The company allegedly paid off doctors to illicitly prescribe the drug outside the bounds of what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows. While the agreed-upon settlement was not an official admission of guilt, it does suggest that AstraZeneca knew it would lose the case and thus decided to cut its losses.
This type of thing happens all the time with Big Pharma, which is notorious for pushing the off-label prescription of its drugs to boost profits. AstraZeneca is no different, and even went a step further by fraudulently stealing millions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare and Medicaid.
The FDA had only approved Seroquel as a treatment for psychotic disorders, specifically short-term treatments of schizophrenia, bipolar mania, and bipolar depression. AstraZeneca went beyond this, according to the government, by lobbing kickbacks at doctors to prescribe the drug for many other conditions.
These off-label conditions included aggression, Alzheimer's disease, anger management, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dementia, depression, mood disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and sleeplessness.
AstraZeneca also treated the elderly, children, veterans, and prison inmates as human "guinea pigs," stated the then-acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
"Under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, pharmaceutical firms must specify the intended uses of a medicine in its new drug application," reported ABC News at the time.
"Before a drug is approved, the FDA determines that it is safe and effective for the use proposed by the company. Once approved, the drug may not be marketed or promoted for off-label uses."
Letting corrupt drug companies inject you with poison is utter foolishness
Just like the company is doing with Chinese virus jabs, AstraZeneca made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of Seroquel for uses other than those for which the FDA issued approval. Consequently, the company was forced to pay out $520 million in damages, $302 million of which went directly to the federal government.
This is nothing compared to what AstraZeneca raked in from the illegal sales of Seroquel, meaning the federal government basically received a $320 million kickback from the company in exchange for this mere slap on the wrist.
"These were not victimless crimes – illegal acts by pharmaceutical companies and false claims against Medicare and Medicaid can put the public health at risk, corrupt medical decisions by health care providers, and take billions of dollars directly out of taxpayers' pockets," stated then-Attorney General Eric Holder at a news conference.
AstraZeneca officially denied the allegations, though Glenn Engelmann, the company's general counsel, stated that AstraZeneca "takes its obligations very seriously under its agreements with the government."
"The company is committed to meeting the expectations and obligations of a leading biopharmaceutical company, while continuing to provide valuable medicines to millions of patients," Engelmann added.
Harvard Medical School clinical instructor John Abramson authored a book at that time called "Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine" that talked all about how fines like this one are "chump change" for big pharmaceutical firms, which make billions illegally marketing and selling drugs.
Still, one would think that because all this is routine practice people would reconsider trusting the drug industry to "treat" them for illness – especially when the treatment is experimental and injected straight into the body, which is the case for Wuhan flu shots.
More related news about the endless corruption of Big Pharma can be found at Corruption.news.
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