(Part II) The FDA is a clearing house for Food and Drug Corruption

Saturday, November 20, 2010 by: Paul Fassa
Tags: FDA, corruption, health news

(NewsTarget) Anywhere from a third to one-half or more FDA internal committee members have Big Pharma or Agribusiness financial ties. Often, key industry executives act as FDA consultants. These are classic foxes guarding hen house scenarios.

Add this to FDA`s user fee policy, where Big Pharma is allowed to fund their own drug trials after paying the FDA. This financial codependency promotes more manipulation of already faulty "evidence based medicine" tests and trials.

Meanwhile, empirical evidence of clinical healing from alternative methods is dismissed as insufficient and anecdotal. This hypocrisy is supported by a mass media and press that takes in lots of Big Pharma advertising money while relying on industry press releases for quick and easy news items.

False Medical Reports

"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine."

That quote is from Dr. Marcia Angell, MD, author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It and the first woman editor of America`s most prestigious medical journal.

Medical journal reports are essentially paid ad copy for drug companies. Many reports are written up by ghost writers who work for PR firms while doctors or PhD scientists sign off on them. Both ghost writers and signers are nicely rewarded.

Universities are no longer disinterested third parties for research. The Bayh-Dole Act of the 1980s has created huge conflicts of interest in this arena. Those universities rely on Big Pharma for huge funding grants. They tend to honor that money with their research results, ignoring negatives and pumping up positives.

Several researchers in top universities have Big Pharma financial ties with stock options, bonuses, or job offers. All this is known as checkbook research. Researchers who don`t follow along risk losing Big Pharma funding for the university and wind up getting fired.

Direct Drug Sales

In addition to those glossy magazine drug ads, TV advertising has become the direct to consumer programming of AMA medical clientele. There are only two developed nations in the world that allow pharmaceutical drug advertising on TV: New Zealand and the USA.

Attractive TV commercials lure patients while doctors are often virtually bribed by pharmaceutical sales reps to push their company`s drugs. All of this marketing occurs before complete testing or after bogus test results.

The real testing occurs during the first several years of successful marketing (ka-ching) while the drug company takes in high prices with its exclusive patent. Dangerous drugs are recalled only after thousands of deaths from FDA approved drugs occur.

The Latest Racket

Lately record fines and legal awards have been imposed on Big Pharma. Those fines and penalties are increasing. But Big Pharma has the solution: vaccines.

More vaccines are falsely promoted for imaginary diseases. The same corrupt research and media coverage used for drugs occurs with vaccines. Most large pharmaceutical firms are cashing in on vaccines for two major reasons: Lower overhead with guaranteed sales, and almost no direct liability.

Vaccines are cheaper to produce quickly with FDA approval. Whole governments can be coerced into buying large lots of vaccines up front. The USA government`s vaccine injury court system filters out most vaccine injury claims while paying the few who get through with government funds. Drug firms are mostly protected from paying vaccine injury claims!

Medicine has become as lucrative and deadly as war.

Sources included for this article:

Exposing Conflict of Interests at the FDA http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/a...

How Drug Companies Deceive Doctors http://www.newswithviews.com/Ellison/shane20...

Ghost writing for pharma "research"
http://www.theintentionexperiment.com/dirty-...

Checkbook Research http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12800894

Hype in Medical Reporting by Diana Zuckerman http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1120

More Crony Capitalism at the FDA http://www.anh-usa.org/more-crony-capitalism...

The Great Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Advertising Con http://www.organicconsumers.org/politics/dru...

About the author

Paul Fassa is dedicated to warning others about the current corruption of food and medicine and guiding others toward a direction for better health with no restrictions on health freedom. You can visit his blog at http://healthmaven.blogspot.com