There are many brave whistleblowers who have sounded the alarm about the extreme corruption of the medical system. This book by Dr. Peter Goetzsche, founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration, was published in 2013. Of course, this outspoken stance led to professional persecution:
Hospital’s suspension of evidence-based medicine expert sparks new controversy Petition in support of former Cochrane board member Peter Gøtzsche has received thousands of signatures
Now, 11 years later, the pharma companies continue to push their deadly “medicines” and “vaccines”. I wanted to provide some quotes from this important book, that I highly recommend for historical perspective of the corruption of Big Pharma. The means and methods of criminal conduct have not changed over the decades and the crimes are repetitive. This book also outlines not just he Big Pharma crimes, the fraud in the scientific literature, the false studies, the corruption of the continuing medical education system, the medical organization and physician corruption, the obscene over reporting of benefits and negating of harms. This book now has more historic meaning than every before, as we find ourselves in the biggest Big Pharma genocide to date.
Here are some selected passages from the book. If you still believe in Big Pharma, the allopathic health care system, the integrity of doctors, the honorability of peer reviewed studies – this book outlines with cold facts that debunk this romantic ideology and proves that Big Pharma and the healthcare system is nothing else but organized crime syndicate, out to profit at all costs, and without any conscience harming and killing millions. The entire system is based on fraud, bribery, lies and harm.
The characters in Aldous Huxley’s novel from 1932, Brave New World, can take Soma pills every day to give them control over their lives and keep troubling thoughts away. In the United States, TV commercials urge the public to do exactly the same. They depict unhappy characters that regain control and look happy as soon as they have taken a pill. We have already superseded Huxley’s wildest imaginations and drug use is still increasing. In Denmark, for example, we use so many drugs that every citizen, whether sick or healthy, can be in treatment with 1.4 adult daily doses of a drug every day, from cradle to grave.
The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. Blatant lies that – in all the cases I have studied – have continued after the statements were proven wrong.
In the foreword by Richard Smith we read: Goetzsche quotes a former vice-president of Pfizer, who has said:
It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry …
Many people are killed by the industry, many more than are killed by the mob.
Indeed, hundreds of thousands are killed every year by prescription drugs. Many will see this as almost inevitable because the drugs are being used to treat diseases that themselves kill. But a counter-argument is that the benefits of drugs are exaggerated, often because of serious distortions of the evidence behind the drugs, a ‘crime’ that can be attributed confidently to the industry.
Dr Goetzsche talks about the slogan “ safe and effective” – the most deceptive statement of the industry:
Organized crime, the business model of big pharma
Drug companies never talk about the benefits and harms of their drugs but about their efficacy and safety. Words create what they describe and the preferred semantics is seductive. It makes you think it can only be good for you to take drugs, as they are both efficacious and safe. Another reason why patients and doctors generally trust their drugs as being both efficacious and safe is that they think they have been carefully tested by the drug industry and carefully scrutinized by the drug regulatory agencies using high standards before they are allowed onto the market.
He explains the history of Pfizer:
An internal 2001 survey of Pfizer employees, which is not available to the public, showed that about 30% didn’t agree with the statement, ‘Senior management demonstrates honest, ethical behavior.’
In 2012, Pfizer agreed to pay $60 million to settle a US federal investigation into bribery overseas. Pfizer wasn’t only accused of bribing doctors, but also hospital administrators and drug regulators in several countries in Europe and Asia. The investigators said Pfizer units sought to hide the bribery by listing the payments in accounting records as legitimate expenses, such as training, freight and entertainment. According to court papers, the company wired monthly payments for what it described as ‘consultancy services’ to a doctor in Croatia who helped decide what drugs the government would register for sale and reimbursement. Pfizer didn’t admit or deny the allegations, which is routine practice when drug companies settle accusations of fraud.
Hoffman La Roche and the attack on Vitamins and Food
High- level Roche executives led a cartel that, according to the US Justice Department’s antitrust division, was the most pervasive and harmful criminal antitrust conspiracy ever uncovered. Top executives at some of the world’s biggest drug companies, largely from Europe and Asia, met secretly in hotel suites and at conferences. Working together in a coalition they brazenly called ‘Vitamins Inc.’, they carved up world markets and carefully orchestrated price increases, in the process defrauding some of the world’s biggest food companies. Roche alone had revenues of $3.3 billion in the United States while the conspiracy was running, and during that time, the conspirators gradually and artfully raised the prices of raw vitamins, so as not to attract notice; they also rigged the bidding process.
Roche pushed Valium (diazepam) to become the top- selling drug in the world, although many indications for its use were highly doubtful and the wholesale price was 25 times the price of gold. In the early 1970s, Roche was fined by antitrust officials in Europe for engaging in anti-competitive behavior in the sale of Valium and another best-selling tranquilizer, Librium (chlordiazepoxide).
It took 27 years after the first report about dependence had been published before the drug regulators fully acknowledged that tranquilizers are strongly addictive, just like heroin and other narcotics.
Dr. Goetzsche discusses the fraud charges over time pertaining to Big Pharma:
This was the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the US Department ofJustice at the time. A subsidiary of the firm pleaded guilty to misbranding drugs ‘with the intent to defraud or mislead’, and the firm was found to have illegally promoted four drugs: Bextra (valdecoxib, an anti-arthritis drug, withdrawn from the market in 2005), Geodon (ziprasidone, an antipsychotic drug), Zyvox (linezolid, an antibiotic) and Lyrica (pregabalin, an epilepsy drug).
An amount of $1billion was levied to resolve the allegations that Pfizer paid bribes and offered lavish hospitality to healthcare providers to encourage them to prescribe the four drugs,and six whistle-blowers would receive$102 million. Pfizer entered a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the US Department of Health and Human Services, which means that good behavior is required for the next 5 years.
This is the largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history. Glaxo Smith Kline pleaded guilty to having marketed a number of drugs illegally for off-label use, including Wellbutrin (bupropion, an antidepressant), Paxil (paroxetine, an antidepressant), Advair (fluticasone + salmeterol, an asthma drug), Avandia (rosiglitazone, a diabetes drug) and Lamictal (lamotrigine, an epilepsy drug).
The Justice Department charged a former vice president and top lawyer for Glaxo a year earlier with making false statements and obstructing a federal investigation into illegal marketing of Wellbutrin for weight loss. The indictment accused the vice president of lying to the FDA, denying that doctors speaking at company events had promoted Wellbutrin for uses not approved by the agency, and of withholding incriminating documents.
Roche has committed what to me looks like the biggest theft in history, but no one has yet dragged the company to court. In preparation for the mild 2009 influenza epidemic, the European and US governments spent billions of Euros and dollars on the purchase of Tamiflu (oseltamivir). Roche has omitted publishing most of their clinical trial data and has refused to share them with independent Cochrane researchers. Based on unpublished trials, Roche has claimed that Tamiflu reduces hospital admissions by 61%, secondary complications by 67%, and lower respiratory tract infections requiring antibiotics by 55%. Curiously, the company convinced the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to approve the drug for prevention of influenza complications, and the agency’s summary of product characteristics stated that lower respiratory tract complications were reduced from 12.7% to 8.6% (P = 0.001).
In contrast, the FDA sent Roche a warning letter that the company should stop claiming that Tamiflu reduces the severity and incidence of secondary infections, and it required Roche to print a disclaimer on the labels: ‘Tamiflu has not been proven to have a positive impact on the potential consequences (such as hospitalizations, mortality, or economic impact) of seasonal, avian, or pandemic influenza.’
Drummond Rennie, editor of JAMA, who, in his announcement for the first peer review congress, stated:
‘There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egoistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.’
The book goes on to list fines for other Big Pharma companies for fraud
A jury found that the company and its subsidiary Janssen had downplayed and hidden risks associated with its antipsychotic drug Risperdal (risperidone). The judge found nearly 240 000 violations under Arkansas’ Medicaid-fraud law.
Merck had failed to pay the appropriate rebates to Medicaid and other government healthcare programmes, and had also paid kickbacks to doctors and hospitals to induce them to prescribe various drugs.
Eli Lilly entered into a settlement with the Department of Justice concerning a wide- ranging, off-label marketing scheme for its top-selling antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa (olanzapine).
Abbott settled allegations of Medicaid fraud for the company’s illegal marketing of the epilepsy drug Depakote (valproate);
Here are a few more quotes from the book
The drug industry is unique in that it can make exploitation appear a noble purpose.
-Former medical director of Squibb at a US Senate hearing
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We have doctors from all over the world who drop into Australia on a first class all expenses paid junket/trip telling us how great a particular medicine is. If you read the small print on a pharmaceutical company flier you will find most references are ‘on file’ or have been presented at a midnight session of the Darfur Cardiologists Conference. As a medical director of a pharmaceutical company I learnt how to get articles published in journals with one journal promising publication if we purchased 2000 reprints at $10 each.
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The wooden spoon in futility I have seen so far goes to erlotinib for treatment of pancreatic cancer. Both the FDA and the EMA approved it, although it only prolongs life by 10 days, is toxic and will cost almost $500 000 for 1 year of life gained (10 days for each of 36 patients that aren’t even pleasant).
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If the American people knew some of the things that went on at the FDA, they’d never take anything but Bayer aspirin. -Len Lutwalk, FDA scientist
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It is really scaring that a survey showed that 70% of FDA scientists are not confident that products approved by the FDA are safe. And that 66% lack confidence in the FDA’s safety monitoring of marketed drugs. The citizens have a similar view. In a public poll, 76% worried that the FDA didn’t communicate safety issues effectively.
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A former FDA scientist, Ronald Kavanagh, spoke out about crimes and gangster methods at the agency:
While I was at FDA, drug reviewers were clearly told not to question drug companies and that our job was to approve drugs … If we asked questions that could delay or prevent a drug’s approval – which of course was our job as drug reviewers – management would reprimand us, reassign us, hold secret meetings about us, and worse. Obviously in such an environment, people will self-censor … Human studies are usually too short and the number of subjects in them too small to adequately characterize the most dangerous risks. That’s why even a single case has to be taken seriously … I frequently found companies submitting certain data to one place and other data to another place and safety information elsewhere so it could not all be pulled together and then coming in for a meeting to obtain an agreement and proposing that the safety issue is negligible … if reviewers say things that companies don’t like, they will complain about the reviewer or they will call upper management and have the reviewer removed or overruled. On one occasion, the company even told me they were going to call upper management to get a clear requirement for approval that they did not want to fulfill eliminated, which I then saw happen. On another occasion a company clearly stated in a meeting that they had ‘paid for an approval’ … Sometimes we were literally instructed to only read a 100–150 page summary and to accept drug company claims without examining the actual data, which on multiple occasions I found directly contradicted the summary document. Other times I was ordered not to review certain sections of the submission, but invariably that’s where the safety issues would be … FDA’s response to most expected risks is to deny them and wait until there is irrefutable evidence postmarketing, and then simply add a watered down warning in the labeling … When you do raise potential safety issues, the refrain that I heard repeatedly from upper management was‚‘where are the dead bodies in the street?’ Which I took to mean that we only do something if the press is making an issue of it … Later, I found that the FDA had internal documents that had the same conclusion [as] my analysis but they had been withheld from the advisory committee … After FDA management learned I had gone to Congress about certain issues, I found my office had been entered and my computer physically tampered with. I saw strange cursor movements on my computer when I was just sitting at my desk reading that I suspected was evidence of spying … The threats, however, can be much worse than prison. One manager threatened my children – who had just turned 4 and 7 years old – and in one large staff meeting, I was referred to as a ‘saboteur.’ Based on other things that happened and were said, I was afraid that I could be killed for talking to Congress and criminal investigators … I found evidence of insider trading of drug company stocks reflecting knowledge that likely only FDA management would have known. I believe I also have documentation of falsification of documents, fraud, perjury, and widespread racketeering, including witnesses tampering and witness retaliation … In fact, thanks in part to the Prescription Drug User Fee Act [in which drug companies pay for expedited reviews], thalidomide could not be stopped today.
Summary:
Please read the book. As new psychological operations come your way, be it monkeypox, avian flu or other fake news plandemics, remember that the entire industry is a gangster mob, that has bought media, academia, politicians, medical associations, universities, hospital administrators, doctors for one purpose: their own profit.
I also highly recommend “The Truth About The Drug Companies – How They Decieve Us And What To Do About It – by Marcia Angell, MD former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Another article that’s impossible to read because two columns are superposed on each other.
The green line suggests forwarded email source. Copy and paste original. If still a problem, reset the left and right columns.
Thank you, Henry. It was an email, but not forwarded, and I did copy and paste. Unfortunately I do not know how to reset columns, so dare not start attempting it!