What would you say if a pollster were to ask how you felt about big pharma (AKA the drug industry)? If you’re like two-thirds of Americans, you’d tell them in no uncertain terms that your view is either totally or somewhat negative. [Gallup poll, August 2021] That’s a precipitous decline from the 51% harboring positive feelings in 2020.
Could it be that the public finally recognizes how they’ve been played? Maybe they heard about how the two vaccine makers, Moderna and Pfizer, are raking in profits of 67% as they prey on hysterical and rich governments around the world. Pfizer has just predicted COVID sales of $36 billion for 2021, yet the gaping maw of billionaire investors and executives is calling for more. To satisfiy that demand they took the usual capitalist route — raising the price of each vaccine dose from $19 to $24, estimated to be twenty-four times the cost of production. All this unbridled greed has one major unfortunate side-effect — the inability of low-income countries like Nigeria to afford to vaccinate its people (only 3.5% of Nigerians are fully vaccinated).
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“Big Pharma’s business model—receive billions in public investments, charge exorbitant prices for life-saving medicines, pay little tax—is gold dust for wealthy investors and corporate executives but devastating for global public health.” [American Friends Service Committee 9/15/2021 |
It seems clear to a growing number of Americans that billion dollar pay days for pharma oligarchs and the finance interests that control them are taking their toll on the health and welfare of the entire world.
Hard to argue with an American public, 80% of whom believe that Pharma’s introduction of pricey meds, including vaccines, is a criminal offense akin to highway robbery. Particularly when you consider that around three-quarters of the drugs big Pharma churns out are “me-too” drugs (structurally similar to existing drugs with only minor differences). Big pharma’s free ride doesn’t stop there. Never mentioned in the fawning mainstream media whose profits rise and fall with pharma’s, vaccine makers get a free pass when it comes to taking responsibility for their “oopsie” moments. That’s right Pharma is in a liability-free zone when it comes to producing vaccines — immune from having to pay for their mistakes.
It all started back in 1955 when a small vaccine maker, Cutter Laboratories, received a federal license to manufacture the Salk polio vaccine. Although federal regulators were notified early in the process that the vaccine was causing test monkeys to get paralyzed, the warnings were ignored. Cutter went on its merry way producing vaccine doses containing live polio virus. The toll was breathtaking — 200,000 children received a dose containing live polio virus, 40,000 cases of polio resulted, 200 children were left with varying degrees of paralysis and 10 children died of polio. [Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, March, 2006]
Lawsuits rained down like snowflakes. One, Gottsdanker v. Cutter Laboratories, made it to the California Supreme Court, where the justices upheld a jury ruling that Cutter Laboratories was not negligent but breached an “implied warranty” that its product was safe. On this basis, the Supreme Court held that the company was financially responsible for the harm the vaccine caused. Pharma found itself in most unfamiliar territory — having to pay for the harm it caused.
A brief coda to this story of sloppy oversight — In 1974, Cutter was purchased by an even more corrupt drug company, Bayer. In the late 1970s through 1980, Bayer along with its partners in crime produced blood products for hemophiliacs tainted with the HIV virus. For twenty years, Bayer faced a tsunami of lawsuits.
Something had to be done. Pharma had two choices. Pour money — lots of it — into refining their R&D, improving their manufacturing processes and oversight or spread around some “filthy lucre” to their ‘friends’ in Congress, in regulatory agencies like the HHS [Health and Human Services] and the NIH [National Health Institutes] and if need be all the way up the food chain to the executive branch.
Bribes being part of Pharma’s business model, it doesn’t take the Delphic Oracle to guess what route they took. In 1986, campaign coffers overflowing with Pharma bribes, Congress rolled up its collective sleeves and passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act shielding vaccine makers from being sued over vaccine injuries.. The purpose of the law was to give vaccine makers a free pass over ““unavoidable, adverse side effects,” design defects and virtually every other error in producing their products. A liability exemption no other product manufacturer was ever lucky enough to procure.
Taking forgiveness to celestial heights, the act set up a special government court to hear vaccine injury claims and award compensation from the federal kitty so that pharma could keep its stash. Killing two birds with one stone, the act shields vaccine makers from both liability (money) and unfavorable publicity (reputation).
Sixteen years later, in 1992, six-month-old Hannah Bruesewitz sustained permanent injuries two hours after receiving a dose of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine (DTP). (Six years later, Wyeth took that vaccine off the market) Hannah’s parents sued the drug maker Wyeth arguing that Wyeth was responsible for their child’s injuries for their negligence in not developing a safer vaccine. Wyeth’s answer was a doozy. First, they complained that state juries had no right to adjudicate injury claims. They followed up with the standard threat big pharma uses to cover a whole litany of misdeeds. The same defense in fact that the archetypal school yard bully uses. If pharma is in danger of having to pay for its screw ups, it will take its toys and flee. If history has taught us anything it’s that the Supreme Court (where the case landed) is just as spineless and cowed by the money and power of the drug industry as every other branch of government. In a 6-2 decision they ruled that drug products unlike other products are not subject to liability claims. A classic case of prioritizing financial incentives over the need to protect public health and rewarding the evildoers. Fourteen years later, in a stunning display of profiteering the crooks at Wyeth rewarded themselves with a big pay day by selling the company to an even bigger crime family Pfizer.
But that isn’t the end of this sordid tale. Taking advantage of public hysteria over the mounting numbers of sick and dying Covid victims, vaccine execs and their investors saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop a vaccine that would make them billionaires overnight. But the next objective was to safeguard their windfall. What of the people who might claim they were harmed by the vaccine? Sure they had the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act but would it hold up three decades later? No, they needed something bullet proof. They found it in an obscure 2005 law, The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act [PREPA] that empowered the HHS secretary to give vaccine makers an impermeable shield against any sort of liability in a “public emergency.”
As the plutocrats at pharma saw COVID as their ticket to Nirvana, pharma lobbyists roared into action. In 2019 Trump’s HHS secretary declared a public health emergency His democratic successor was equally all in. When the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was implicated in a severe blood clotting disorder that resulted in several fatalities, the PREP Act prevented victims and their families from seeking redress in the courts.
For big Pharma just another day at the office: overcharging the U.S. and other rich countries to the tune of $41 billion while at the same time demanding and getting over $100 billion in subsidies from these same countries, using intellectual property laws to keep one-half of the world’s people from getting vaccinated, paying an outrageously small amount of U.S. federal taxes on billions in profits and demanding and getting total immunity for its products.
A liability shield for drug companies is the ultimate ‘get out of jail free’ card for Pharma execs. But that’s not the only reward for their skullduggery. Members of the criminogenic drug cartel have the last word when it comes to ‘following the science,’ consigning public health to the machinations of con artists like Albert Bourla, Chairman and CEO of Pfizer Drug Corporation and his cronies. As public health suffers, the fortunes of the drug chieftains rise. Where has that left us? In a universe where not one pharma billionaire (and there are nine newly minted ones as a result of COVID) has to worry about losing a dime for product deficiencies. In the oligarchy that has replaced American democracy they’re legally immune from accountability for their missteps. Behold a system where public health takes a back seat to profit margins.
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