It involves drug company payments to Karen Wagner, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas. Big payments, over many years, for her touting the benefits of various dangerous concoctions for the most vulnerable among us — children.
The Commission’s very hush-hush. Wagner never reported any of this money to her university. Well, once she reported she’d gotten six hundred dollars. That left multiple hundreds of thousands that she concealed.
The university thought it’d be a great idea to put Wagner on a committee reviewing other professors’ conflict of interest forms.
Wagner knows how to keep a secret:
In March 2006, Dr. Wagner was being deposed in a case on Paxil. During that deposition, Dr. Wagner was asked how much money she had taken from drug companies over the previous five years.
Her response? She said, and I quote, “I don’t know.” In fact, she testified that she couldn’t even estimate how much money she received from the drug companies.
The latest on the Wagner Commission:
An influential U.S. senator has reported a University of Texas researcher’s financial relationship with a drug company to the top investigator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to the University of Texas System in September raising concerns that child pharmacology researcher Karen Wagner had not properly disclosed her financial connections with drug companies. He reported her in a letter to the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General.