iMedicine shares a lot of greed with Big Pharma

Oh, boy, this post could be as long as I wanted ir to be, so I'll just make it short.

I'll just list here a few high-profile cases (all from 2007-2012) that Peter Gotzsche shares in the chapter 3 of his book "Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime", published in 2013 (so this list is already way outdated). He calls the list the "Hall of Shame for big pharma", and you'll understand why. The cases are in descending order of the size of the fines applied to the pharmaceutical companies:

1. GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $3 billion in 2011 (the _largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history up to then), after pleading guilty to having marketed a number of drugs illegally for off-label use, including Wellbutrin, Paxil, Advait, Avandia and Lamictal.

2. Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion in 2009, after a subsidiary of the firm pleaded guilty to misbranding drugs "with tje intent to defraud or mislead", amd the firm was found to have illegaly promoted four drugs: Bextra, Geodon, Zyvox and Lyrica. 1 out of the 2.3 billion dollars were paid to resolve the allegations that Pfizer paid bribes and offered lavish hospitality to "healthcare" providers to encourage them to prescribe the four drugs. Pfizer entered its fourth CIA (Corporate Ingrity Agreement) with the US Department of Health amd Human services, which means that good behavior is required for the next 5 years (conserdong, though, that ot was already the forth one...).

3. Abbot agreed to pay $1.5 billion in 2012, for illegal marketing of Depakote. $800 million would be for civil damages amd penalties to compesate Medicaid, Medicare and various healthcare programmers for harm suffered as a result of the company's conduct. $700 million would be to pay a criminal fine and forfeiture for violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, to which Abbott pleaded guilty. It entered a CIA, too.

4. Eli Lilly agreed to pay more than $1.4 billion in 2009, for illegal marketing of its top-selling drug, Zyprexa. $800 million would be for civil penalties; $600 million would be for a criminal fine. Guess what? The company emtered a CIA.

5. Johnson and Johnson was fined more than $1.1 billion in 2012, for downplaying and hiding "risks" (I put it into quotes because it is a questionable concept, as we will see in a later post) associated with its drig Risperdal. The judge found nearly 240000 violations under Arkansas' Medical-fraud law alone (the company had already has unfavorable verdicts in South Carolina and in Texas). More than a quarter of Risperdal's use was in children and adolescents, including non-approved indications. A world-renowned child psychiatrist, Joseph Biederman from Harvard, pushed the drug heavily to children and extorted the company (he once requested from J&J a $280000 "research grant"). Alex Gorsky, Vice President of Marketing accused of being actively involved and having firsthand knowledge of an even bigger case of potential fraud, was actually rewarded by J&J by being chosen to be the next CEO!

6. Merck agreed to pay $670 million in 2007, for failing to pay the appropriate rebates to Medicaid and other government "healthcare" programmes and paying kickbacks to doctor and hospital to induce them to prescribe various drugs. Merck's sales force had induced doctors to prescribe its drugs, using approximately 15 different programmes consisting primarily of excess payments disguised as fees for "training", "consultatiom" or "market research". Merck, too, entered a CIA with US's HHS.

7. AstraZeneca agreed to pay $520 million in 2010, for illegal marketing of one of its best-selling drugs, Seroquel, to children, the elderly, veterans and inmates for uses not approved by the FDA. The company even paid kickbacks to some doctors who do not tipically deal with patients having the conditions allegedly treated by the drug. Other doctors were sent to lavish resorts to encourage them to market and prescribe the drug for unnaproved uses.

8. Novartis agreed to pay $423 million in 2010, for illegal marketing of Trileptal. The agreement resolved allegations that the company paid kickbacks to "healthcare" professionals to induce them prescribe Trileptal and five others drugs. Believe it or not... Novartis entered a CIA.

9. Sanofi-Aventis agreed to pay more than $95 million in 2009, for overcharging US and local "health" agencies for medications designed for indigent patients. The company actually acknowledged that it misreported drug prices for patients in the Medocaid Drug Rebate programme for poor patients. It deliberately misquoted the prices, underpaying rebates to Medicaid and overcharging some public health agencies for the medications.

10. Roche convinced governments to stockpile Tamiflu, in what to Gotzsche (remember, the author of the book I'm citing here) seems to be the biggest theft in history, but has not been dragged to court. The company convinced the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to approve its drug Tamiflu for prevention of "influenza" "complications", even though most of the marketing had been based om unpublished clinical studies! The FDA acted otherwise, warning the firm that it should stop claiming that Tamiflu reduces the severity and "incidence" (an epidemiological term; won't explain it here) of secondary "infections", and required Roche to print a disclaimer on the labels. By the way, FDA itself approved Tamiflu after Relenza, a similar drug, had been approved by the agency through heavy political lobbying involving a mention of the American Congress (go see the details in Gotzsche's book, this is a blog post, not an Encyclopedia!). After much media attention, by the way, Roche promised in 2009 to make the full study reports of the unpublished trials available on its own website (it hadn't done so until the publication of Gotzsche's book, and I didn't care to check whether it has or not).

    
    
    
    

Being really honest, I did made this post very, very short. Ii basically crunched 4.5 pages of Gotzsche's book in a few paragraphs. Remembers all those cases cited above happened between 2007 and 2012, and those are only the publicly know cases. Just for you to habe a further idea of it, John Braithwaite published a whole book, "Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry", in 1984. Some time ago, he decided to revise the book and publish a new version. Asked if he thought things had got better, he answered that, more than 30 years laters, they actually got worse in Big Pharma!

Now, let's pause for a moment and do the math: in billions of dollars, we have, for the first 9 cases described above, a total of: 3 + 2.3 +1.5 + 1.4 + 1.1 + 0.67 + 0.52 + 0.42 + 0.1 = 11. 11 billion fucking dollars!!! Just for a few publicly known cases, where the companies actually got caught and agreed to pay to settle the case! Not only that, remember how many CIAs were signed between the companies involved and US's HHS. Pfizer alone entered 4: as Gotzsche further argues in his book, the crimes are repetitive and ruthlessly carried out, with blatant disregard for the deaths and other serious harms they possibly cause. In other posts, I will describe further ways in which doctors and other imedicine members are involved, but keep this in mind: corporate greed in Big Pharma has the involvement and connivance of imedicine. Don't think for a second otherwise. Remember: even though individual doctors might be mindful and concerned about all that greed, many have no idea of the full extent of it, while others actively take part in it. The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the institution imedicine shares huge greed with Big Pharma and also its effects, effects which are endured by whom? The "patients".