingly productive",
that unethical conduct "would never be tolerated" by pharma companies
and made an undocumented historical claim to the effect that any such unethical
firms have always rapidly gone out of business, all claims that were clearly rubbish.
The problem is that the FDA is in no position to evaluate the companies doing
the trials, and base their conclusions only on the reported results which are
repeatedly proven to have been falsified. The FDA refused to be interviewed for
these programs, but blandly claimed they were "strongly engaged in the
clinical research process" in all stages, another claim that is clearly
false.
Al
Jazeera conducted a similar investigation that confirmed NBC's experience. (7) Both
groups noted that physicians in India are revered and their recommendations
almost never questioned by the population, making it exceedingly easy for them
to use their own patients as unwitting victims in these drug trials - the same
process Peddicord wants to create in the US. They noted that US pharma
companies arrange to conduct many of their trials at hospitals where physicians
have been recruited through simple bribery, offering opportunities for both the
doctors and the hospitals to earn important sums of money. A few small studies
by one hospital can collect several hundred thousand dollars, some of which is
shared by the doctors and which represents a pittance to the pharma companies
when compared to these costs in the US. Al Jazeera reported interviewing
doctors who claimed the US pharma companies had paid them and many colleagues
to conduct these trials on their patients, and had also given these doctors
all-expense paid trips to the US and other Western countries, as both incentive
and reward.
Both
Al Jazeera and NBC commented on the apparent total lack of empathy for the
victims of these studies, many of whom end up suffering horribly or dying. Al
Jazeera interviewed one woman who lost both her daughters after they were
vaccinated with Merck's Gardasil, and found many other mothers with the same
tales. There were no examinations, no follow-ups, and no prosecutions. The
government quickly found nobody responsible for the deaths of these girls, and
refused to blame Merck's vaccine.
In
their attempt to paint black as white, to portray big pharma as benevolent
fairy, and to engender sympathy for the companies that are simultaneously
killing us and stealing our money, the US corporate media never tire of telling
us that bringing a new drug to market can cost billions and require 20 years of
research and testing. I doubt there has been even one such real example, but in
any case many medications can be brought to market in six weeks at the cost of
a few tens of thousands of dollars. Newspaper columnists never tell us the
range or the average of drug development costs, always stating the worst
possible case as a typical example.
We're
then told the costliest and most time-consuming portion of drug development is
the clinical testing phase, the live trials, these being heavily promoted by
industry insiders appealing to our humanity in a desperate effort to equate
that humanity with the process of filling the pockets of the inhuman. One such
person, a Dr. Diana Anderson, tells us "Without people who are willing to
participate there would be no process to test new medicines, vaccines, and
devices, (and that) without testing on human subjects, there wouldn’t be any
new drugs made available to the public." That may be true, but the real
purpose of these clinical trials is to count the number of dead bodies and the
number of unfortunate survivors who suffer a progressive collapse of all their
internal organs from the injection of yet another expensive wonder drug. In any
case Dr. Anderson lost me when she claimed clinical trials were conducted by
"the strict rules and regulations mandated by the FDA". After I
stopped laughing, I wanted to cry.
Industry-financed
NGOs tell us the real problem is that pharma companies are unskilled in public
relations, that "better communication" is needed to educate people
about the benefits of clinical trials. Someone called Ken Getz, Chairman of one
such NGO with a long name, tells us these firms need to be more personal, with
responses that reflect "heart and compassion", so that the general
public, consisting of tens of millions of potentially-gullible volunteers will
offer to self-immolate for the benefit of humanity, i.e. the profits of the
pharma companies. Getz's non-profit NGO was formed "to raise awareness of
clinical trials", to educate the public and remove any stigma against
testing on humans. He tells us 80% of volunteers never again take part in a
clinical drug trial, a result he terms "a harsh trend that the industry is
desperate to reverse", but without offering the reasons for that harsh
trend. He feels "the pharma community" (note how these
Satan-worshippers have now become almost family) needs to pro-actively educate
the public about big pharma's need for more profits and the role played by
clinical trials in this. He believes the industry should communicate "the positive
benefits" from trials, saying "There are so many good things to
report ...". Yes, and a few bad ones.
And
we have another NGO called the Association of Clinical Research Organizations,
headed by the same Douglas Peddicord, whose surveys tell him the greatest
barrier to participating in clinical trials is not fear of death or massive
organ collapse, but a lack of knowledge about opportunities to participate, the
great gullible public eager to take a shot and see what happens but apparently
have no idea how or where - to the great detriment of both humanity and pharma
profits. Peddicord apparently believes it is a responsibility of family doctors
to "accurately and positively" educate their patients as to the
benefits of being a guinea pig. So now our family doctors are to be recruited
as the front-line soldiers, taking unfair advantage of the public's natural
gullibility and its no-longer-justified trust in physicians, to line up all
their patients for the latest kidney-failure lottery.
Our
Dr. Diana Anderson envisions "a fully-integrated marketing approach"
(if it's America, it's always just marketing) containing "a multitude of
effective strategies". Of course, marketing may not help as much as Dr.
Anderson evidently hopes. Increasingly in the West, people are fully aware of
the dangers of ingesting untested medications and increasingly fewer are
willing to take serious physical risks in spite of their intense desire to
enhance big pharma's profits. Hardly anybody much cares about the needs of the
pharma companies and hardly anybody needs a few dollars badly enough to risk
the perils of medicines. But an equal problem is that the 'unexpected and
unforeseen' fatal or otherwise side effects of these medications have led to
increasingly huge lawsuits and court awards, to the extent that the pharma
companies no longer want the volunteers in spite of their desperate need.
Mr.
Rogers tells us that "while human testing will continue to be the most
costly and time-consuming aspect of drug development, it is the only way that
drug development can move forward. New medicines have to be tested on people to
see if they work – it’s as simple as that. For the pharmaceutical company
involved it can be a bitter pill to swallow if all the years of hard work and
resources have come to nothing. But as Merck found out to its cost, any side
effects are best unearthed in the laboratory or during a clinical trial than on
the market."
That's
a cute story. Too bad it's not true. First, Merck "unearthed" Vioxx's
side effects long before the drug went on sale, but the salient point is that
what Merck actually "found out" is that it's profitable as hell to
market a flawed medication, kill hundreds of thousands of people, make tens of
billions in profits, then pay a small penalty while "neither admitting nor
denying" anything.
Let's
review. US regulations demand clinical trials of new medications be performed
on live humans. Many new medications produce fatal or otherwise disastrous side
effects (aka unforeseen anomalies) during these trials. US courts don't
generally consider these anomalies to have been quite as unforeseen as did the
pharma companies, leading to huge financial settlements. Westerners are now far
better informed and educated than in days gone by, and few are now interested
in offering themselves as 50% profit incubator and 50% potential corpse. So
much bad news. A problem with no solution. But then everything has a bright
side, every cloud with its own silver lining. Mr. Rogers happily tells us that
"while the diminishing number of volunteers is proving a headache for the
pharmaceutical companies and researchers, increasingly they are outsourcing
human testing to the developing world. India, for instance, is flourishing as
clinical trials hotbed." He notes truthfully that "Critics argue that
volunteers (in the developing world) are naive about the potential consequences
of human testing and that some trials are illegal", but then dismisses
this inconvenient truth and proceeds to happier things.
Our
Dr. Diana Anderson, always the optimist, hopes the Indians' "enthusiasm to
participate" in their own deaths and organ failures will be contagious to
the Americans, stating "I also hope and believe that as the general public
here in the U.S. becomes more aware of the benefits of participating in
clinical trials that we will see greater levels of participation in the
future". But she saves her best hopes for the undeveloped world, telling
us "Within the last few months I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to
China and India as well as other emerging markets and I’ve seen first-hand the
momentum and enthusiasm for clinical trials that is taking place in these
countries. They have enormous populations and they are very willing to
participate in clinical trials. This is an exciting time to be involved in the
clinical trials industry and I’m very optimistic about our future." Not to
be mean-spirited, but I fervently pray that dear Diana's hopes and enthusiasm
are both dashed by reality, by strict government intervention, and by long
prison sentences.
And
Mr. Rogers, apparently equally an optimist, tells us that even the news of
deaths, organ collapses, cancers and other misfortunes will not discourage
clinical trial "regulars" from participating in these injectable
lotteries of life. He tells us almost breathlessly that "Some regulars use
(drug) trials as a second income, while backpackers see it as a way of funding
the next leg of their travels". Is that cool, or what? A second income.
Keep the wife at home with the kids, and still afford that new car. And now
every university student can take a gap year and travel the world without
concern for finances; first thing when you hit Rome, just call Merck or Pfizer
and tell them you need cash. We can understand when Peddicord claims "the
controlled clinical trial represents the single greatest advance in the science
of medicine in our time". A great advance not only for medical science,
but apparently for the auto and travel industries as well.
Note
to Readers: the above-referenced articles and
quotations by Peddicord, Rogers, Anderson et al, appear to have been removed
from the internet.
Pharma Pricing
Strategies
In
June of 2013, the London Telegraph produced an astonishingly scandalous article
that served to confirm the things we've always believed about drug prices, in
this case the newspaper recording conversations with drug company executives
boasting like schoolboys about selling prescription drugs for many hundreds of
dollars when they cost only pennies to produce. (8) Several drug companies were
willing and even eager to offer discounts of 70% or more to any pharmacist or
hospital willing to prescribe their medications, with the understanding these
would be billed at full prices to the Health Service and to the patients. The
Telegraph used undercover reporters posing as investors planning to open a
large chain of retail pharmacies, and recorded their meetings with pharma
executives, producing extensive proof of the collusion to manipulate drug
prices to unconscionable levels, systematically overcharging the national
health services in many countries by billions of dollars each year. These
pharma frauds have been escalating apparently without fear or limit, in spite
of the billions paid in fines. One US Attorney General said the system needed
12 years to recover $2 billion in fines from big pharma, but a few years later
recovered $3 billion in only 18 months.
The
pharma companies are so overcome by greed that no amount of profit is ever
sufficient, with abundant evidence in categories of drugs that are vital to the
preservation of life as in many cancer drugs and those used to control AIDS.
Many vital cancer medications are priced at $50,000 to $100,000 per year and
more, when the production costs are often only a few dollars. As a typical
example, in late 2013, in response to unprecedented public protests, a large
group of over 100 consumer organisations in 35 states launched a massive class
action against Abbott for anti-trust violations in increasing the price of the
critical anti-AIDS drug by over 500%, from $200.00 to over $1,000.00 per
package. These public actions included boycotts by physicians, demonstrations
at the company's annual meetings, and a general storm of public condemnation
for this profiteering. Abbott stubbornly refused to reconsider its price
increase, leading the US Health Service to request that Abbott be stripped of
its patent and generic versions of the drug be approved for other
manufacturers. Abbott, like all pharma companies, will abandon both morality
and humanity if given even a slight monopoly on a life-saving medication.
Fraudulent Investment
Most
national governments are eager to see an expansion of domestic R&D, and
easily fall prey to research scams perpetrated by the pharma companies who
promise to greatly magnify their research expenditures in a nation in exchange
for longer periods of patent protection. Too many naive governments have fallen
for this ruse, only to discover that the promised research never materialised,
and often that the expenditures included in so-called research were little more
than daily operating expenses or clinical trials for medications that had already
been developed elsewhere. I am unaware of any instances where these
undertakings were actually kept, and they remind me of the false promises made
by so many American firms entering into JVs in China, where promises to develop
and promote domestic brands proved to be plans to milk the JVs dry and kill the
brands instead.
In a
National Post article in October of 2014, Tom Blackwell wrote that some years
ago Canada entered an agreement with the international pharma companies to
greatly lengthen their patent protection in exchange for a commitment to spend
10% of all revenue on R&D. In practice, the companies in totality reneged
on their commitment, with R&D being at 4% or below, and even this figure
being loaded with questionable expenses. The entire process was simply a cash
grab with no intent to honor the research commitment. When presented with the
evidence of these breaches of contract, the pharma companies invariably blamed
Canada or other governments, claiming their local divisions have grave difficulty
competing internationally, and lay the blame for this condition on the same
government or its regulatory system or IP protection. (9)
As
Blackwell pointed out, the extension of these drug monopolies not only delays
entry of much-cheaper generics, but actually makes it harder for small domestic
pharma companies to innovate, as their work often stems from existing medicines
that are off patent. In all research, there is also the matter of the extreme
emphasis on profit and marketability, driven by the business schools and large
capitalists, which in the end will destroy the entire idea of scientific
research and twist research facilities into mis-shapen profit incubators bereft
of any thought of benefit to humanity or society generally. It is also true that
this insane and greed-driven push to maximise profits will almost assuredly
serve to prevent truly useful medical discoveries since profits arise from
controlling a disease rather than from curing it. It is only within the
confines of truly non-profit and totally corporate-independent facilities that
socially beneficial research will be conducted.
The
secret non-elected government of the European Community organised a
well-thought-out plan to benefit their own European pharma companies by what
was presented as an advanced method of encouraging pharmacological research for
the good of the world. Their newly-created "Innovative Medicines
Initiative", (10) which was to be "an alliance of corporations and
universities" with the aim of developing new medications, a program with
billions in funding - all drawn from taxpayer money, of course. The stated goal
was to encourage innovation in the creation of essential medicines through
funding universities and small research companies. But this great initiative
has been a complete disaster for everyone but the pharma companies for whom it
was designed. Through this program, the EU has siphoned off literally billions
of dollars which have almost entirely disappeared into the coffers of the large
European pharma companies - which are owned by the same individuals in the EU
government who crafted this scheme. The German newspaper der Spiegel did an
excellent review of this matter, demonstrating that the billions of dollars of
taxpayer money have been spent almost exclusively as a tax-free subsidy to the
pharma industry.
Auto
companies do the same thing, promising to build factories, expand production,
create new jobs, but invariably fail to adhere to the promises, often doing the
opposite of cutting jobs and closing factories. And in every case I have
investigated, these contracts have never contained any penalty clauses for
failing to meet the commitments, meaning that local governments saddled their
population with many extra years of much higher drug prices, and received
nothing of benefit in exchange. These agreements have almost always been a
one-sided hoax.
Additional Reading
https://www.omsj.org/corruption/scale-of-pharma-criminal-fraud-settlements-exposed
Scale of Pharma Criminal Cases Exposed
https://www.enjuris.com/blog/resources/largest-pharmaceutical-settlements-lawsuits/
10 Biggest Pharmaceutical Settlements in
History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements
List of largest pharmaceutical
settlements
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/bigpharma
Big Pharma’s Big Fines
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/big-pharma-global-vaccine-rollout-covid-pfizer
Putting big pharma in charge of global
vaccine rollout was a big mistake
https://www.uspharmacist.com/article/new-fda-strategy-criminal-charges-against-pharma-executives
New FDA Strategy: Criminal Charges
Against Pharma Executives
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/holding-big-pharma-accoun_b_8280952
Holding Big Pharma Accountable: Why
Suing The Pharmaceutical Industry Isn't Working
https://www.omsj.org/2010/19%20Billion%20pharma.pdf
Rapidly Increasing Criminal and Civil
Monetary Penalties Against the Pharmaceutical Industry: 1991 to 2010
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257309170_Institutional_Corruption_of_Pharmaceuticals_and_the_Myth_of_Safe_and_Effective_Drugs
Institutional Corruption of
Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs; An Epidemic of
Harmful Side Effects
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his
articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in
more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held
senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an
international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at
Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to
senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a
series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When
China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/herbal-supplements-are-often-not-what-they-seem.html
Herbal Supplements Are Often Not What
They Seem
(2) https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-11-222
DNA barcoding detects contamination and
substitution in North American herbal products
(3) https://www.forbes.com/2010/05/12/health-care-drugs-medical-opinions-contributors-henry-miller-gregory-conko.html
Off Target On Off-Label Drugs - Forbes
(4) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heart-risk-heartburn-drugs-idUSKBN0OQ2DI20150610
Some heartburn drugs may carry
heightened risk of heart attack
(5) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/people-keep-falling-sick-how-poor-indians-are-recruited-clinical-flna293239
'People keep falling sick': How poor
Indians are recruited for clinical drug trials
(6) https://www.kenallenlaw.com/2012/03/dateline-nbc-hansen-expose-of-fda-drug-testing-overseas-drug-trials-arent-trustworthy-which-means-maybe-your-prescription-drugs-arent-either/
Dateline NBC Hansen Expose of FDA Drug
Testing: Overseas Drug Trials Aren’t Trustworthy Which Means Maybe Your
Prescription Drugs Aren’t Either
(7) https://www.aljazeera.com/program/fault-lines/2011/7/11/outsourced-clinical-trials-overseas/
Outsourced: Clinical trials overseas
(8) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/10135897/Pharmaceutical-scandal-firms-boast-of-profits-on-drugs-that-cost-pennies.html
Pharmaceutical scandal: firms boast of
profits on drugs that cost 'pennies’
(9) https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/drug-companies-well-short-of-research-spending-they-promised-in-exchange-for-longer-patent-protection
Drug companies well short of research
spending they promised in exchange for longer patent protection
(10) https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/research-area/health-research-and-innovation/innovative-medicines-initiative_en
Innovative medicines initiative
Copyright
© Larry
Romanoff, Moon of
Shanghai, Blue Moon
of Shanghai, 2022
