The five rules that govern Big Pharma

from alternet...

• Science has been supplanted by rank hucksterism

• The strictest "moral duty" of corporate executives has been reduced to maximizing profits

• A "good" regulation is one that's good for profit seekers

• Public reproach is just a momentary embarrassment to be covered over by corporate image makers

• Legal "punishment" never includes jail time, but only a fine that's easily absorbed as a necessary cost of doing business by these immensely profitable entities.

it's truly appalling to see the number of advertisements on tv for prescription drugs... by my rough estimate, they account for nearly half or more of all tv ads... it's also appalling to listen to the hastily-recited warnings that often take up 1/3 or more of the total time of the ad... the one that i find most disturbing are the abbott ads - all separate ads but many run within the same tv program - for humira - adalimumab - which is featured as THE remedy for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn's disease, and moderate to severe chronic psoriasis among others... c'mon... you gotta be kidding... all THOSE...?

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A Park Avenue M.D. Rheumatologist supports OWS

Alexander Reed Kelly
Bertha Bauer is a board certified rheumatologist
who has been practicing medicine for 30 years.

she has an office in a building very close to where jpmorgan chase ceo jamie dimon lives... here's what she had to say...

I am completely sympathetic to what’s going on here. My profession is being ruined and decimated by the greed of Wall Street, by Big Pharma, by insurance companies. I’m practically forced out of practice after 30 years because I’m honest, because people looking at ways of hurting me and patients while CEOs are making millions and billions of dollars in the industries that control us now. So I am—I came running out of my office to say ‘Yes! Yes! I agree with you.’

nothing like a quote from somebody in the 'hood...

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Today's LEAST surprising "news" story

i was digging through some of my more recent memorabilia this past week and came across a brochure that was being handed out by argentine immigration and customs officials last year during the height of the swine flu "pandemic"... i was flying to buenos aires from afghanistan via dubai and sao paulo... swine flu was little more than a side topic of discussion in kabul... i saw no more than 4 or 5 people in the very busy dubai international airport wearing face masks, quite a few more in sao paulo as i was changing planes, and, when i got to buenos aires, all the officials were wearing face masks along with a goodly number of the passengers... i was surprised and remember commenting to myself on what i believed, even at that time, to be an overblown fear tactic... well, guess what...?

Reports accuse WHO of exaggerating H1N1 threat, possible ties to drug makers

European criticism of the World Health Organization's handling of the H1N1 pandemic intensified Friday with the release of two reports that accused the agency of exaggerating the threat posed by the virus and failing to disclose possible influence by the pharmaceutical industry on its recommendations for how countries should respond.

The WHO's response caused widespread, unnecessary fear and prompted countries around the world to waste millions of dollars, according to one report. At the same time, the Geneva-based arm of the United Nations relied on advice from experts with ties to drug makers in developing the guidelines it used to encourage countries to stockpile millions of doses of antiviral medications, according to the second report.

along with the multiple things that annoy me about my fellow "liberals" and "progressives" is the way they pounced on anyone who dared to question the legitimacy of the flu "pandemic" in very much the same way they do with those who question any other item of the liberal/progressive orthodoxy...

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What about that swine flu...

no one would ever consider it was just a bogus scam to enrich big pharma... oh, no-o-o-o-ooo...!

Although it is too early to write the obituary for swine flu, medical experts, already assessing how the first pandemic in 40 years has been handled, have found that while luck played a part, a series of rapid but conservative decisions by federal officials worked out better than many had dared hope.

The outbreak highlighted many national weaknesses: old, slow vaccine technology; too much reliance on foreign vaccine factories; some major hospitals pushed to their limits by a relatively mild epidemic.

But even given those drawbacks, “we did a lot of things right,” concluded Dr. Andrew T. Pavia, chairman of the pandemic flu task force of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Federal officials deserve “at least a B-plus,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University’s medical school.

Even Dr. Peter Palese, a leading virologist at Mount Sinai Medical School, who can be a harsh critic of public policies he disagrees with, called the government’s overall response “excellent.”

i don't chase after conspiracy theories, believe me... i've got too much to do dealing with the real world...

nonetheless, it simply amazes me that we can just sit back and soak in our belief that all these super-greedy, power-hungry folks who call all the shots for us peasants always act in the interest of the common good and take the spin of an article like this without even a shrug of skepticism...

yeah, i know... SOME of our esteemed leaders really do try to work on behalf of the common good, but i think they're the rare exception and their efforts invariably get neutered by those who are all to willing to leave them by the side of the road as just so much discarded street pizza...

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Greedy big pharma bastards

like they aren't already hauling in money fast enough...

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

check out this load of crap...

[D]rug companies say they are having to raise prices to maintain the profits necessary to invest in research and development of new drugs as the patents on many of their most popular drugs are set to expire over the next few years.

ya know what...? there's no longer even a graceful ATTEMPT to disguise naked greed... sure, the drug companies will put out the obligatory totally bullshit statement about WHY they're having to raise prices but it's all eyewash... they might just as well drop all pretense and give you and me the famous one-finger salute because THAT'S what they're really communicating...

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"It takes a willful act of ignorance ... not to perceive the United States as the latest in history’s falling empires"

david michael green via information clearing house...

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which proposing a new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading as national health care gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist stooge by gun-toting angry mobs.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which the same people who hate you for being a socialist simultaneously hate you for being a fascist.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which angry mobs of supposed anti-socialist demonstrators scream at their congressional representatives to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which claims that the government is going to start killing off seniors are taken seriously by tens of millions of people.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which people are all worked up about government czars, but sat silently while the Bush administration destroyed the Bill of Rights and used a thousand signing statements to write Congress out of the Constitution.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which deficits have all of a sudden become the source of enormous anger among people who said nothing about them previously, as the tax cuts for the wealthy, off-budget wars based on lies, and unfunded prescription drug Big Pharma giveaway transmogrified the biggest surplus in American history into the biggest deficit ever.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which politicians can rant incessantly about other peoples’ sexual morality, get caught screwing prostitutes, and then still be reelected to the highest ranks of government by trashing the president.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.

my thoughts exactly... and, btw, the above is just a teaser... you owe it to yourself to go read the whole thing...

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Alex Gibney and Bill Moyers on "Money-Driven Medicine"

as always, bill moyers manages to burrow in to the guts of what's really happening in contemporary issues...

here's a trailer for the documentary, money-driven medicine, that was offered on bill moyers journal in shortened form...



a snippet from the documentary's producer, alex gibney...

The fact is that, in a mixed system where private enterprise and public monies inhabit the same space, inefficiency and extravagance are profitable. Remember the military industrial complex? Private contractors make profits by charging the government for cost overruns. Defense contractors call this "cost plus." Pharma calls it "No Public Option."

Why is it that free marketeers are so afraid of competing with a government program which, in their religion, is inherently inefficient? Well who wants to compete with a public option that won't take 10-20% in overhead, lobbying costs, administration costs and profit? That's my bonus, dude. Whoops, I mean, I have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver the highest possible return to my shareholders.

watch it... read it... it's some truly infuriating stuff that unsurprisingly validates most everything we already know...

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Get longer eyelashes but beware the four-hour erection

i've rarely watched tv in the u.s., preferring to catch my favorite u.s. programs in argentina where they play in english with spanish subtitles... i find that commercials in argentina are ever so much more tolerable than the u.s. where the ads seem to get right in your face... argentine commercials are much more fluffy-bunny, mom-dad-kids, and tend to be kind of sweet overall...

now that i've been back in the u.s. for a while, i'm gravitating to my favorite shows and have been not just a tad bit appalled at the commercials i'm seeing, particularly the ceaseless pitches for prescription pharmaceuticals for everything under the sun from sexual dysfunction to mesothelioma to bone loss to longer eyelashes... it's positively disgusting not only how many there, but then to listen to the obligatory side-effects warnings, they become a real horror show: "reports of suicidal thoughts have occurred in an extremely small percentage of users"... great caesar's ghost...! if suicidal thoughts have been a factor with ANY users, it's too many...

maybe something will come of this - or not...

[P]oliticians are taking aim at the 60-second spots that have made viewers familiar with maladies like male urinary urgency and deficient eyelashes — not to mention side effects like four-hour erections.

Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia, is sponsoring a House bill that would ban ads for prescription sexual aids like Viagra and Levitra from prime-time television, on decency grounds. Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, has said he favors empowering the Food and Drug Administration to bar consumer advertisements for new drugs for an initial period after the F.D.A. approves them — until there has been more real-world experience with the medications.

Meanwhile, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, has introduced a bill called the Say No to Drug Ads Act. It would amend the federal tax code to prevent pharmaceutical companies from deducting the cost of direct-to-consumer drug advertisements as a business expense.

“You should not be going to a doctor saying, ‘I have restless leg syndrome’ — whatever the hell that is — or going to a doctor saying, ‘I have the mumps,’ ” Mr. Nadler said in an interview. “You should not be diagnosed by some pitchman on TV who doesn’t know you whatsoever.”

i'm sure big pharma will pull out all the stops and deploy every lobbyist they can lay their hands on to stop this in its tracks...

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