A Week of Reporting Important Conspiracy Theories Respecting The Pharmaceutical Industry, Including Participation of One of The Major Covid Shot Manufacturers in One of Those Conspiracies

Two stories in the New York Times the same day published across from each other on a double page spread both about the pharmaceutical industry conspiring with government officials and deceiving the public, one about a bogus "Alzheimer's" drug, the other about selling the public addicting heroine pills, the ingredients supplied by Johnson & Johnson.

It’s been an interesting week in terms of seeing two conspiracy stories published about the pharmaceutical industry and its collusion with government regulatory agencies to put out dangerous and harmful drugs whose supposedly beneficial effects were misrepresented in order to foist them onto an unsuspecting public.  Yes, there are two of these stories out this week, at least two of them where the outlines of the conspiring seem to be endorsed by outlets like that paper of record, the New York Times.  One of the stories prominently features as a wrong-doer, Johnson & Johnson, a company elsewhere very much in the news these days as a top tier manufacturer of Covid vaccine shots.        

The alleged suspicious collusion with government in these stories also involves the way that pharmaceutical industry wrong doers are getting off practically scot-free for their misdeeds, and are being allowed to ultimately profit by keeping their ill-gotten gains.  That may be ascribed to state attorneys general not being sufficiently aggressive (or just being feckless stage props?) while courts friendly to the pharmaceutical corporations and the wealthy opiod-manufacturing Sackler family steer things in the direction of ensuring the wrong doers are protected from paying any real price.  Fiendish collusion? Amounting to conspiratorial behavior?

Here is what is being reported.

In the smaller scale, less notorious of the two stories, a very expensive ($56K per annum) multi-year drug, aducanumab, that Biogen wanted to market for Alzheimer’s even though there was insufficient evident that it worked and might instead have harmful side effects (brain swelling or brain bleeding) was approved by the FDA., with the FDA involving itself to work and closely collaborate with Biogen to help the company deal with the fact that they were asking for approval of a drug that shouldn’t be approved given that the evidence wasn’t there that it worked.  (That FDA assistance reportedly included at least one secret off-the-record meeting.)  Oh well, whatever the medical side effects, what’s more important to everyone, bad actors included, is that Biogen would be soaking Medicare and, via expensive co-pays, families desperate to treat their Alzheimer’s suffering family members . .  . The what-the-heck approach to someone with Alzheimer’s apparently being `what they don’t know can’t hurt them’?

I recommend the coverage that comes from FAIR in its second segment of their weekly half-hour Counterspin program:  Chris Bernadel on Haitian Assassination, Michael Carome on FDA Alzheimer’s Investigation, July 16, 2021.
 
Here is the program segment summary:

Cronyism between pharmaceutical companies and their ostensible government regulators is an infuriating fact of US life, along with the unsurprisingly obscene cost of drugs. Yet somehow the story of aducanumab takes it to a new level. We talk about what pharma and the FDA call a breakthrough Alzheimer’s drug, and what public advocates call an example of all that’s wrong with the FDA, with Michael Carome, M.D., director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen.

In that interview Dr. Michael Carome ends by laying blame squarely at the feet of Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the FDA.  He calls for her resignation as commissioner.  He says, that for three decades she was director of the center of the FDA that reviews and approves new drugs and asserts that over her three decades she has:

fostered an ever cosier relationship between her agency and pharmaceutical companies and that has resulted in regulatory capture of the agency by the pharmaceutical industry. She regularly refers to the agency as being a partner with industry, a partner– that they work with, you know, collaboratively– and she actually defended the collaborations that occurred between her agency and companies like Biogen.

Dr. Carome says she needs to be replaced by someone who is more aligned with protecting public health instead of the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.

The more notorious of the two stories during the week is about the pharmaceutical industry and the Sackler family’s responsibility, again working with the FDA (yes, recently and within that last three decades), for drug approvals that have led to an estimated 500,000 opiod addiction deaths in this country.  Most recently, in just the 12-month period ending in November, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures show that drug overdoses were soaring during Covid (egged up by Covid despair?) causing deaths just shy of another hundred thousand (92,000) ascribed to the “increasing availability of synthetic opioids” like fentanyl.  Now for the last year of 2020 the figure is stated to be up to 93,000. Compare that to the figures offered the national toll offered for Covid since it was first announced.  They are actually in the same neighborhood.

Among others covering this story during the week was Democracy Now, giving time to documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney who has a new documentary out about the collaborative and highly coordinated misconduct generating all that opiod addiction sickness and death. According to Gibney there were all sorts of “terrible incentives, where the incentive is not to cure the patient.”  See: “Crime of the Century”: How Big Pharma Fueled the Opioid Crisis That Killed 500,000 and Counting, July 19, 2021

According to Democracy Now’s story “overall, drug overdoses accounted for more deaths in 2020 than car crashes, gun violence and HIV/AIDS combined.”

In the Democracy Now segment it is described how with the Sackler family’s oxycodone marketed by their Perdue Pharma involved selling “drugs that are essentially heroin pills.”   Gibney says that “Purdue didn’t have any evidence that the drug was safe,” so the company obtained help from a medical officer at the FDA to deal with that.  Is this, perhaps, beginning to sound familiar?  Gibney says that, working with an FDA officer, Perdue took actions that “really coalesce around the idea of fraud” and “launched that fraud with a drug called OxyContin” working with the FDA official to “write the review of their own application.”   They got “inserted into the package insert, the paper that comes along with a prescription,” what Gibney observes were two very consequential falsehoods: “one, that it [the drug] wasn’t terribly addictive, and, two, because of the time-release mechanism, the Contin system, it wasn’t prone to abuse.”

According to the Democracy Now story, when Purdue was pursued by the authorities, the company lied under oath.  Moreover, when there were efforts to hold the pharmaceutical companies “accountable,” the companies “decided to change the statute,” changing the rules rather than their behavior.  It’s not just regulatory capture of federal agencies, it’s also insanely cooperative law making legislators.

Beyond the pharmaceutical companies and the Sackler family playing its part, the unfolding of the opiod addiction crisis permeated many aspects of the industry, a legion of doctors complicit in prescribing pills, pharmacies or “pill mills” filling the prescriptions.  The Democracy Now interview goes into financial incentives that drove this permeating complicity, vacation jaunts, payments (including for “speaking” fees) and, for instance, job promotions that made it clear that Purdue knew what it was doing.  Not everyone in the industry was directly involved, of course, but with something so widespread and effects that must have been widely evident, one wonders where the whistleblowers were.  Was everyone else just a passive bystander?  Of course, we know that whistleblowers pay prices.  And with all the interlocking ownership and interconnected interests, you never know whose toes you might be stepping on, so you have to be careful before taking any risks.

Running a big scale heroine selling racket sounds a lot like what we tend to classify as the work of organized crime.  If fact, Amy Goodman, the Democracy Now host, noted that Gibney’s documentary “describes the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma, as a kind of crime syndicate” and Gibney says it’s a “blurry line between licit pharmaceutical sales and, essentially, cartel sales,” that “they’re not so very different.”    

But there is more to this conspiracy tale of collusive bad behavior; the final part of it is the kind of intricate coordination that got the Sacklers and other wrong doers off essentially scot-free.  This is part of exchange between Goodman and Gibney on that about the Sacklers using political “muscle” from those high up the government ladder to escape liability and keep their misdeeds secret:

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Alex Gibney, in fact, while you talk about Insys, people there were jailed. The Sackler family — and this goes to the recently settled lawsuit, and I’m wondering if you could comment on this — 15 states recently abandoning their fight to block the bankruptcy plan of Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin; in exchange, Purdue releasing tens of millions of documents, paying a settlement expected to reach $4.5 billion, but the Sackler family agreeing to cede ownership of Purdue but will not have to admit responsibility.

    ALEX GIBNEY: Yeah, it’s really — that settlement was designed to sound good, like, “Oh my gosh, $4.5 billion, that’s a lot of money.” It is a lot of money. But the Sacklers have about $11 billion. And that $4.5 billion gets paid over nine years. So, if you’re taking in at least 5% on your money, it’s really not affecting the principal at all.

    But I think the larger thing here goes to a failure of accountability. You know, Purdue was investigated by the federal government back in 2006, and indeed found guilty. But that investigation, which was a very robust investigation, really laid out the roadmap for how Purdue did what it did. And the attorneys were arguing for very extensive felony convictions. Ultimately, Purdue used its muscle to go above those attorneys and have the charges knocked way back to misdemeanors and a fine. And most importantly — and this gets to the current episode — they were able to seal all the records relating to the prosecution. So the most important evidence was buried, which meant that all of us, the public, couldn’t see what had really happened, in order to be able to stop it.

If you want to hear essentially this same assessment of the Sacklers’ escape act repeated you can read it in an New York Times opinion piece of the week by Patrick Radden Keefe, who says “it is difficult to overstate the fiendish brilliance” of how the Sacklers manipulated the court system to come out still ultra-wealthy and essentially unscathed: See: How Did the Sacklers Pull This Off? July 14, 2021.

He notes:

American corporations can pick the jurisdiction where they file for bankruptcy and, thus, often the judge who determines their fate. Even though Purdue has never had any real business presence in White Plains, N.Y., that is where it filed its bankruptcy case. Purdue has maintained that this choice was driven by proximity to the company’s headquarters in Stamford, Conn. But it may also have been relevant that only one federal bankruptcy judge presides in White Plains: Robert Drain. In the past, he indicated a willingness to shield from litigation certain parties who had not even filed for bankruptcy in his court. He promptly granted the request, temporarily protecting the Sacklers from those suits.

    * * * *

    . .  Their offer: $4.5 billion, with no admission of wrongdoing by the family and permanent immunity from any future civil liability related to the opioid crisis.

That may seem like a lot of money, but billionaire math can be deceptive. The Sacklers proposed to pay the $4.5 billion out over nine years. Their current fortune is estimated to be at least $11 billion. Conservatively, with interest and investments, this means they can expect a 5 percent annualized rate of return on that fortune. If that’s the case, they’ll be able to pay the fine without even touching their principal. When they’re done paying in 2030, they will probably be richer than they are today.

It’s not just about the Sacklers.  Especially, now, today, we should notice that, along with others in the industry it is also about a top-tier Covid vaccine manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson who got a similar settlement.  Here is Gibney, again on Democracy Now:

one thing I would like to point out, as much as we talk about the Sacklers — and it’s very important to talk about them and Purdue — we shouldn’t be naive and think that that was the only company that was making extraordinary profits out of the opioid crisis and indeed didn’t know better. I mean, you know, [the huge companies distributing the drugs] knew very well that their pills, their opioid pills, were being diverted in ways that were causing massive addiction, but they didn’t do anything about it. And indeed, they ended up influencing Congress to pass a law which made them even less accountable, because they used the power of the revolving door to rig the rules. Johnson & Johnson, you know, famous for baby shampoo, was one of the biggest manufacturers of a potent kind of opioid, produced in Tasmania, that actually supplied Purdue Pharma with all the oxycodone that they needed in order to be able to market their drug. They wouldn’t have been able to do it without Johnson & Johnson. . . .

The amount of the settlement, Johnson & Johnson paid for their role working with Purdue in fueling the opioid crisis?: A paltry $230 million to New York State announced the end of June, and, bore broadly, in a settlement announced this week affecting other of the big pharmaceutical companies alongside of which it acted badly, $5 billion over nine years.  In other words, it wasn’t it wasn’t meaningful.

Maybe there will be those who say that this could have been all for the best if  Johnson & Johnson, after paying dividends to its shareholders, managed to squirrel away extra cash from the profits it made from selling opiods to  Purdue Pharma* on the theory that the extra cash might have helped the company come out with their Covid vaccine.  That’s the same sort of the thinking behind the idea of what makes it OK for the CIA to self-finance off the books through its engagement over the years with the illicit drug trade.

(* Johnson & Johnson also famously made money knowingly selling asbestos laced baby talcum powder.)

What a week! Two conspiracy theories at the same time about Big Pharma being engaged with government officials to cause harm to the public by marketing drugs that are misrepresented and shouldn’t have been approved– And one of those conspiracy theories extends to secrecy and coverups aided by more government officials outside the FDA and the politically very high up?  And that conspiracy theory involves one of the most prominent of the Covid vaccine manufacturers?  Are we allowed to believe in such conspiracy theories?  Well the New York Times in subdued, grey lady, respectful-of-power fashion is endorsing both of them.

For an official answer on the question of what we are allowed to believe, we could consult Cass Sunstein, an expert on conspiracy theories, an expert on what should, and should not, be censored by the media and a man who is also in charge of World Heath Organization group charged with steering what the public should think about Covid.  See: Samantha Power, “Humanitarian Hawk,” Is Married To Cass Sunstein, “Libertarian Paternalist”: They Both Advocate Censorship– Should That Advocacy Be On WBAI “Free Speech” Radio 99.5 FM?

(Note: Both FAIR's Counterspin and Democracy Now are programs who reporting is cited here air on WBAI radio 99.5 FM in New York City.  I am currently a member of the WBAI Local Station Board and urge people to donate to the station.)

Postscript: After this article was posted July 25, 2021, Democracy Now ran another story July 28, 2021 about how the pharmaceutical industry is corruptly and incestuously connected to government to make decisions that shortchange and fleece the public, decisions that are definitely contrary to the public’s interest and decisions that put Big Pharma profit and payoffs to the government officials they work with ahead of actually attending to the public’s healthcare needs.  See: Workers Beg Joe Manchin to Save West Virginia Pharma Plant as His Daughter Walks Away with $31M, July 28, 2021.

The story probably ran getting the prominence it did, because it is comfortably in the current vein of other let’s make Joe Manchin the villain (calling him “the most powerful man in Washington”) stories, so we have a someone to blame and a distraction from the rest of lawmakers as a whole should be held accountable as they deliver, both the Republican and the Democrats doing it, the spoils that the corporatist interests that placed them in office expect.  Nonetheless, this story is valuable as another window into how brazenly connections can be in place between the pharmaceutical companies and government officials that conflict with the public interest, allowing what are pretty clearly payoffs so that government officials don’t protect the public’s health.

In this story we learn that Joe Mansion’s daughter Heather Bresch, heads a pharma company in his state of West Virginia, Viatris, and formerly Mylan.  Pfizer is involved because Viatris, which Ms. Bresch heads and was thereby able to recently pocket $31 million, was created through a merger involving Pfizer in December 2020.  Ms. Bresch is likely mainly qualified for the job and to pocket such sums (in 2014 as head of Mylan she pocketed $25 million) via her relationship with her father.  There was a scandal concerning how her MBA had to be revoked by West Virginia University.  She had been given the now revoked degree right after Manchin became governor, (before he became senator) without doing the course work on the basis of doctored transcripts.

As Mylan’s chief executive, Senator Manchin’s daughter was famous for her company’s raising by 400% the price of its life-saving EpiPen, used by millions who are vulnerable to reverse fatal allergic reactions.   And more in the family: Mansion’s wife, Gayle Conelly Manchin was on a school commission that was trying to get the U.S. government to mandate that schools purchase the EpiPen at the insanely inflated price.

The Democracy Now story reports about how Viatris is, with government, Biden and Mansion all doing nothing about it, shutting down its West Virginia plant (that should be designated “vital infrastructure”) and moving manufacturing operations abroad although according to Katherine Eban, author of the book Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom and Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America’s Drug Supply:

We have seen five years of congressional reports, policy reports and bipartisan agreement that we need to make as many of our own pharmaceuticals as possible. We know from data, from reporting, that the drugs that are made overseas can be full of carcinogens and toxic impurities. There is all kinds of data fraud and other quality questions that the plants overseas are riddled with, including Viatris’s own plants, which are operating in India under an official action indicated warning from the FDA. So, why, in the middle of a pandemic, are we going through this exercise that every single report has told us is absolutely counterindicated to public health and our national interest?   

Ms. Eban says there is a:

sort of cone of silence that has come down over this shuttering of this critical manufacturing plant in West Virginia. It seems like it is both pharmaceutical and national security suicide to close this plant.

PS #2- Democracy Now October 22, 2021- Remember the TPP?  The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty?  It was a proposal to use a “treaty” between countries to override national laws and invert the relationship between government and corporations; government would become subservient to and accountable to corporations rather than the traditional vice versa; corporate contracts would tell governments what laws could be passed.  Democracy Now did a story about how, during Covid, Pfizer has used contracts with countries worldwide to exactly that. . . Contracts that put Pfizer in charge so that the Pfizer corporation tells the countries what they can do when conducting what would normally be the province of government.  See: Public Citizen Blasts Pfizer for Putting Corporate Profit Over Increasing Access to COVID Vaccines, October 22, 2021.  That leaves us with a peculiar situation when it comes to these medical matters- Is it government or Big Pharma that we are dealing with? You'll never know which is which.