Pharmaceutical companies are businesses - they want to increase profits for shareholders, and during the last 20 years they have been very successful in doing that.
In 2001 the global pharmaceutical market was valued at 390 billion U.S. dollars, but by the end of 2020 the market had grown to 1.27 trillion dollars.
Put another way, the pharmaceutical industry is more than 3 times bigger than it was 20 years ago.
According to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the profit margins of pharmaceutical companies during the last 20 years or so were significantly greater than those of S&P 500 companies.
We might think that this is not necessarily a bad thing, since some drugs do save lives. However, there is considerable evidence that much of this increase in revenue has been gained as a result of nefarious activities.
In 2012 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was ordered to pay 3 billion dollars to resolve fraud allegations and failure to report drug safety data.
According to the Depart of Justice in the United States, from April 1998 to August 2003 GSK unlawfully promoted Paxil for treating depression in patients under the age of 18. The FDA has not approved Paxil for pediatric use.
In 2001, GSK published a misleading medical journal article in the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that stated Paxil “is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents” even though the data showed the opposite - it showed Paxil to be ineffective and to cause more harm than good in this group of people.
GSK’s 3 billion dollar fine also covered the promoting of several other drugs for uses that the drugs were not approved for, and for paying kickbacks to physicians for prescribing those drugs.
3 billion dollars might sound like a lot, but the total revenue for the drugs in question during the period covered by the settlement was at least 28 billion dollars. So, 3 billion dollars might be considered an acceptable cost of doing business. But here’s an interesting thing, that misleading journal article about Paxil was never corrected. The article still stands today, with its incorrect and harmful conclusion. None of the academic authors or the medical journal itself have issued an apology or a retraction. And the authorities seem OK with that. This fact was even highlighted by the British Medical Journal in 2015 and still no action was taken to retract the conclusions. Why would our health authorities allow this incorrect conclusion to stand in the medical literature for more than 20 years? Paxil is known to actually increase the risk of suicide in children which for an antidepressant would be ironic if it wasn’t so tragic.
Next up, Pfizer..
In 2009, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer was fined 2.3 billion dollars for:
falsely promoting 4 of its drugs
paying kickbacks relating to these drugs
submitting false claims to government health care programmes.
This is Pfizer’s biggest fine to date, however, it is by no means the only one. In 2012 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reached a 45 million dollar settlement with Pfizer in connection with charges that its subsidiaries had bribed overseas doctors in order to increase foreign sales.
In 2013, a subsidiary of Pfizer agreed to pay 500 million dollars for marketing its kidney transplant drug for unapproved uses, and in 2016 the UK's Competition and Markets Authority fined Pfizer the equivalent of 107 million dollars for charging excessive and unfair prices for an epilepsy drug. These are just a few of the violations on Pfizer’s corporate rap sheet.
In 2013, Johnson and Johnson agreed to pay 2.2 billion dollars in settlement based on the False Claims Act. The company was promoting its antipsychotic drug, Risperdal, for uses that had not been approved, making false statements about its safety, and paying kickbacks to physicians. The drug was inappropriately promoted to the most vulnerable in society including: children, the elderly, and those with developmental disabilities.
Drug companies seem to be motivated to use whatever means available to them to get as many people as possible to consume their products. These methods are not confined to the directly illegal methods described above.
Another method that has been in place for some time is disease mongering, which involves the practice of widening the diagnostic boundaries of illness in order to increase the market size for a drug. An example of this can be seen in the setting of cholesterol-lowering guidelines. The threshold beyond which is considered a treatable high level has been progressively lowered in order to get more people to swallow the tablets.
Image courtesy of PLOS Medicine.
In general, disease mongering has been described as the promotion of anxiety about future ill-health, exaggerating the number of people affected by a disease and introducing new conditions that are hard to distinguish from normal life, for example, social anxiety disorder.
Knowing all of this, it’s strange that governments trust big pharma. In November 2020, just before the first covid-19 vaccine was released onto the public, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, publicly announced “I trust Pfizer”.
For those of us who follow big pharma’s activities, that was the first red flag regarding the covid-19 vaccines. A shoddy clinical trial, extreme censorship of any data that is critical of the vaccines, safety data that should have halted their use, and complete denial of the fact that the vaccines only work for, at best, a few weeks, didn’t help to restore confidence. Not to mention the suppression of the alternatives that genuinely work and are much safer.
Now that the pandemic is subsiding and the hypnotic haze is starting to clear from most peoples’ minds, it is time for us to consider what we are going to do about these crooks.