The Pharmaceutical Industry. Dishonesty, Corruption and Fraud. Ely Lilly & Prosac - the drug that causes violence & suicide

Prosac, an SSRI antidepressant drug, was once hailed a 'wonder drug', a 'magic bullet', the solution to the problem of depression. Decades later it is still being prescribed, regardless of the horrific 'side effects' it is now known to cause (not to mention its limited ability to treat depression). In its praise one American psychiatrist, Peter Kramer, said in his 1993 book 'Listening to Prozac'  that the drug could make even people without depression “better than well”. The mainstream media, as usual, shared this pharmaceutical enthusiasm, and the sales of antidepressant drugs climbed astronomically; and been steadily increased since that time.

Joseph Wesbecker, from Louisville, Kentucky, USA was prescribed Prozac in 1989, and after taking the drug for about month, shot dead 8 work colleagues, wounded 12 others. and then killed himself. Survivors of the massacre, and relatives of the dead, took Ely Lilly, the drug manufacturer, to court. It was then, and is now, one of countless of mass killings in the USA. So in the early 1990's Dr Breggin was asked to evaluate the scientific basis for the claim that Prozac was causing violence and suicide, and claims the company had been negligent in the development and marketing of Prozac.

Eli Lilly won the case, was exonerated, and absolved of any blame for murders by the jury, which decided that the evaluation and testimony of Dr Breggin had not proven that Prozac was at fault. The judge suspected at the time that the trial had been rigged, and that Eli Willey had withheld damaging evidence from the court. Dr Breggin described this situation in his book, 'Medication Madness', published in 2009. Apparently, for many years after the trial, both plaintiffs and attorneys remained unaware of some the documents Breggin had evaluated. Then, in 2004, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) were sent the documents, anonymously, and they published an article about them.

Even so, it took longer (some 30 years in total) for the full truth to come out. Eli Lilly had secretly paid plaintiffs a total of $20 million to conceal damaging evidence that the company had concealed vital evidence that would have, if made public at the trial, damaged the reputation (and thus the sales) of the drug. The judge and jury knew nothing about this payment. 

What also became clear was that Eli Lilly had, just previous to this trial, pleaded guilty to 25 counts of failure to report adverse reactions to another of its drugs, Oraflex. They feared that the Prozac jury would be more inclined to rule against them if this was known - so they settled out of court to prevent the court from hearing about it. It seems that Eli Lilly has a track record of concealing damning truths about their drugs.

The Judge, John Potter, had suspected that Eli Lilly had bribed both the plaintiffs and their lawyers before the jury verdict. He uncovered evidence of bribery, and fought Eli Lilly for several years after the trial but was unable to obtain proof of the Prozac payoff. So the company succeeded in keeping its criminal action from public view, and were able to continue selling a drug (and have been selling it to this day).

All this information has been gleaned from a variety of sources

• What your doctor might not know about Psychiatric Drug Facts
• Prozac maker Eli Lilly subverted mass murder trial 
• Eli Lilly paid $20 million in  hush money over Prozac mass shooting lawsuit
  

Eli LIlly's victory also sent a powerful message to lawyers and plaintiffs about the odds of winning judgments against powerful drug companies. There seemed little prospect of proving that Prozac was a grave danger.

It is also known now that the original FDA examiner had refused to accept Prozac because he knew that it caused aggression and violence. However, the drug was approved by the regulator, Prozac came to market, and has stayed there ever since. So much for the robustness of the drug regulation system! As Keith Scott-Mumby has stated (in his book, "Psychiatry without Drugs", if Eli Lilly had lost the case it could be the end of the a marvellous gravy train for the industry, stating that 1 in 5 USA citizens are on some form of psychiatric medication.

            "The drug ... was 'exonerated' and now it’s difficult to get the bent psychiatric profession to tolerate the idea that their stupid drugs are causing mass murders. Prozac and other SSRIs KILL people."

Yet the dishonesty, corruption and fraud was not just the mean saving Prozac's reputation. It also meant the link between Prozac, other subsequent SSRI, antipsychotic drugs, and violence also failed to be highlighted. Wesbecker was crazy, that's why he committed the murders. It had nothing to do with the drugs. Yet Wesbecker was not known to have murderous or suicidal tendencies prior to taking Prozac. And he was not the last mass killer on SSRI antidepressants. Since that time hundreds of mass shooters have been done by individuals on psychiatric drugs.
 
Indeed the situation within the conventional medical establishment is now ever worse. As Mumby says, the call is now for more drugs, to drug more 'crazy', patients who psychiatry believe might do harm, and have 'tendency to violence'. They are then put on psychiatric drugs, drugs with 'violence' as a well known side effect, clearly listed on Patient Information Leaflets.

Drugs used to 'treat' a problem - that actually cause the problem.

The pharmaceutical industry is dishonest, corrupt and fraudulent. It gets away with it because it is rich, influential and powerful. And they spend their wealth on ensuring we do not need to hear about the harm they cause to patients, and profit from harming patients, and get richer, more influential and powerful.

It is a vicious circle that can only be broken when we patients put an end to it - by saying 'No' to pharmaceutical medicine.

Dishonesty, Corruption and Fraud in the Pharmaceutical Industry. It's been going on for years

Would you consider buying a second-hand car from these pharmaceutical drug companies? 

If not, why are we still accepting their drugs and vaccines?

If you believe that the pharmaceutical industry is honest enterprise, placing the best interests of its patients at the heart of its business, it is time you looked closely at the history of dishonesty, corruption and fraud it has been found guilty of during the last 20+ years.

Over this time pharmaceutical companies have been subject to a succession criminal cases, court rulings, and the imposition of heavy fines and compensation payments to victims of their drugs and vaccines. Many of these emanate in the USA, but all the drugs mentioned have a world-wide distribution. This is a just brief summary of some of the bigger, recent cases.

Pardue Pharma. 2007
Purdue Pharma was fined $634.5 million for fraudulently selling the painkilling drug, Oxycontin, suggesting it was less addictive, and less likely to be abused than other painkillers. The company was also charged with using misleading sales tactics, minimizing the risks of the drug, and promoting it for uses for which it was not approved.

Bristol-Myers Squibb. 2007
Bristol-Myers Squibb were fined $515 for illegally promoting its antipsychotic drug, Abilify, to children and older people, despite a 'black box' warning about possible fatal side effects. The company was also fined for giving payments, and offering expensive presents and vacations to doctors and pharmacists who dispensed the drugs.

Eli Lilly. January 2009
Eli Lilly was fined $1.42 billion following government investigation into its promotion of the antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa. Zyprexa had been approved for the treatment of certain psychotic disorders, but Lilly admitted to promoting the drug to older people to treat dementia. The government also proved that Eli Lilly had targeted primary care physicians to promote Zyprexa for unapproved uses, and had trained a sales force specifically to disregard the law. They were also found to have failed to divulge important side effect information. Zyprexa was marketed as a sleeping aid for older people because one of its side effects is sedation, even though the drug also increased the risk of death!

Pfizer. September 2009
The drug company, Pfizer, was fined $2.3 billion, at the time the largest health care fraud settlement, and the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the USA. Pfizer pleaded guilty to misbranding the painkilling drug, Bextra, with the intent to mislead and defraud, and promoting the drug to treat acute pain at dosages the drug regulator, the FDA, had previously deemed dangerous. In 2005 Bextra was banned due to safety concerns. It was also found that Pfizer had promoted three other drugs illegally, the antipsychotic Geodon, an antibiotic Zyvox, and the anti-epileptic drug, Lyrica.

AstraZenica. April 2010
AstraZeneca was fined $520 million following allegations that it llegally promoted the antipsychotic drug, Seroquel. The drug was approved for treating schizophrenia and bipolar mania, but AstraZeneca had promoted Seroquel for a variety of unapproved uses, such as weight loss, aggression, sleeplessness, ADHD, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, depression, and dementia. AstraZeneca denied the charges, but nonetheless agreed to pay the fine to end the government investigation! During the hearings it was found that the company promoted the drug for weight loss by highlighting one favourable study but burying others that linked it to substantial weight gain!

GlaxoSmithKiline and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 2010
In February 2010, the USA Senate Finance Committee, in a 334 page report, found that the diabetes drug Avandia was linked with tens of thousands of heart attacks, and that the drug company, GlaxoSmithKline had known about this for many years but kept them from the public. The report also criticised the FDA. It found that although members of staff expressed concerns, the drug regulator (sic) connived with the drug company to 'overlook' and 'overrode'  patient safety concerns.

Bristol-Wyers Squibb. 2010
This story has been taken from the magazine 'What Doctors Don't Tell You", May 2019, in an article "Institutes face $1 billion lawsuit for wartime experiment, indicating the dishonesty and fraud is not a recent development as far as the pharmaceutical industry is concerned.

         "John Hopkins University, the drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Rockafeller Foundation face a £1 billion lawsuite for their part in a US government experiment that infected hundreds of Guatamalans with syphilis in the 1940's. The experiment was set up to text the newly developed drug penicillin as a therapy against sexually transmitted diseases. It remained secret until 2010.... since when the three institutions have been fighting legal action... The complaint cites that several John Hopkins and Rockefeller Foundation doctors were involved in the experiement, along with four executives from Bristol Laboratories and the Squuibb Institute... John Hopking University has apologised for its involvement in the experiment, but the Rockefeller Foundation .... denies any wrongoiding. The drug company has refused to comment".

Merck. November 2011
The drug company, Merck, was involved in a huge scandal over its dangerous painkilling drug, Vioxx. It was fined for selling the drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis, for which it had not been tested, over decade earlier. Indeed, they were found to have illegally promoted Vioxx for three years, even after they were reprimanded for doing so in September 2001 by the USA drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration. In the following year, Merck was fined a further $321 million in Boston, USA.

GlaxoSmithKline. 2011
In December 2011, GSK were ordered to pay $3 billion "to settle United States government civil and criminal investigations into its sales practices for numerous drugs". This involved a variety of illegal activities, including illegally marketing drugs, paying off doctors to promote dangerous drugs, and manipulating scientific data to get dangerous drugs approved.

GlaxoSmithKline, January 2012
In January 2012, in Argentina, GSK was fined 400,00 pesos when 14 babies died in an illegal vaccine trial. It was stated that the doctors took advantage of the many illiterate parents who took their children for treatment by pressuring and forcing them into signing 28-page consent forms, and getting them involved in the trials. In Europe and the USA laboratories are not allowed to conduct such experiment, so it was done in third-world countries instead.

Abbott. February 2012
A Colombian court ruled that Abbott Laboratories had overcharged the Ministry of Health for drugs, "maintaining the price of an HIV medicine above the reference price" and "flouting a government order". The court’s decision was described as a groundbreaking condemnation of pricing abuses by pharmaceutical companies".

Abbott. May 2012
Abbott was fined $1.5 billion for its illegal promotion of the antipsychotic drug, Depakote. Abbott admitted it had trained a special sales team to target nursing homes, promoting the drug for the control of aggression and agitation for dementia patients. Depakote had not been approved for this purpose, and Abbott could not demonstrate evidence that the drug was safe or effective for this purpose. The company had also promoted Depakote to treat schizophrenia, again with evidence of its efficacy in treating this condition.

GlaxoSmithKline. July 2012
GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $3 billion in civil and criminal liabilities following its promotion of several drugs, as well as its failure to report negative safety data, and making unsupported safety claims, in particular for its diabetes drug, Avandia. The company was aware that the drug increased the risk of heart attacks and congestive heart failure, but they withheld this information for seven years! During this time the drug was prescribed to patients, who were unaware that GSK were intentionally putting their lives at risk in order to sell the drug. The company also pleaded guilty to promoting the antidepressant drug, Paxil, for patients under 18 although it had never been approved for that age group. GSK were also found guilty of paying bribes to doctors, with one attorney prosecuting the case saying that the company used every imaginable form of high-priced entertainment and paid millions of dollars in bribes to doctors. One doctor is reported as receiving $275,000 to promote just one GSK drug!

A full account of the dishonesty and fraud perpetrated in this case is contained in the book "Children of the Cure", written by David Healy, Joanna LeNoury and Julie Wood,

AstraZenica. July 2012
A USA federal judge found that AstraZenica had attempted to block the FDA's approval of generic versions of its antipsychotic drug, Seroquel. Its patent had expired in March.

Pfizer. August 2012
Pfizer were forced to pay $60 million after bribing European and Asian health officials to dispense their drugs and vaccines. The fraud involved doctors and public health officials in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia and Serbia. When the company realised they might be caught they apparently attempted to hide the illicit transactions by burying them in accounting records as 'business expenses'.

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. October 2012
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals agreed to pay $95 million after it had promoted several drugs for non-medically accepted uses. These drugs included the stroke-prevention drug, Aggrenox, the lung disease drugs, Atrovent and Combivent, and also the high blood pressure drug ,Micardis. The FDA said that Boehringer had improperly marketed the drugs and "caused false claims to be submitted to government health care programs."

Sanofi-Aventis. December 2012
Sanofi-Aventis paid a fine of $109 million after it was found that the company gave doctors free units of the drug Hyalgan (an injection to relieve knee pain) to encourage those doctors to buy their product. Sanofi lowered the effective price by promising doctors free samples, although it continued to charge government programmes high prices by submitting false price reports.

Amgen. December 2012
Amgen paid $762 million after criminal and civil charges that the company had illegally introduced and promoted several drugs including the anaemia drug, Aranesp. The company pleaded guilty to illegally selling Aranesp at doses the FDA had explicitly rejected, and for an off-label treatment that did not have FDA approval.

Wyeth. August 2013
Wyeth paid $500,000 when charged with illegal marketing of their immunosupressant drug, Rapamune. One comment made about this case said that "Wyeth's conduct put profits ahead of the health and safety of a highly vulnerable patient population dependent on life-sustaining therapy,"

Johnson and Johnson. November 2013
Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay a $2.2 billion fine following criminal and civil charges relating to three of its drugs, Risperdal, Invega and Natrecor. The drug company had promoted these drugs for uses that had not been approved  by the FDA as safe and effective. They had also spent large sums promoting the drugs to dementia patients in nursing homes, and paid bribes to doctors and pharmacies. Johnson & Johnson also admitted it had promoted Risperdal for the treatment of psychotic symptoms in non-schizophrenic patients, for which the drug was not approved.

Endo Health Solutions. February 2014
Endo Health Solutions, and its subsidiary, Endon Pharmaceuticals, paid $192.7 million to resolve criminal and civil charges arising from Endo's marketing of the drug, Lidoderm. The company admitted that it promoted Lidoderm for uses for which it was unapproved.

Novartis and Roche. March 2014
Italian medical authorities fined two Swiss pharmaceutical companies, Novartis and Roche Holdings, a total of $250 million for colluding to keep doctors from prescribing a relatively inexpensive eye treatment in favour of a more expensive drug.

Takeda and Eli Lilly. March 2014
These two drug companies were fined $9 billion in Louisianna, USA, after they concealed evidence of a link between their diabetes drug, Actos, and bladder cancer. They were subject to thousands of lawsuits after the drug regulator, the FDA, issued a warning in 2011 that the drug might increase the risk of bladder cancer, and the drug companies denied any link. As well as bladder cancer the drug has also been linked to cognitive heart failure.

GlaxoSmithKline. June 2014
GlaxoSmithKline were ordered to pay $105 million to 44 states for providing it sales representatives with financial incentives to make misleading claims and statements to doctors about its drugs Advair, Paxil and Wellbutrin. The company was sued for deceptive trade practices and violations of consumer law.

Johnson and Johnson, Pardue Pharma and the Opioid Scandel (2019)
Opioids were involved in almost 400,000 overdose deaths in the USA between 1999 and 2017. In Oklahoma alone, since 2000, some 6,000 people died from opioid overdose, and many more suffered from dependence and addiction. Earlier in 2019 Oklahoma State had settled with Purdue Pharma ($270m) and Teva Pharmaceutical ($85m), but Johnson & Johnson continued to deny 'wrong-doing'. However in August they were fined $572m (£468m) for its part in fuelling Oklahoma's opioid addiction crisis. The case was the first to go to trial  but there are about 2,000 opiode lawsuits filed against other opioid makers and distributors around the USA.

Johnson & Johnson paid for a marketing campaign that minimised the addictive quality of painkillers, minimised their risks, and promoted their benefits. They were said to be the opioid "kingpin" in an industry-wide campaign to profit was these drugs, and the judge said that the company had contributed to a "public nuisance" in its deceptive promotion of highly addictive prescription painkillers.

For more information on the Opioid Scandel visit this Mercola website, which begins with this statement. "Opioid overdoses kill more than 130 people in the U.S. daily1 in an unprecedented crisis that continues to spiral out of control."

AND SO IT GOES ON.........
The list of fraud and dishonesty practised by the pharmaceutical companies is a long one, and an ongoing one. Those mentioned above are just a few selected examples from recent years. They are not isolated incidents. They have become a regular part of the pharmaceutical business. They form a pattern of behaviour that has continued over many decades.

And for every case brought to court there are probably hundreds more that never reach that stage, or which go unexamined.

(This information was first published in my "The Failure of Conventional Medicine" website)

No one can examine this plethora of cases without realising that pharmaceutical companies are not open, honest and trustworthy businesses; nor can anyone believe that they place patient safety before corporate profit.

Nor should anyone believe that any drug they produce are safe, or even effective. Most of the drugs mentioned in the above list of criminal cases are still being used by conventional medicine with patients.

And hopefully no one who knows anything about this long history of dishonesty, corruption and fraud will be tempted to take any pharmaceutical drug or vaccine in the future.

 

HPV (Gardasil) Vaccine - linked to lowered probability of pregnancy

In June 2018, the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health published an article Gayle DeLong entitled 'A lowered probability of pregnancy in females in the USA aged 25-29 who received a human papillomavirus vaccine injection'. This is an everyday event - medical science publishing research and evidence about pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. However it is one the demonstrates the dishonesty of medical science.

Gayle DeLong told the story on the 'Children's Health Defense' website on 17th December 2019

               "Data revealed that 60% of women who had not received the HPV vaccine had been pregnant at least once, while only 35% of HPV vaccine recipients had ever conceived. The article detailed the statistical analysis as well as offered possible biological mechanisms for the results.  Three researchers peer-reviewed the article. When the article first appeared, the editors eagerly promoted it by making it free.  By early December 2019, the number of downloads reached close to 24,000."

This is how medical science is supposed to work - if it functioned honestly and openly. But, of course, it doesn't. Young girls, and their parents, who are routinely encouraged by doctors to have the vaccination, are (or at least should be) entitled to know all there is to know about the likely side effects and consequences of any medication. But pharmaceutical medicine does not work this way. It is a business that thrives on enticing patients to take drugs and vaccines, and information about side effects is not good for drug sales.

Medical journals, such as the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, should publish evidence about every drug and vaccine. This particular research was processed in the normal way, peer reviewed, and published. Then it was withdrawn - and withdrawn without any satisfactory reason being given.

All this is detailed in Gayle DeLong's piece in Children's Health Defense.

Yet the detail is not important. What we are dealing with is a medical system that does not want patients to know about the serious, life-changing side effects of their drugs and vaccines. If the conventional medical establishment was honest it would look at DeLong's findings, and be sufficiently concerned to look further into the findings. Indeed, on the basis of 'first do no harm', and the precautionary principle, it would suspend use of the vaccine.

None of this is done. Instead, the journal pulls the research. It is important to realise that medical journals survive only on the basis of funding from the pharmaceutical industry. So if drug companies don't like a piece of research, if it might have an effect on profits, it is easier to ensure that the research is pulled rather than to seek to make the vaccine safe, and free of side effects.

So it's not just that pharmaceutical medicine peddles dangerous drugs and vaccines. It is that the pharmaceutical industry has sufficient control over medical journals (a major source of information doctors rely on) to ensure that they don't have to worry about the dangers - neither doctors nor patients will get to know about them.

So our daughters are damaged....

...and the drug companies rake in the profits.

THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY. Greed, corruption, fraud, dishonesty. Would you buy a 2nd hand car from them? Leave along drugs that can seriously damage your health?

Conventional medicine, what we invariably get when we see our doctor, or visit a hospital is dominated by the pharmaceutical industry. And the pharmaceutical industry is dominated by greed, corruption, fraud, and dishonesty.

This is not a new claim. Nor is it one from which the drugs industry can defend itself. It has form, a history that demonstrates that it will go to any lengths to sell us drugs and vaccines, quite regardless of the damage they do to our health.

The pharmaceutical industry has been involved in a large number of legal cases over the years, cases that have demonstrated the lack of ethics that drives the industry. I have highlighted some of them, those from 2007 to the present day, here - it makes sobering, frightening reading.

My question is this. Each of these legal uses illustrates the extreme lengths drug companies will take in order to sell us dangerous drugs. So can they be trusted? Is any drug or vaccine peddled by these companies, for profit, safe for us even to consider taking? Can we, should we believe anything pharmaceutical drug companies tell us?

Especially when drug company executives in the past have told us that judicial fines are 'merely another cost of doing business"? An amount to little more than 'pocket money'?

Johnson & Johnson is a drug company that (in the words of Bloomberg News) has taken some costly beatings in USA courts this year. "And it could get worse."

In October 2019 J&J were ordered by a jury to pay $8 billion for wrongfully pushing doctors to prescribe the anti-psychotic drug, Risperdal. As Bloomberg outlines, this came on the heels of many $billions paid out for damage claims involving opioid painkillers, artificial hips, and even their renowned baby powder.

               "The health-care giant still faces at least 100,000 lawsuits alleging injuries from those products and others, including vaginal-mesh devices and the diabetes drug Invokana....... Analysts say the cost of resolving those cases may reach $20 billion, and J&J’s handling of the various litigations is likely to spark questions when the company reports results on Tuesday."

This is the problem, as highlighted by Bloomberg. Not so much a concern for the damage J&J has done to patients, but the implications for the financial viability of the company. Shares of J&J were down 12% "partly because there’s no end in sight for liability costs".

I am not concerned with the shareholders! They have profited greatly from these drug companies for many decades. "Investors are tired or it", Bloomberg tell us. Well, I am more concerned about the patients who have used and taken, quite innocently, these profitable J&J products for personal health reasons, only to find that their health was damaged. A business ethics professor, Michael Santoro, at California’s Santa Clara University, gets closer to my concerns.

               “J&J used to be the gold standard of ethical behavior in the pharmaceutical industry. They just seem incapable of properly managing their ethical behavior at this point. They’ve lost their way.”

Indeed they have certainly lost their way! The Bloomberg article outlines the enormity of their current problems.

Opioids. J&J face 2,000 pending cases, with an estimated cost of $5 billion

Baby Powder. J&J face 15,5000 pending cases, with an estimated cost of $5 billion

Risperdal. J&J face 13,000 pending cases, with an estimated cost of $800 billion

Vaginal Mesh. J&J face 2,000 pending cases, with unknown costs

Artificial Hips (Pinnacle, ASR). J&J face 12,000 pending cases, with an estimated cost of $4 billion

Xarelto. J&J face 31,700 pending cases, with an estimated cost of $775 billion

Invokana. J&J face 1,000 pending case, with unknown costs

Details of each of these cases is further outlined in the Bloomberg article, who make the point that J&J are not the only pharmaceutical drug company that faces such action, and that "battling in court has become routine for many drugmakers, and J&J is no exception." This is absolutely true.

J&J were quoted saying that it has an expansive legal strategy that carefully evaluates all claims to determine when to settle and when to fight, that they were operating within a very litigious environment, and that they must at times be willing to go to trial when necessary. They also said that they remained open to resolving cases through settlement when and where that was appropriate. 

               "We have a proven track record of being able to successfully and appropriately manage this balance.”

I have no doubt that they do! But there was no mention (there rarely is) about their track record for keeping patients safe from dangerous drugs and medical devices. And that's probably because making such a case is more difficult - given their track record - and the track record of most other pharmaceutical companies.

What we must remember is that each one of the cases listed above represent people, and their families, who have been damaged by 'medical' products. Moreover, they represent only a tiny proportion of people and families who would be similarly damaged. And then only people and families living in the USA. The damage cause by J&J, and other drug companies, is much greater than these court cases could ever represent. So the real question for each of us is this.

WOULD YOU BUY A SECOND HAND CAR FROM J&J?

WILL YOU RISK YOUR HEALTH BY BUYING DRUGS FROM THEM?

OR ANY OTHER PHARMACEUTICAL DRUG COMPANY?

GSK & Pfizer to merge their Healthcare Operations. Is this to improve patient health? Or is it Unity in Dishonesty, Fraud and Corruption?

Two of the largest and most influential drug companies, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Pfizer are to merge their healthcare operations, whose combined annual sales will reach nearly £10 billion. The deal still has to be approved by shareholders, but as they are more interested in profit than patient health, this is not likely to be a problem.

Earlier this year, GSK took full control of a previously joint operation with Novartis, paying them over £9 billion for its 36.5% stake in their Consumer Healthcare Business.

The merger deals are about selling drugs, as many drugs as possible, for as much profit as possible. Every industry engages in similar manoeuvres, but the merger between drug companies makes particular sense. They all profit from the sale of drugs and vaccines. They all profit from ongoing sickness and disease. But more importantly, they are all leaders in an industry that is regularly, some would say routinely, engaged in

• dishonesty
• fraud
• corruption

So drug companies fit well together!

The evidence for such a devastating judgement on the ethics of the pharmaceutical industry is plentiful, although it has not been well publicised by our governments, or by our compliant media, both of whom have studiously failed/refused to publicise the evidence against this powerful and influential industry.

I have written about this before, in some detail, when outlining the ongoing failure of the Conventional Medicine, so here I will do no more than outline some of the details of this activity over the last decade or so, appertaining just to these two companies.

• 2009. Pfizer, was fined $2.3 billion when it pleaded guilty to misbranding the painkiller, Bextra, with the intent to mislead and defraud, and then promoting it to treat acute pain at dosages the drug regulator, FDA, had previously deemed dangerous. Bextra had been banned in 2005 for safety reasons. It was also found that Pfizer had illegally promoted three other drugs, the antipsychotic Geodon, an antibiotic Zyvox, and an anti-epileptic drug, Lyrica.
• 2012 GSK was fined 400,00 pesos when 14 babies died in an illegal vaccine trial. It was found that doctors had taken advantage of illiterate parents who took their children for treatment, but were pressured and forced to sign a 28-page consent form.
• 2012 GSK agreed to pay $3 billion in civil and criminal liabilities following its promotion of several drugs, failure to report negative safety data, and making unsupported safety claims, particularly for its diabetes drug, Avandia. The company was aware that the drug increased the risk of heart attacks, and congestive heart failure but they withheld this information for 7 years! The company also pleaded guilty to promoting the antidepressant drug, Paxil, for patients under 18 although it had never been approved for that age group. GSK were also found guilty of paying bribes to doctors, with one attorney prosecuting the case saying that the company used every imaginable form of high-priced entertainment and paid millions of dollars in bribes to doctors. One doctor is reported as receiving $275,000 to promote just one GSK drug.
• 2012. Pfizer were forced to pay $60 million after bribing European and Asian health officials to dispense their drugs and vaccines. The fraud involved doctors and public health officials in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia and Serbia. When the company realised they might be caught they apparently attempted to hide the illicit transactions by burying them in accounting records as 'business expenses'.
• 2014. GSK were ordered to pay $105 million to 44 states for providing it sales representatives with financial incentives to make misleading claims and statements to doctors about its drugs Advair, Paxil and Wellbutrin. The company was sued for deceptive trade practices and violations of consumer law.

So the business practices of both these drug companies seem well suited! These are just the criminal cases in which GSK and Pfizer were involved. There are many others, listed on the page referred to, that have been taken against other pharmaceutical companies. In my book I concluded.

               "And so it goes on. The list of fraud and dishonesty practised by the pharmaceutical companies is a long one, and certainly a continuing one. Those mentioned above are just a few selected examples from recent years. They are not isolated incidents. They have become a regular part of the pharmaceutical business. They form a pattern of behaviour that has continued over many decades. And for every case brought to court there are probably hundreds more that never reach that stage, or which go unexamined."

So this merger has little to do with patient health. It is to do with safeguarding the future profitability of the industry. This has become more necessary as more people realise that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are harmful to health, and so resistance to taking them is increasing. The competitors of GSK and Pfizer is no longer each other - it is falling drug sales, the banning and withdrawal of failed drugs, and the failure over many years now to come up with new 'blockbuster' drugs. So the industry is reforming itself to tackle these problems.

Another problem faced by drug companies is the growing realisation that curing illness and disease is actually bad business for the industry! It is better not to cure disease, to keep patients sick, so that they continue to be drug consumers! 

Goldman Sachs have confirmed this in a recent report, admitting that biotech companies have no incentive to cure illnesses. Their analysis was published in a report entitled, “The Genome Revolution” which looked at whether curing patients was a sustainable business model. Their answer was a clear - "No" - it is not sustainable!

But selling drugs that don't work, better still if side effects cause even more illness, is sustainable. But drug companies are realising that to continue selling them they can continue convincing patients that their drugs and vaccines DO make sick people better when in fact they don't! 

So combining their healthcare operations makes a great deal of sense.