Big Pharma: Undermining Democracy & the Public Health
There is little doubt that the pharmaceutical industry, worldwide, has unimaginable power. Power over the choices we make about our health. Power to influence government. Power to control what we know and cannot know about the chemicals we ingest. Power over the choices physicians make. Power to keep us locked into the disease model. Here’s just how crazy it gets. Taxpayers subsidize the industry to do research and development. They then produce the drugs and sell them back to us at extortionate prices. And the drugs we don’t approve or we no longer use we ship overseas. In Brazil, for example, it is possible to get prescription drugs over the counter (Biehl, 2013, 2016). And the chemical suppliers, all overseas, then dump the toxic refuse into local environments.
In the midst of the pandemic, Alex Azar, the U.S. Health Secretary, made the following extraordinary claim; and only after a quick pushback was he forced to retreat from this.
Under a deal struck with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority agreed to pay 80 percent of the costs of developing and manufacturing coronavirus treatments — without any requirement that the final products be affordable. Regeneron has the two highest-paid executives in the pharmaceutical industry.
Similarly, another promising experimental drug to treat coronavirus, remdesivir, was developed with the help of taxpayer-funded research. Gilead Sciences, famous for its price gouging of other medicines developed with public funding like Truvada for PrEP and Sovaldi, owns the exclusive rights to remdesivir. In the case of coronavirus vaccines, nearly every candidate in development involves public-private partnerships that builds off publicly funded research, like Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi’s collaborations with the government’s biomedical research authority.
Drug Companies Will Make a Killing
Listen here to Congresswoman Porter’s interrogation of corrupt Pharma Executive
In October 2020, Big Pharma Purdue Settled 8B Suite: The OxyContin Crisis
Listen to NPR: Purdue Settlement
Listen Next to David Healy Interview
Dr. David Healy (visit the project, RxRisk)
Take Some Time to Get Familiar with the Cradle to Grave Project at the British National Museum
Here you will learn about the degree of exposure we have to drugs, prescribed, over the course of a lifetime.
References
Biehl, J. (2006). Pharmaceutical governance. Global pharmaceuticals: Ethics, markets, practices, 206-239.
Biehl, J. (2013). Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Biehl, J., & Petryna, A. (Eds.). (2013). When people come first: critical studies in global health. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chon. G. (2016) Rising Drug Prices Put Big Pharma’s Lobbying to the Test. New York Times.