Here we go again folks with more fraudulent behavior from four of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, they are; GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Schering -Plough. The report can be found @ Pharma Times .
Quoted From The Article:
"The drug industry has now become the biggest defrauder of the US government, surpassing defence, the long-time leader.
That is the claim of a study from the influential US consumer group Public Citizen, which found that pharmaceutical cases accounted for at least 25% of all federal False Claims Act payouts over the past decade, compared with 11% by the defence industry. The analysis looked at all major pharmaceutical company civil and criminal settlements on state and federal levels since 1991".
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Of the 165 pharmaceutical industry settlements comprising $19.8 billion in penalties during the past 20 years, 73 percent of the settlements (121) and 75 percent of the dollar amount ($14.8 billion) have occurred during the past five years.
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From Shearlingplowed Blog : "Many of the infractions, and the single largest category of financial penalties, stemmed from the practice of off-label promotion of pharmaceuticals -- the illegal promotion of a drug for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Off-label promotion can be prosecuted as a criminal offense because of the potential for serious adverse health consequences to patients from such promotional activities. Another major category of federal financial penalties was purposely overcharging for drugs under various federal programs, which constitutes a violation of the FCA"
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Just back in November Roche was fined for offering money to a nurse working at a undisclosed clinic. Kate Hagan from age.com writes "Drug company Roche has been fined $200,000 for offering to fund a nurse's position at a health service - depending on how many patients were treated with its hepatitis C drug Pegasys"The drug company has two fines under (two different occasions) the Medicines Australia code of conduct for the maximum of 200,000 dollars.
This summer a French doctor working as a consultant for "Human Genome Sciences Inc. was charged by the U.S. with insider-trading for allegedly tipping off a hedge fund about negative results of Albuferon drug trials."
In October Sam Waksal, the former CEO of ImClone Systems, whose insider trading lead to spending time in prison along with Martha Stewart, remember? Announced a new enterprise; "Waksal said his drug company Kadmon Pharmaceuticals has bought the privately held Three Rivers Pharmaceuticals, and that its treatments for hepatitis C, infections and cancer will be the backbone of his new enterprise".
Let's not forget the list published on the 384 doctors and healthcare professionals who were paid by pharmaceutical companies to promote their drugs. They "Drew Payments From Drug Companies" for the amount of no less then $100,000 published @ ProPublicas website: This list covered "Top Earners from 2009 and early 2010"
See the list
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Update From NPR on Dec 22 2010
Academic Docs Kept Speaking On Big Pharma's Dime, Despite Bans
Our friends at ProPublica combed their database of drug companies' disclosures to check up on the schools' performance and turned up quite a few violations. Stanford, which made a big deal a few years ago, of forbidding speaking gigs paid for by drugmakers had some high-profile scofflaws. For instance, Dr. Alan Yeung, vice chairman of Stanford’s department of medicine and chief of cardiovascular medicine, earned $53,000 from Eli Lilly last year and the first half of 2010. Child psychiatrist and professor emeritus Hans Steiner was paid $109,000 by Lilly, too. The basic problem for these speaking gigs remains company control. ProPublica rounds up the drugmakers' policies on the talks and they require the experts to use company-prepared materials. ProPublica also found problems at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Pennsylvania and University of Colorado, Denver.
Continue reading...........
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Is this how the game is played ? If so we should demand a payout for all incurring side effects from interferon, ya think ?
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