News

Our campaign for drug company executive accountability is picking up. New Scientist magazine published a detailed article in their October issue titled “When big pharma breaks the law, prosecute the CEO.” The article was written by Paul Thacker an investigator with “Project On Government Oversight,” a non-profit organisation working to expose waste, fraud and abuse in federal government. Thacker’s credentials? He is also a congressional investigator for the United States Senate Finance Committee and was lead investigator for Senator Chuck Grassley's successful Avandia criminal investigation.  

As we reported earlier this year that investigation and the lawsuits involving UK ’s drug giant, GlaxoSmithKline's Avandia came to a head and has thus far resulted in a $460 million dollar court settlement.

Avandia is an anti-diabetes “wonder” drug that has been directly linked to heart attacks. Last month, the European Medicines Agency recommended its complete suspension from the market, while the US Food and Drug Administration made it all but impossible for doctors to write prescriptions for the drug.

GlaxoSmithKline enjoyed sales of well over $3 billion in 2006 alone making Avandia the world's best-selling diabetes drug until May 2007. At that time The New England Journal of Medicine published a study that linked Avandia to heart attacks and, with pressure from the media and groups like ours, the US Senate began its criminal investigation. With multi-billion dollar lawsuits in progress and a US Senate committee investigation in full swing GlaxoSmithKline, in a play of complete arrogance, pulled out all the finance and marketing stops and continued to keep the drug on the market.

GlaxoSmithKline is not alone in this arrogance and contempt for human health and taking into account an ever-increasing volume of civil and criminal court cases and government investigations into drug company corruption, Thacker appears to fully agrees with our drug company executive culpability position noting in the New Scientist article that; “Patient safety will remain at risk until big Pharma’s top executives are brought to book* for their companies' actions.” (“brought to book” – punished).

Now we have helped to expose and issue numerous reports regarding pharmaceutical company corruption, illegal re-marketing of drugs for unapproved uses, fabrication of clinical study reports, practitioner pay offs, executive and even FDA cover ups. Vioxx, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Paxil and many others have been successfully exposed and widely covered in the press – and all involved serious and even fatal consequences for unaware consumers.
However, unless consequences are really stepped up these lawsuits and investigations will only increase and continue, but far worse are the consequences felt by the victims themselves and/or their surviving families.

Several actions can and should be done to truly protect consumers and Thacker lists a number of good ideas in his article (see http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827826.900-when-big-pharma-breaks-the-law-prosecute-the-ceo.html). However, we believe the most effective action will be to hold drug company executives fully accountable when their companies are caught committing illegal acts. Thacker concurs.
Since WINHS was established in 2004, pharma has paid out over $7 billion in fines and penalties, but even these figures barely dent their litigation war chests and set asides and are dwarfed by their phenomenal profits.
For example, while the $2.3 billion fine that Pfizer was forced to pay for the way Bextra and three other drugs were illegally marketed just one year ago was the biggest of fines ever paid by any single corporation, it was still only 14 percent of their $16.8 billion in sales revenue from those drugs.

We do believe, as does Thacker, that only by pursuing executives through the courts will CEOs be made to think twice before fudging or falsifying clinical studies and reports or illegally re-marketing their drugs for unapproved uses and demographics. And you need to know that while the government has threatened to bring more criminal charges against executives for breaking the law, most are never prosecuted or punished. Take Tachi Yamada, the head of research at GlaxoSmithKliine for example. When negative studies on Avandia were being intentionally downplayed to keep the drug’s sales high Yamada left the drug company to become president of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Using internal GlaxoSmithKline documents, the Senate committee assembled a report, released in 2007, that cited Yamada as part of the company’s intimidation of a doctor who spoke out about Avandia's health risks shortly after it was put onto the market. In 2008, Yamada was awarded an honorary doctorate from Warwick Medical School in the UK, a leader in medical education.

Do we want this kind of crime and corruption to continue to pay off?