[A just-announced Justice Department] indictment accuses [a] Glaxo official, Lauren C. Stevens of Durham, N.C., of lying to the Food and Drug Administration in 2003, by writing letters, as associate general counsel, denying that doctors speaking at company events had promoted Wellbutrin for uses not approved by the agency. Ms. Stevens “made false statements and withheld documents she recognized as incriminating,” including slides the F.D.A. had sought during its investigation, the indictment stated.
This could get ugly. The Justice Department has decided to go after people, not just companies.
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UPDATE: Along these same lines, the latest issue of Academe, edited by the wonderful Sheldon Krimsky, is all about conflict of interest and corporate influence in the university. Looks like a must-read.
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ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more detail about the Justice Department’s action from the indispensable Health Care Renewal.
From the New York Times:
… [Medical residency programs] where fewer graduates passed tests from the American Board of Internal Medicine — “one indicator of program quality” — were also more likely to accept the [financial] assistance [of drug companies for things like meals, office supplies, and drug samples].
… “As the pass rates went down,” [one observer] said of the new doctors’ test scores, “the odds of accepting pharmaceutical support went up.”
… Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of the department of medicine at New York University, said his organization’s internal medicine residency program decided about five years ago to stop accepting food or financial support from industry.
“I spend a fair amount of my budget feeding my residents,” Dr. Blaser said, “but then they can learn in a way that is not unduly influenced by who is feeding them.”…
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Wear it proudly.
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UD thanks Brad.
… here, on a Wharton School blog. University Diaries follows lots of campus stories involving pharma-compromised professors and conflict of interest, and it’s easy to get lost in all the cases. This article provides the big picture.
Even by pharma standards, Israel’s Teva is a real ugly standout. Where’s the long punishing article about this dirty enterprise in the NYT? Far as UD can tell, the place has long been a committed bad actor, and one wonders, with its latest massive settlement, whether anyone will bother looking at its scandalous history and writing about it. I mean, it’s clearly able to handle hundreds of millions in penalties every year as the cost of doing business, so pressure needs to come from elsewhere if we are going to stop these predators.
It’s right there in their headline:
18-Year-Old’s Science Reporting Leads Stanford President to Quit
It takes a child to point out to the world that the emperor has no standards.
Everyone else – especially at places like Stanford, which make scientific entrepreneurs like Stanford’s president billionaires – plays the games, the insider trading, irreproducible results, conflict of interest, ghost writing, pharmawhore games.
And everyone’s making so much money playing the games that no one’s going to make a peep.
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So making noise about it takes some snot-nosed self-righteous little person at the student newspaper who thinks exposing corruption is more important than being able to stash billions away in your tax haven.
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It’s a 2017 announcement, from the Pharmacists Society of the State of New York, of that year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Laurence Doud.
The criteria for this award is very selective and discerning. The award is intended to distinguish those who have the continued passion and dedication to pharmacy throughout the years… Doud has been one of the most influential and deeply committed executives to independent pharmacy.
Move on to this Albany College of Pharmacy honorary degree citation:
After decades of consolidation, most industry observers in the 1980’s believed that independent pharmacy would not survive. Larry Doud was not one of those people. Since he joined Rochester Drug Cooperative (RDC) in 1987, RDC has become one of the nation’s largest drug wholesalers, serving community pharmacies and home health care dealers (and by extension, patients) in eight states. During that time, RDC has helped launch and maintain more than 400 independent pharmacies – including the College’s own student operated pharmacies. Since the early 2000’s, the number of independent pharmacies has remained relatively stable, in part due to the efforts of people like Larry who understand that independent pharmacists remain an important part of the nation’s health care system.
As Larry’s carted off to jail for having flooded the Northeast corridor with opiates, let us pause on that independent and ask why Larry was so eager to foster his own independent chain of pharmacies unhampered by any large corporate controls… Let us also ask why Larry’s awards/honors/praise remain intact today on the websites of pharma organizations and schools. Just what are they trying to say?
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Prosecutors asked for “15 years in prison, saying that he should be held accountable for the ‘shattering impact’ his actions had on people to whom he had unlawfully funneled opioids.” He got two and a half.
The mystery of the awful 2021 Tesla crash, about which I wrote here, has been solved.
A final report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found that a 2021 fiery crash that killed two people in a Tesla was a result of the driver speeding and being intoxicated… NTSB’s investigation determined the probable cause of the crash was “the driver’s excessive speed and failure to control his car, due to impairment from alcohol intoxication in combination with the effects of two sedating antihistamines, resulting in a roadway departure, tree impact, and post-crash fire.”
You can take the Texas good ol’ boy out of twentieth century car technology, but you can’t take him out of revving the engine plus polypharmacy.
People at the time were quick to blame Tesla.
Add to this clear evidence of psychological decline – all sorts of bizarre statements/behaviors – since I posted (Nov 21, 2020).
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Why Donald Trump Might Kill Himself.
He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser.
Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.
He has been in bad physical health. It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.
Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment. He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“
Hey. I ain’t drawing the pictures.
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He is the very embodiment, in other words, of the suicide.
Demographically, he stands smack in the center of the self-slaughter sweet spot.
You’re shocked. You think it’s a crazy notion. Allow me to quote a recent NYT headline:
‘How Did We Not Know?’ Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic
Try to keep in mind two salient features here (You probably won’t be able to, because people HATE to think about suicide.):
- A suicide epidemic. In some states (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico), the numbers are staggering.
- General ignorance about the suicide epidemic.
“Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn’t realize was we have a huge suicide rate.”
How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.
I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.
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Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.” Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest. Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden. Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”
This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies). There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.
What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.
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There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.
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Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.
Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.
The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…
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Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.
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Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.
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How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.
‘Fellow Pennsylvanians: If we go by the most recent numbers, around a million American women had abortions last year, AND EVERY ONE OF THOSE WOMEN (AND RAPED CHILDREN) IS A MURDERER. As I said in a recent townhall:
“If life starts at conception, why do you care what age the heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder, if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.”
But Dr Oz! I hear you say. That’s a lot of women and children to put on trial for murder. Won’t that strain our justice system?
It might. But consider: For a lot of these murders, there are medical records attesting to them, and if I’m elected I will work with others to give the FBI special access to all women’s and female children’s medical, and pharmaceutical purchase, records. We will also of course work to be able to confiscate all abortion clinic patient paperwork going back to let’s say 1980. None of these murders will entail a trial, because irrefutable proof of them exists.
Another question I get a lot is: If hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania women know that under Senator Oz they will be pursued for murder, won’t most of them flee to states where they will not be hunted down?
Yes, many of them will. This represents a win-win for the state. These scum are removed from the premises without our justice system having to deal with them at all. It’s called exile. Those unable or unwilling to flee will be subject to the death penalty.’
UD‘s heart skips a beat when she realizes that this hugely intriguing figure was for years just across campus from her GWU office! A bona fide lecturer/researcher in the university’s medical school despite allegedly having lied about a number of his degrees, this man held on to his GW position while telling his boss Trump – or those close to him – that Fauci had to be fired, and that hydroxychloroquine was the solution to coronavirus. (Also involved in Trump administration hydroxychloroquine pushing: The Pride of New Jersey, Mehmet Oz.) He seems at the moment rather close to being in contempt of Congress, though I’m trying to update this information. He appears to be a “big lie” co-conspirator. He also seems to have used his personal GW email account for official WH communications.
Dr. Hatfill exchanged more than 1,000 messages using his George Washington University email account with senior officials in the Trump White House, federal agencies, private companies related to procurement and supply chain issues, and others about the federal government’s pandemic response. In one email to an unidentified White House employee, Dr. Hatfill misleadingly stated: “States favorable to Trump have a lower COVID Case Fatality Rate than the Fucktard states that do not.”
SH doesn’t seem to be at GW anymore; but the question I’ve got is why such a person was ever there in the first place. Surely GW is as we speak asking itself that question.
And Teva Pharmaceuticals – the remarkably corrupt megacorp we’ve followed on this blog for years – does have one dumpster fire of debt. It’s way up there in the billions.
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But what’s this? Teva stock “is on fire today.”
See, they just settled – again, for several billions – the latest of … billions? … of criminal cases against them, these involving the company having been a big ol’ drug dealer during the heyday of opioid addiction (I guess we’re still in the heyday). Now that Teva has paid its way out of its most recent vileness, the company looks much more stable, and investors can heave a sigh of relief, all the while preparing to withdraw their winnings before the next gigantic criminal scheme takes Teva down for good.
Well, no one better than University of North Carolina Professor Anita Louise Jackson to do that. She herself, in contemplating unique funding opportunities within the United States Medicare system, has earned many millions in personal compensation.
It was easy: She simply performed hundreds of unnecessary procedures on hundreds of hapless patients … some of whom must really have wondered why she felt the urge to stick balloons, repeatedly, up their perfectly healthy nasal passages.
But one has to pay through the nose for a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course… uh, I mean we the taxpayers have to pay through the nose for Anita Louise Jackson to live in a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course; and if it weren’t for those pesky lawyers at the Justice Department wondering why a dinky rural practitioner is “the nation’s top-paid provider of a special sinus-relief procedure,” all would be well: Our hard-earned tax dollars would go to maintain Jackson’s lifestyle, and the farmers of northeast central Carolina would continue to boast the clearest nasal passages in the world.
Yet another American Stakhanovite punished by the federal government for working hard! UD has followed many of these on this blog over the years – doctors whose daily caseloads beggar belief, and what do they get?
A wildly popular physician whose willingness to go above and beyond for his patients was well-known locally, Orusa is now looking at decades in prison. This is a man who even finds ways to treat non-compliant patients.
Trial testimony from former employees and patients described a standing-room-only lobby area at Orusa’s clinic. Patients with insurance coverage were forced to visit the clinic four to six times a month and undergo cortisone shots to receive pain medication and Orusa threatened to withhold pain management prescriptions from those who refused the injections… Cash-paying patients generally were not required to accept injections in order to receive prescriptions. Due to the excessive number of controlled substance prescriptions, Walmart and CVS pharmacies refused to fill prescriptions written by Orusa.
It seems like piling on to point out Orusa is a man of God, “the pastor at God’s Sanctuary Church International,” but UD really wants you to get a sense of the vile reach of the federal government.
Ippolito, a licensed pharmacist and owner of Northgate Pharmacy in Waldorf, and Shifflett, an employee at the pharmacy, were indicted by a Charles County Grand Jury in August. Ippolito distributed narcotics to an undercover officer and Shifflett was conducting street deals of pharmaceutical controlled substances that she obtained from the pharmacy.
Back in 2008, UD was quoted in Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen (he’s no longer associated with the organization) on the corruption of medical schools by pharma lobbyists. Pleasant, so many years later, to discover that.