News

In The UK, It’s Glaxo?

06 February 2008

By Ed Silverman

A scandal is mushrooming because the Schools Secretary has appointed a Glaxo exec to the board of the government’s official education watchdog agency, known as Ofsted. And the move occurred less than a month before the government awarded a reported $200 million contract to Glaxo for its HPV vaccine for school-age girls 12 years and older, which some parents fear will give a green light to teenage sex, The Daily Mail reports.

The appointment also comes at a time when a growing number of families are filing lawsuits against Glaxo over its Paxil antidepressent, claiming the drug caused suicide or attempted suicides. (Paxil is called Seroxat in the UK). Consequently, critics say the decision by Schools Secretary Ed Balls (pictured at top) has conferred moral authority on Glaxo and commercially strengthened its position at a time when children are being targeted by pharma with meds for treating ADHD, in particular, the paper writes. Glaxo markets Dexedrine in the US for ADHD.

Glaxo “is looking at new markets to create and I am disturbed that someone from Glaxo is considered appropriate for a position with Ofsted,” Graham Stringer, a Labor Party member of Parliament, tells the paper. The appointment of Paul Blackburn, a Glaxo senior vp and financial controller (pictured to the right), prompted one childcare expert to boycott an Ofsted conference this past Friday.

Blackburn, 53, was one of four businessmen installed on the Ofsted board last month. “They bring with them a breadth of private sector experience and a passion to help improve the lives of children and learners,” Balls said in a statement announcing the appointments. In a new statement issued to the paper, Balls says: “The Ofsted Board determines the strategic direction for Ofsted and ensures that its functions are performed efficiently and effectively, but has no operational responsibilities. Paul Blackburn was selected to become a non-executive member of the Ofsted Board for his financial expertise and experience. He is appointed as an individual and does not represent GlaxoSmithKline.”

But there is also criticism the move suggests a “cozy relationship” between pharma and the government, according to the paper, which notes that Balls is one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s closest advisers. Last year, Brown named former Glaxo ceo JP Pierre Garnier to his new Business Council, while Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge made Glaxo chairman Richard Sykes a member of the Higher Education Funding Council.

The paper goes on to note that the Labor Party and Glaxo were also linked through the so-called cash-for-honors controversy. Although Glaxo stresses it does not make donations to political parties, it has invested heavily in a firm run by a man who has. In 2004, Labor awarded a peerage to party donor Paul Drayson, founder of vaccine firm PowderJect Pharmaceuticals, and made him Minister for Defense Procurement. It later emerged that Glaxo had invested about $350 million in PowderJect.

Outlining his reasons for pulling out of the Ofsted conference he was due to address, childcare expert Phil Frampton blamed Glaxos history of testing drugs on children in care, the paper writes. He cited an episode in 2004 in which drugs were tested on 100 babies and toddlers with HIV at the Incarnation Children’s Center in New York. Glaxo was one of the companies that supplied the drugs.

At the time, the paper writes, Glaxo insisted that all trials followed stringent standards and complied with local laws and regulations. But Frampton, who called Blackburn’s appointment “really outrageous,” told the paper that “drug trials using children in care are a modern form of child slavery, only more insidious. Do we want the modern Bodysnatchers at the heart of the care system using their position on Ofsted as a cover for their global exploitation of children in care?”

In 2000, Glaxo was accused of extraordinary “obfuscation” by Ireland’s senate after a commission unsuccessfully sought files concerning vaccine trials it conducted in the Sixties and Seventies on children in care homes, the paper writes. At the time, Glaxo said: “‘Glaxo Wellcome regrets any distress that may have been caused to individuals involved in these trials.”

This weekend, the drugmaker rejected criticism of Blackburn’s appointment and described Frampton’s comments as “without foundation”, according to the paper. Glaxo “acts properly and responsibly in the conduct of all its clinical trials, including those related to children,” the drugmaker said.