Why Did the Wall Street Journal Bury the Merck Fraud Story?

via: Mercola
by: Dr. Mercola
July 23, 2012

It was big news when court documents were unsealed revealing a whistleblower lawsuit accusing drug giant Merck of fraud and lying about the true efficacy of its mumps vaccine. Just about every media, large and small, picked it up and the world was abuzz about the hundreds of millions of dollars the lawsuit claimed Merck had defrauded from the U.S. government.

The Wall Street Journal published the story in the form of a Dow Jones news release written by Jon Kamp on June  22, 2012, and links to the story began popping up on social media like Facebook.

Then, suddenly, the link to the story no longer worked, and if anyone clicked on the link in social media, it would show up “page not found.” Apparently the story had been pulled, and when search engines and Internet archives wouldn’t even show it, it looked as if it had never been published on the Journal’s site at all. It was erased nearly clean–except for a small stock-watcher’s website, 4Traders.com, which did a good job of erasing it from its main site but didn’t catch it in the cache.

The question is, why did the WSJ pull the story and try to erase as if it never existed when there were actual court documents for evidence?

Is it possible that an event that occurred on June 25¹—three days after the story broke—could have influenced the story being pulled? On that day, the Wall Street Journal’s “elite” network of CFOs from the world’s top corporations met at the WSJ². Merck is on that executive council³.

My team attempted to connect with the WSJ on this issue, but as of this time, we have not yet received an answer as to why this article was pulled.

 

Merck Accused of Falsifying Efficacy Studies and Lying about Effectiveness of Mumps Vaccine

 

Merck has actually been slapped with two class-action lawsuits over their mumps vaccine (which is part of the trivalent measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine). The first, which was initially filed in 2010, was unsealed late last month.

Two former Merck virologists, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, claim they witnessed first-hand the improper testing and falsification of data that was done to hide the fact that the vaccine has significantly declined in effectiveness⁴.

By artificially inflating the efficacy, Merck was able to maintain its monopoly over the mumps vaccine market—and that is the main point of contention of the second class-action lawsuit, filed by Chatom Primary Care⁵.

According to Courthouse News Service⁶:

“Merck has known for a decade that its mumps vaccine is “far less effective” than it tells the government, and it falsified test results and sold millions of doses of “questionable efficacy,” flooding and monopolizing the market… Chatom says in its antitrust complaint that Merck falsely claims its mumps vaccine is 95 percent effective. That claim “deterred and excluded competing manufacturers,” who would enter the risky and expensive vaccine market only if they believed they could craft a better product…

Merck is the only manufacturer licensed by the FDA to sell the mumps vaccine in United States, and if it could not show that the vaccine was 95 percent effective, it risked losing its lucrative monopoly…

That’s why Merck found it critically important to keep claiming such a high efficacy rate, the complaint states. And, Chatom claims, that’s why Merck went to great lengths, including “manipulating its test procedures and falsifying the test results,” to prop up the bogus figure, though it knew that the attenuated virus from which it created the vaccine had been altered over the years during the manufacturing process, and that the quality of the vaccine had degraded as a result.”

 

How Merck Faked and Manipulated Vaccine Trials to Achieve Desired Results

 

According to these two lawsuits, Merck began a sham testing program in the late 1990′s to hide the declining efficacy of the vaccine. The objective of the fraudulent trials was to “report efficacy of 95 percent or higher regardless of the vaccine’s true efficacy.”

According to Krahling and Wlochowski’s complaint, they were threatened with jail were they to alert the FDA to the fraud being committed. The sham testing program was initially referred to as “Protocol 007,” the Chatom anti-trust claim states. Suzanne Humphries recently wrote an excellent summary for GreenMedInfo.com⁷, explaining in layman’s terms how the tests were manipulated⁸.

Here’s a brief extract. For more, please refer to the original source article:

“For the new testing method, the children’s blood was tested for its ability to neutralize the virus using the vaccine strain virus, instead of the wild type strain that is much more infective, and the one that your children would most likely catch… But still it was not 95% effective. In order to make the blood pass the test, antibodies from rabbits was added. The addition of rabbit antibody increased the efficacy to 100%. But that was not the end, because the test has to be done on pre-vaccine blood and post-vaccine blood.

Just the addition of rabbit antibody made the pre-vaccine blood go from 10% positive to 80% positive and that was such an obvious sign of foul play that yet another manipulation had to be made.

The desired end result is to have very low pre-vaccine antibody and 95% or more post-vaccine efficacy as measured by antibody neutralization. So, yet one more change in procedure was made: The pre-vaccine tests were all redone… According to the Merck scientists, they did this by fabricating the “plaque” counts on the pre-vaccine blood samples, counting plaques that were not there. What this allowed was a mathematical dilution of the pre-vaccine positive blood counts.”

This is a perfect example of how medical research can be manipulated to achieve desired results, and why it may be wise to question vaccine makers’ study results. Clearly, there needs to be a truly independent review in the mix… As reported by the Courthouse News Service⁹:

“Chatom claims that the falsification of test results occurred” with the knowledge, authority and approval of Merck’s senior management.”

While I do not advocate indiscriminately abstaining from all vaccines, I strongly encourage you to exercise a major dose of due diligence as vaccines can cause serious reactions that can have devastating consequences. I believe in informed consent and the freedom to choose. There can be little doubt anymore that drug companies are in it for the profits, and virtually no price seems too high for them when it comes to protecting their profit-making.

Continue Reading At: Mercola.com

Exclusive: Glaxo whistleblower goes public with shocking details of bribery, marketing fraud and other pharma crimes

via: NaturalNews
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
by Mike Adams

[NaturalNews] GlaxoSmithKline employee and whistleblower Blair Hamrick has helped make medical history. Together with his colleague Gregory Thorpe, Blair blew the whistle on criminal practices taking place inside GlaxoSmithKline which have now led to the largest criminal admission and financial settlement in the history of western medicine. GSK is paying a $3 billion fine while pleading guilty to felony crimes. (http://www.naturalnews.com/036416_GlaxoSmithKline_fraud_criminal_char…).

Blair recently joined Mike Adams on the Health Ranger Report for a video interview. In this astonishing interview, Blair describes his firsthand knowledge of the “bribery” of physicians, the push for off-label marketing of drugs for unapproved health conditions, the illegal marketing of drugs to children, how 80 percent of physicians were willing to be “on the take,” and other astonishing details from behind the scenes of the criminally-operated medical mafia known as Big Pharma.

The full video interview is available on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_RJ9QPG70U

And on TV.NaturalNews.com at:
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=1FE6404520AA77A877753AA936722510

Blair Hamrick is also being interviewed on live national radio by Mike Adams on the Alex Jones Show, Tuesday, July 17th, beginning at 12 noon Eastern / 9 am Pacific (www.InfoWars.com). Those who miss the live broadcast can download the audio file from the Alex Jones Show archives at www.PrisonPlanet.TV

Below, we’ve published selected transcribed statements from Blair Hamrick as revealed in the above videos.

The worst decision ever made by any drug company

The $3 billion settlement was achieved with the help of the law firm known as Kenney & McCafferty (http://quitam-lawyer.com), specializing in whistleblower cases.

“When our clients were forced out of their marketing positions, GlaxoSmithKline (‘GSK’) had proof of illegal off-label prescription drug marketing. Our clients properly reported those marketing misdeeds to management in 2001. An ensuing GSK internal investigation verified their allegations, but the company took no action, choosing hefty profits over compliance and patient safety,” said whistleblower attorney Tavy Deming of Kenney & McCafferty. (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/glaxosmithklines-gsk-3-billio…)

“GSK could have saved hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion or more dollars of the $3 billion it paid today by following through on the combined Human Resources / Corporate Compliance investigation they launched. Instead they ignored evidence of improper marketing and physician kickbacks. When you look at the detail and accuracy of Greg Thorpe’s written complaints distributed to the highest levels of Glaxo it’s almost surreal that the company took no corrective action. Now more than a decade later, GSK is essentially admitting that Thorpe had been right in 2001,” Kenney said. “It’s been a very, very, very long 10 years for whistleblowers Thorpe and Blair Hamrick.”

Court documents reveal even more details

The following PDF document contains selected pages from the “seventh amended complaint” filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, where Gregory Thorpe and Blair Hamrick sued Smith Kline Beecham and GlaxoSmithKline.

This document shows some of the GENERAL ALLEGATIONS against GlaxoSmithKline. View the full document here:

http://www.naturalnews.com/files/GSK_7th_amended_complaint_Select_Pag…

These allegations are vast and disturbing. They include:

From 1997 to the present and continuing, GSK’s marketing plan, devised at a senior executive level, has been to “Exploit the Bolus” of government-funded healthcare programs such as Medicaid and Tricare, with the direct and intended effect of causing the submission of false claims to such programs as identified herein.

GSK has illegally and fraudulently promoted and marketed the sale of its drugs for off label, non-medically accepted uses… As part of this scheme, GSK overtly and aggressively targeted physicians identified by GSK’s prescription tracking methods to have the largest volumes of patients enrolled in government-funded healthcare programs such as Medicaid and Tricare.

GSK has paid illegal remuneration (i.e. kickbacks) to physicians and other health care providers with the purpose and intent of inducing those physicians and healthcare providers to prescribe GSK drugs in return in violation of the federal Anti-Kickback law and the analogous anti-kickback laws of the Plaintiff States.

Top level GSK managers and executives, including but not limited to GSK’s Chief Executive Officer J.P. Garnier, current President of Pharmaceutical Operations David Stout, Vice Chairman of Pharmaceuticals (and former President of Pharmaceutical Operations) Robert A. Ingram, Senior Vice President Stan Hull, Regional Director Mike Bennett, and Vice President and Head of Corporate Compliance Arjun Rajaratnam, have been aware of GSK’s illegal marketing schemes and have played an active role in supporting and promoting these schemes.

Continue Reading At: NaturalNews.com

Merck Accused of Lying about Vaccine Effectiveness

via: Mercola
by: Dr. Mercola
July 10, 2012

Things aren’t going so well lately in the litigation department for Merck, which stands accused of lying according to not just one, but two class-action lawsuits.

In the first case, two former Merck virologists accuse their former employer of overstating the effectiveness of the mumps vaccine in Merck’s combination MMR shot, which may have cost the US government hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decadeⁱ.

Merck’s mumps vaccine was originally licensed 45 years ago. Since the 1970s, it’s been part of the trivalent measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is part of the recommended childhood vaccination schedule. The case, which was initially filed in 2010, was unsealed late last month. As reported by the Courthouse News Serviceⁱⁱ:

“… Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski were Merck virologists who claim in their unsealed complaint that they “witnessed firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine’s efficacy findings.”

… As the largest single purchaser of childhood vaccines (accounting for more than 50 percent of all vaccine purchases), the United States is by far the largest financial victim of Merck’s fraud,” according to the 2010 False Claims Act complaint.”

According to Nasdaq.comⁱⁱⁱ:

“Merck–which stressed that none of these allegations relate to the safety of its product–said the lawsuit is “completely without merit”, and that it plans to “vigorously defend itself.”

It’s quite interesting to note the chosen language in Merck’s rebuttal. It in no way addresses the issue of the vaccine’s effectiveness, which is the core issue of the lawsuit and the allegation by the two former Merck employees that the drug company purposefully used improper testing methods and falsified data to make the mumps vaccine appear highly effective when the opposite was true. Instead, Merck responds by saying that none of the lawsuit’s allegations relate to the safety of its products. Such evasive maneuvering certainly gives the appearance of an admission of guilt.

Second Lawsuit Filed

A mere week after the first case was unsealed, a federal antitrust class action lawsuit was filed by Chatom Primary Care. According to Courthouse News Service^iv:

“Merck has known for a decade that its mumps vaccine is “far less effective” than it tells the government, and it falsified test results and sold millions of doses of “questionable efficacy,” flooding and monopolizing the market, a primary caregiver claims in a federal antitrust class action.

… Chatom says in its antitrust complaint that Merck falsely claims its mumps vaccine is 95 percent effective. That claim “deterred and excluded competing manufacturers,” who would enter the risky and expensive vaccine market only if they believed they could craft a better product…

Merck is the only manufacturer licensed by the FDA to sell the mumps vaccine in United States, and if it could not show that the vaccine was 95 percent effective, it risked losing its lucrative monopoly… That’s why Merck found it critically important to keep claiming such a high efficacy rate, the complaint states. And, Chatom claims, that’s why Merck went to great lengths, including “manipulating its test procedures and falsifying the test results,” to prop up the bogus figure, though it knew that the attenuated virus from which it created the vaccine had been altered over the years during the manufacturing process, and that the quality of the vaccine had degraded as a result.”

According to these two lawsuits, Merck began a sham testing program in the late 1990′s to hide the declining efficacy of the vaccine. The objective of the fraudulent trials was to “report efficacy of 95 percent or higher regardless of the vaccine’s true efficacy.” This program was initially referred to as “Protocol 007,” the Chatom claim states, and instead of testing the vaccine’s efficacy against a wild mumps virus, as is the norm, Merck used its own attenuated strain of the virus—the identical strain with which the children were being vaccinated!

That’s as brilliant as it is devious, and a perfect example of how medical research can be manipulated to achieve desired results. Suzanne Humphries recently wrote an excellent summary for GreenMedInfo.com, explaining in layman’s terms how the tests were manipulated (see Sources). The two virologists bringing the lawsuit against Merck claim they witnessed firsthand this deception and were asked to directly participate in it.

As reported by the Courthouse News Service^v:

“That “subverted” the purpose of the testing regime, “which was to measure the vaccine’s ability to provide protection against a disease-causing mumps virus that a child would actually face in real life. The end result of this deviation … was that Merck’s test overstated the vaccine’s effectiveness,” Chatom claims.

Merck also added animal antibodies to blood samples to achieve more favorable test results, though it knew that the human immune system would never produce such antibodies, and that the antibodies created a laboratory testing scenario that “did not in any way correspond to, correlate with, or represent real life … virus neutralization in vaccinated people,” according to the complaint.

Chatom claims that the falsification of test results occurred “with the knowledge, authority and approval of Merck’s senior management.”

Continue Reading At: Mercola.com

Big Pharma criminality no longer a conspiracy theory: Bribery, fraud, price fixing now a matter of public record

via: NaturalNews
Monday, July 09, 2012
by Mike Adams

[NaturalNews] Those of us who have long been describing the pharmaceutical industry as a “criminal racket” over the last few years have been wholly vindicated by recent news. Drug and vaccine manufacturer Merck was caught red-handed by two of its own scientists faking vaccine efficacy data by spiking blood samples with animal antibodies. GlaxoSmithKline has just been fined a whopping $3 billion for bribing doctors, lying to the FDA, hiding clinical trial data and fraudulent marketing. Pfizer, meanwhile has been sued by the nation’s pharmacy retailers for what is alleged as an “overarching anticompetitive scheme” to keep generic cholesterol drugs off the market and thereby boost its own profits.

The picture that’s emerging is one of a criminal drug industry that has turned to mafia tactics in the absence of any real science that would prove their products to be safe or effective. The emergence of this extraordinary evidence of bribery, scientific fraud, lying to regulators and monopolistic practices that harm consumers is also making all those doctors and “skeptics” who defended Big Pharma and vaccines eat their words.

To defend Big Pharma today is to defend a cabal of criminal corporations that have proven they will do anything — absolutely anything – to keep their profits rolling in. It makes no difference who they have to bribe, what studies they have to falsify, or who has to be threatened into silence. They will stop at nothing to expand their profit base, even if it means harming (or killing) countless innocents.

Let’s take a look at recent revelations:

GlaxoSmithKline pleads guilty to bribery, fraud and other crimes

It what is now the largest criminal fraud settlement ever to come out of the pharmaceutical industry, GlaxoSmithKline has pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in civil fines following a nine-year federal investigation into its activities.

According to U.S. federal investigators, GlaxoSmithKline (http://www.naturalnews.com/036416_GlaxoSmithKline_fraud_criminal_char…):

• Routinely bribed doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs
• Fabricated drug safety data and lied to the FDA
• Defrauded Medicare and Medicaid out of billions
• Deceived regulators about the effectiveness of its drugs
• Relied on its deceptive practices to earn billions of dollars selling potentially dangerous drugs to unsuspecting consumers and medical patients

And this is just the part they got caught doing. GSK doesn’t even deny any of this. The company simply paid the $3 billion fine, apologized to its customers, and continued conducting business as usual.

By the way, in addition to bribing physicians, GSK has plenty of money to spread around bribing celebrities and others who pimps its products. The company reportedly paid $275,000 to the celebrity doctor known as “Dr. Drew,” who promoted Glaxo’s mind-altering antidepressant drug Wellbutrin (http://naturalsociety.com/top-radio-doctor-paid-by-glaxosmithkline-to…).

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

In June 1999, popular radio personality Dr. Drew Pinsky used the airwaves to extol the virtues of GlaxoSmithKline PLC’s antidepressant Wellbutrin, telling listeners he prescribes it and other medications to depressed patients because it “may enhance or at least not suppress sexual arousal” as much as other antidepressants do. But one thing listeners didn’t know was that, two months before the program aired, Dr. Pinsky — who gained fame as “Dr. Drew” during years co-hosting a popular radio sex-advice show “Loveline” — received the second of two payments from Glaxo totaling $275,000 for “services for Wellbutrin.”
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230393340457750503200685…)

Merck falsified vaccine data, spiked blood samples and more, say former employees

According to former Merck virologists Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, the company: (http://www.naturalnews.com/036328_Merck_mumps_vaccine_False_Claims_Ac…)

• “Falsified test data to fabricate a vaccine efficacy rate of 95 percent or higher.”

• Spiked the blood test with animal antibodies in order to artificially inflate the appearance of immune system antibodies.

• Pressured the two virologists to “participate in the fraud and subsequent cover-up.”

• Used the falsified trial results to swindle the U.S. government out of “hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization.”

• Intimidated the scientists, threatening them with going to jail unless they stayed silent.

This is all documented in a 2010 False Claims Act which NaturalNews has acquired and posted here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Merck-False-Claims-Act.p…

Millions of children put at risk by Merck

In that document the two virologists say they, “witnessed firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine’s efficacy findings.”

They also claim that because of the faked vaccine results, “the United States has over the last decade paid Merck hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization… The United States is by far the largest financial victim of Merck’s fraud.”

They go on to point out that children are the real victims, however:

“But the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection. …The failure in Merck’s vaccine has allowed this disease to linger with significant outbreaks continuing to occur.”

Merck’s mumps viral strain is 45 years old!

According to the complaint, Merck has been using the same mumps strain — weakened from generations of being “passaged” — for the last 45 years! The complaint reads:

“For more than thirty years, Merck has had an exclusive license from the FDA to manufacture and sell a mumps vaccine in the U.S. The FDA first approved the vaccine in 1967. It was developed by Dr. Maurice Hilleman, at Merck’s West Point research facility, from the mumps virus that infected his five year-old daughter Jeryl Lynn. Merck continues to use this ‘Jeryl Lynn’ strain of the virus for its vaccine today.”

A complete medical farce

This information appears to show Merck’s mumps vaccine to be a complete medical farce. Those who blindly backed Merck’s vaccines — the science bloggers, “skeptics,” doctors, CDC and even the FDA — have been shown to be utter fools who have now destroyed their reputations by siding with an industry now known to be dominated by scientific fraud and unbounded criminality.

That’s the really hilarious part in all this: After decades of doctors, scientists and government authorities blindly and brainlessly repeating the mantra of “95% effectiveness,” it all turns out to be total quackery hogwash. Utterly fabricated. Quackety-quack quack. And all those hundreds of millions of Americans who lined up to be injected with MMR vaccines were all repeatedly and utterly conned into potentially harming themselves while receiving no medical benefit.

Intelligent, informed NaturalNews readers, home school parents, and “awakened” people who said “No!” to vaccines are now emerging as the victors in all this. By refusing to be injected with Merck’s vaccines, they avoided being assaulted with a fraudulent cocktail of adjuvant chemicals and all-but-useless mumps strains over four decades old. They protected their time, money and health. Those who refuse to be physically violated by vaccines are, once again, turning out to be the smartest people in society. No wonder they also tend to be healthier than the clueless fools who line up to get vaccinated every year.

Merck fraudulently misrepresented the efficacy of its vaccine and contributed to the spread of infectious disease, says lawsuit

The faked vaccine efficacy numbers aren’t the only troubles Merck is now facing. Shortly after the above False Claims Act was made public, Chatom Primary Care filed suit against Merck. That document is available from NaturalNews at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Chatom-Lawsuit-Merck-Mum…

It alleges that:

• [Merck engaged in] …a decade-long scheme to falsify and misrepresent the true efficacy of its vaccine.

• Merck fraudulently represented and continues to falsely represent in its labeling and elsewhere that its Mumps Vaccine has an efficacy rate of 95 percent of higher.

• Merck knows and has taken affirmative steps to conceal — by using improper testing techniques and falsifying test data — that its Mumps Vaccine is, and has been since at least 1999, far less than 95 percent effective.

• Merck designed a testing methodology that evaluated its vaccine against a less virulent strain of the mumps virus. After the results failed to yield Merck’s desired efficacy, Merck abandoned the methodology and concealed the study’s findings.

• Merck also engaged in “incorporating the use of animal antibodies to artificially inflate the results… destroying evidence of the falsified data and then lying to an FDA investigator… threatened a virologist in Merck’s vaccine division with jail if he reported the fraud to the FDA.”

• “Merck designed a testing methodology that evaluated its vaccine against a less virulent strain of the mumps virus. After the results failed to yield Merck’s desired efficacy, Merck abandoned the methodology and concealed the study’s findings. [Then] Merck designed even more scientifically flawed methodology, this time incorporating the use of animal antibodies to artificially inflate the results, but it too failed to achieve Merck’s fabricated efficacy rate. Confronted with two failed methodologies, Merck then falsified the test data to guarantee the results it desired. Having achieved the desired, albeit falsified, efficacy threshold, Merck submitted these fraudulent results to the FDA and European Medicines Agency.”

• “Merck took steps to cover up the tracks of its fraudulent testing by destroying evidence of the falsified data and then lying to an FDA investigator… Merck also attempted to buy the silence and cooperation of its staff by offering them financial incentives to follow the direction of Merck personnel overseeing the fraudulent testing process. Merck also threatened… Stephen Krahling, a virologist in Merck’s vaccine division from 1999 to 2001, with jail if he reported fraud to the FDA.”

• “Merck continued to conceal what it knew about the diminished efficacy of its Mumps Vaccine even after significant mumps outbreaks in 2006 and 2009.”

Continue Reading At: NaturalNews.com 

GlaxoSmithKline pleads guilty to criminal fraud charges, pays massive $3 billion in fines

via: NaturalNews
Sunday, July 08, 2012
By: Ethan A. Huff

[NaturalNews] U.K.-based pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a corporate “person” in the eyes of the federal government (http://blog.timesunion.com/occupyalbany/corporations-are-people/394/), has pleaded guilty to criminal charges in what even the mainstream media is calling the largest healthcare fraud case in history. And though the company is having to fork over $3 billion in collective fines for its illegal activity, no actual GSK employees or executives are being held personally responsible for their crimes.

A roughly nine-year federal investigation has exposed GSK’s rampant abuse of the law by illegally marketing drugs, forging drug safety data, bribing doctors to promote dangerous and expensive drugs, ripping off Medicare and Medicaid, and lying about the effectiveness and safety of drugs. And all this deception has generated tens of billions of dollars in profits for GSK over the years, while thousands of patients who used the drug products involved have suffered horrific side effects and even death.

But rather than pursue any of the individuals responsible for purveying such crimes, the federal government instead agreed to have GSK simply fork over $1 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in civil fines. This $3 billion sum is but a fraction of the amount GSK raked in as a result of its illicit behavior, and the company’s employees are now essentially free to continue engaging in such behavior without having to worry about facing any real repercussions.

Big Pharma considers legal settlements to be just another cost of doing business

Though it may sound like a lot of money to most people, $3 billion is not really all that much for a company that generated more than $42 billion in revenues just last year. In fact, according to Reuters, GSK has agreed to pay the $3 billion in fines from company cash reserves that appear to be specifically earmarked for such uses.

This means that GSK, and more than likely all other drug companies, consider criminal activity to be part of their normal company operations, and the legal settlements and fines that may result to be just another cost of doing business. GSK, in this case, was able to bring in tens of billions of dollars using illicit marketing and sales tactics, and only had to pay a small fraction of that revenue to basically pay off the American justice system.

When you really think about it, the legal system actually encourages drug companies to break the law because doing so will generate significantly larger profits in the long run. As long as the drug companies breaking the law are willing to share a piece of the pie with the federal government when investigators come to initiate the shakedown, there are no real legal consequences for the corporate “persons” of the drug industry that continue to do as they please.

Every GSK executive, scientist, salesperson, or employee that engaged in illegal activity should be arrested and tried in court

In a just world, the actual GSK employees that engaged in criminal activity as part of the decades-long scheme would be immediately arrested and tried in court for their crimes. Every corporate executive, laboratory scientist, territory salesman, administrative assistant, and factory worker at GSK that knowingly participated in the campaign of deception should be brought to justice, whether that means seizure of financial assets or jail time.

According to Reuters, such a scenario is not necessarily out of the question in this case, despite the settlement. However, federal prosecutors declined to state whether or not any individual at GSK would be pursued, which suggests that none of them likely will. And if nobody at GSK is held personally responsible for the company’s ill-gotten gains, then GSK will more than likely continue to abuse the corrupt system indefinitely.

“What we’re learning is that money doesn’t deter corporate malfeasance,” said Eliot Spitzer, former attorney general of New York, as quoted by the New York Times. Spitzer filed a lawsuit against GSK back in 2004 over the company’s illegal marketing and misrepresentation of the antidepressant drug Paxil. “The only thing that will work in my view is CEOs and officials being forced to resign and individual culpability being enforced.”

Sources for this article include:

http://www.reuters.com

http://www.businessweek.com

http://www.nytimes.com

Source: NaturalNews.com

GlaxoSmithKline Forced to Pay $3 Billion Over Faking Research, Bribing Doctors

via: NaturalSociety
by: Lisa Gerber
July 3, 2012

It’s not often that we get an express and unequivocal admission of criminal behavior from Big Pharma. British pharmaceutical behemoth GlaxoSmithKline, however, made headlines when they pled guilty to three criminal charges. They settled to pay $1 billion in criminal fines and $2 billion in civil fines. This settlement surpasses the $2.3 billion Pfizer agreed to pay in 2009 for inappropriately marketing 13 drugs.

“[This] is unprecedented in both size and scope,” said James Cole, the US Deputy Attorney General.

Doctors Bribed, Research Faked, and Dangerous Drugs Pushed

The charges against GSK include marketing the antidepressant Paxil to minors when it was only approved for adults. In fact, in 2003, the FDA warned against Paxil administration to teens and youth due to a heightened risk of suicide.

GSK also promoted Wellbutrin for unapproved uses like weight loss and sexual dysfunction. The Justice Department’s criminal information files even state that “GSK sales representatives sometimes referred to Wellbutrin as ‘the happy, horny, skinny pill’ when touting its unapproved uses.”

The third drug in question, the diabetes drug Avandia, had safety issues that went illegally unreported to the US Food and Drug Administration. GSK pled guilty to these three misdemeanor criminal counts.

Since the late 1990s, GSK has been sending doctors to spas, expensive restaurants, and vacations to Hawaii in order to promote their drugs (such as the three in question). According to US attorney Carmin Ortiz, they even paid millions of dollars for doctors to go on speaking tours and bought them tickets to Madonna concerts.

Glaxo CEO Sir Andrew Witty (who was, ironically, knighted in 2012 for services to the economy and the UK pharmaceutical industry) promised to rectify the problems. “On behalf of GSK, I want to express or regret and reiterate that we have learnt from the mistakes that were made.”

Snaky, corporate types don’t pay for their misdeeds as often as we’d like. (We were happy to report that Monsanto coughed up $93 million to victims of their herbicides earlier this year.) GSK’s unprecedented fines, however, might at least help to spread word to the masses of the indecent behaviors of such companies, and maybe even send a warning that not even Big Pharma is impervious to the justice system.

Additional sources:

The Guardian

NPR

Source: NaturalSociety.com

GlaxoSmithKline: Largest Case of Healthcare Fraud in U.S. History

via: BlacklistedNews
Source: Reuters
by: David Ingram
July 2, 2012

GlaxoSmithKline Plc has agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor criminal charges and pay $3 billion to settle what government officials said on Monday is the largest case of healthcare fraud in U.S. history.

The agreement, which still needs court approval, would resolve allegations that the British drugmaker broke U.S. laws in the marketing of several pharmaceuticals.

GSK targeted the antidepressant Paxil to patients under age 18 when it was approved for adults only, and it pushed the drug Wellbutrin for uses it was not approved for, including weight loss and treatment of sexual dysfunction, according to an investigation led by the U.S. Justice Department.

The company went to extreme lengths to promote the drugs, such as distributing a misleading medical journal article and providing doctors with meals and spa treatments that amounted to illegal kickbacks, prosecutors said.

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