February was a ‘lively’ month in the pharmaceutical sector. GSK attracted yet another £37m fine for illegal practices on 12th February. Although a record-breaker in itself, as the largest fine ever to be handed to a drugs company by a UK competition regulator, for size, it pales into insignificance by their own standards, since they set the pharmaceuticals bar at the current record level of $3bn in 2012.1 Fines of a few million like this can be seen as simply a reasonable marketing cost, merely serving to uphold the seemingly true adage, in this field at any rate, that ’crime pays’. This time they got caught out for buying the inactivity of smaller companies that would otherwise have weighed in with cheap generic alternatives to a GSK blockbuster, once their patent had expired. By paying out £50m, they managed to ‘suppress’ any competition and keep the gravy-train rolling a bit longer.2 Seroxat sales in one year in the UK alone were £90m. How a fine of a mere £37m is proportionate for this, I fail to understand.
But far more difficult to grasp is the manner in which criminal misdeeds that led not only to undeserved profits but also to enormous suffering and the deaths of thousands - as has been the case in many high-profile cases - could lead solely to affordable fines and not to the prosecution of a single executive for manslaughter, let alone crimes against humanity. Furthermore, when ordinary mortals are convicted of repeating a serious crime they are treated more severely than the first time. Pharmaceutical giants however, seem to manage to arrive in court with a clean slate time and time again - they just pay the fine and then it’s business as usual, whilst others pay the real price.
Ministers launch urgent inquiry into NHS officials' second jobs at drugs firms
Next up, comes another downer for the pharmaceuticals: on 16th February the Telegraph announced that a FOI request had revealed that ‘more than 130 NHS officials involved in assessing which drugs are given to patients are also acting as paid consultants to pharmaceutical companies’.5 Alistair Burt, the health minister, was so ‘shocked’ by this totally unexpected ‘revelation’ that he responded “These are very serious allegations – an urgent investigation is under way and action will be taken against any NHS staff attempting to influence purchasing decisions in return for payment, gifts or hospitality.’
Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the
history of modern medicine will probably, like me, have found his response
laughable, as it is well know that ’twas ever thus. The revolving door between
posts in the regulatory bodies and in drug corporations (notice how the
Telegraph reports that the CCG’s defend the covert relationship with industry,
rather than the public - this has
traditionally been the part regulatory bodies play, as Gotzsche makes plain3)
, as well as the myriad ways in which the pharmaceuticals seek to influence the
course of medicine towards ever greater profits, have long been well
documented. Way back in the last century, Ralph Moss did sterling work in this
area in books such as The Cancer Industry.6 Peter Gotzsche’s heavyweight broadside3
is simply the latest in a long line of attempts to awake us to the criminality
of medicine. That said, it is by far the most comprehensive and hardest hitting
to date, in my opinion.
And then along comes a ray of sunshine to break
through the murky pharma dealings, the
sort of news pharmaceutical corporations will do pretty much anything for (it
seems) - AstraZeneca got ‘breakthrough status’ for its new immunotherapy drug.4
Durvalumab uses ‘the body's own defence system to attack tumours’ which sounds
like a very smart idea. But hold on a minute… haven’t we heard that idea
somewhere before? Haven’t ‘quack’ doctors and nutritionists been banging on
about this for decades? Ah, but this is different - here we are talking about a
proper drug as opposed to all that ‘natural medicine’. How do we know it’s a
‘proper drug’ ? Because, unlike ‘natural medicines’, real drugs - to even begin
to get taken seriously - have to be unnatural, patentable and potentially
profitable, bringing us to the current nonsensical scenario where all
conventional medicines are, by definition, toxic. ‘Proper drugs’ all have
proper side-effects. And breakthrough status does nothing to ameliorate
Durvalumab’s situation in this respect. But the benefit it does certainly
bestow is a fast track to profits, the raison d’être of the pharmaceutical
industry. So an amazing day for AstraZeneca and probably a mixed blessing for some
future cancer patients.
Pharmaceutical firms paying members of panel which oversees NHS drug procurement
Does all this mean I think that drugs are just a
complete con? Absolutely not. In a perfect world, all medicines would be
natural and non-toxic, but medicine is far from a perfect science, and no-one
has all the answers. This is never more true than in cancer. At this point,
people with cancer need all the resources they can get, whether natural or
otherwise. But above all they need trustworthy resources, and such has been the
corruptive force of greed in the development of medicine, that the only
trustworthy drugs tend to be those with a track record. This is a tragic state
of affairs. Despite being pretty cynical about Alistair Burt’s apparent ‘shock’
and about drug ‘breakthroughs’, it is genuinely heartening to see at least the
beginnings of a general understanding and disapproval of the biggest racket in
history, and the fact that many of our health professionals are, and have
always been complicit in this; and it is also good to see the drugs industry
finally acknowledging that our best defence against cancer has always been our
own innate immune defences.
Probably the most astonishing aspect of all this
is the continuing ability of these businesses to trade with impunity and to
retain some sort of respectability, despite having their dirty washing very
publicly laundered with regularity, and despite such a powerful voice within
medicine as Gotzsche’s spelling it out so bluntly.3 GSK’s best
attempt at cleaning up its act following the $3bn monster fine in 2012 has
included investigations over bribery in Poland, the United Arab Emirates,
Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Romania, not to mention another
record-breaking $490m fine for bribery in China.7
The ‘moral’ of the story is, I suppose, that
money can buy an awful lot of things, especially if you have enough. And the
pharmaceutical industry certainly has more than enough. As for morals…
Dying for a Cure Campaign - Overhaul Cancer Drug Development
Dying for a Cure Campaign - Overhaul Cancer Drug Development
It seems that there may now be a unique opportunity to finally tackle these sorts of conflicts of interest within the pharmaceutical industry. In September 2015, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe concluded that conflicts of interest between profits and public health within the pharmaceutical industry have led to a lack of new drugs of real therapeutic benefit in recent years and shocking levels of profiteering. It voted overwhelmingly (94%) in favour of a Resolution to tackle the issue.
One man who lost his wife to ovarian cancer last year, has taken the initiative to set up a formal campaign to urge the UK Government to act on this resolution and implement measures to tackle the conflicts of interest between profits and public health. The campaign is called Dying for a Cure and is linked to a petition on change.org, urging the UK Government to overhaul cancer drug development. If like me, you want to see things change, please make your voice heard by supporting this campaign.
Read more from Robin here
4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/pharmaceuticalsandchemicals/12160974/AstraZeneca-wins-breakthrough-status-from-US-regulators-for-key-cancer-drug.html
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