Merck / Johnson & Johnson/ Lilly-Zyprexa: $690 Million settlement / a Flowering of Diabetes Drugs Fri, 10 Jun 2005 A cluster of news reports about three pillars of the pharmaceutical industry– Merck, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson–leave no doubt that this industry has shown its disregard for the welfare…
Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2005 pp. 111-124 Screening for Mental Illness: The Merger of Eugenics and the Drug Industry Vera Hassner Sharav, MLS New York, NY The implementation by the President’s New Freedom Commission (NFC) to screen the entire United States population – children…
Randomized Controlled Trials: Evidence Biased Psychiatry By David Healy, MD MRCPsych Introduction A new drug gets introduced to the market. It has been approved after stringent scrutiny by the FDA, which requires ever more convincing evidence that it works and that its safe. The new treatment will always cost more…
Superiority of Zyprexa (Olanzapine) Challenged Mon, 1 Dec 2003 “The profound issue in health care is do we pay anything — regardless of the price — for a statistically significant benefit?” A major 12 month randomized study compared the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of Eli Lilly’s $3.7 billion blockbuster schizophrenia…
A Taxpayer-Funded Clinical Trial Registry Exists! Thu, 6 Oct 2005 A former FDA medical officer reports: A Taxpayer-Funded Clinical Trials Registry and Results Database: It already exists within the US Food and Drug Administration. But the agency keeps the vital information about drug safety secret and inaccessible. So, all the…
Cong. to act on GAO Finding: Families Give Up Kids to Get Treatment Tue, 29 Apr 2003 A report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) confirms that draconian state policies are causing families to break up when parents across America are forced to give up custody of their children in…
The Facts about Medicare “Wider Choices in Drug Benefits" Thu, June 16, 2005 The New York Times reports: “The expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs is President Bush’s most significant achievement in domestic policy. He plans to emphasize it at two events this week, on Thursday in Washington and…
Protecting Human Subjects in Research: Are Current Safeguards Adequate? AHRP Testimony submitted to Congressional Committee April 23, 2002 Vera Hassner Sharav, President, and John H. Noble, Jr., Ph.D., steering committee member, The Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), before the Subcommittee on Public Health, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, &…
Glaxo chief: “Our drugs do not work on most patients” Mon, 8 Dec 2003 Dr. Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Britain’s giant pharmaceutical company, acknowledged at a scientific meeting in London that fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually…
Cash Interests Taint Drug Advice – NATURE / Death a Risk of Antipsychotics – AP Sun, 23 Oct 2005 An investigation by the journal, NATURE (the largest of its kind) reveals that not only do conflicts of interest taint the conduct and outcome of clinical trials, the authors who formulate…
August 7, 2002 University of California Seeks to Ease Curbs on Patient Protection in Research – LA Times FYI Thanks to a series of articles, in the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, the public has been made aware about the back-door efforts to pass a bill in California…
Merck Baby Vaccines Not Pure – LAT/ FDA Advisory-Crestor / Zyprexa Lawsuit charges Lilly concealed Diabetes risk Fri, 11 Mar 2005 The FDA’s failure to carry out its watchdog responsibility to protect the public from unsafe drugs, has encouraged the pharmaceutical industry to conceal the risks and deceive the public….
