British drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline is embroiled in a corruption and bribery scandal in China when authorities reported that GSK executives admitted to funnelling bribes to Chinese doctors and officials through 700 travel agencies and consultancies over six years. The Chinese government have detained four senior GSK executives and barred its vice-president for finance in China, Steve Nechelput, from leaving the country. GSK isn't the only multinational drug company involved in nefarious dealings. Investigators visited the offices of the Belgian drug maker UCB seeking information on compliance. The US-based Merck and Japan's Novartis are also being probed for price-fixing.
One western expert on China's healthcare system said health officials may have deemed GSK arrogant for exporting its drugs at artificially inflated prices. "For drugs, especially oncology drugs, there's this huge inflation of costs," said the expert, who requested anonymity to avoid reprisals from drug companies. "I think what's happened is the government said, 'we want to have these drugs, and you will give them to us at a decent price'."
However, the underhand manner that Big Pharma does business does not stop at the Great Wall of China. Drugs companies publish only a fraction of their results and keep much of the information to themselves, but regulators want to ban the practice. If companies published all of their clinical trials data, independent scientists could reanalyse their results and check companies' claims about the safety and efficacy of drugs. Drugs companies would be compelled to release all of their data, including results that show drugs do not work or cause dangerous side-effects. A recent review of medical research estimated that only half of all clinical trials were published in full, and that positive results were twice as likely to be published than negative ones. Certainly for researchers, doctors and patients a very common sense proposal.
The pharmaceutical industry, nevertheless, has "mobilised" an army of patient groups to lobby against these plans to protect its profits. Two large trade groups, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), are engaged in a campaign designed to to spur " patient groups to express concern about the risk to public health by non-scientific re-use of data". Translated, that means patient groups go into bat for the industry by raising fears that if full results from drug trials are published, the information might be misinterpreted, cause health scares and risk breaching patient-doctor confidentiality.
Tim Reed, of Health Action International explains “...patient groups who are in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry will go into battle for them. There's a hidden agenda here. The patient groups will say they think it's a great idea to keep clinical trials data secret. Why would they do that? They would do that because they are fronts for the pharmaceutical industry.”
One western expert on China's healthcare system said health officials may have deemed GSK arrogant for exporting its drugs at artificially inflated prices. "For drugs, especially oncology drugs, there's this huge inflation of costs," said the expert, who requested anonymity to avoid reprisals from drug companies. "I think what's happened is the government said, 'we want to have these drugs, and you will give them to us at a decent price'."
However, the underhand manner that Big Pharma does business does not stop at the Great Wall of China. Drugs companies publish only a fraction of their results and keep much of the information to themselves, but regulators want to ban the practice. If companies published all of their clinical trials data, independent scientists could reanalyse their results and check companies' claims about the safety and efficacy of drugs. Drugs companies would be compelled to release all of their data, including results that show drugs do not work or cause dangerous side-effects. A recent review of medical research estimated that only half of all clinical trials were published in full, and that positive results were twice as likely to be published than negative ones. Certainly for researchers, doctors and patients a very common sense proposal.
The pharmaceutical industry, nevertheless, has "mobilised" an army of patient groups to lobby against these plans to protect its profits. Two large trade groups, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), are engaged in a campaign designed to to spur " patient groups to express concern about the risk to public health by non-scientific re-use of data". Translated, that means patient groups go into bat for the industry by raising fears that if full results from drug trials are published, the information might be misinterpreted, cause health scares and risk breaching patient-doctor confidentiality.
Tim Reed, of Health Action International explains “...patient groups who are in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry will go into battle for them. There's a hidden agenda here. The patient groups will say they think it's a great idea to keep clinical trials data secret. Why would they do that? They would do that because they are fronts for the pharmaceutical industry.”
1 comment:
Big Pharma will never learn as there is far too much profit to make to bother about those that they are supposed to help. Indeed the $3 billion-plus out-of-court settlement of GSK in the USA last year was a mere expense not a punishment as they were reputed to have fraudulently sold nearly $30 billion of harmful drugs, even though they knew the side effects through their own research results. Indeed as big pharma are known to have a big profit mark-up exceeding 50%, even after paying out the $3 billion, they would ban I the order of £11 billion. And all through fraud that has now been apparently legalised looking at the paybacks that fraudulent trading allows.
A overview why they are like this and will never change is http://foolscrow.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/return-to-nuremberg-big-pharma-must-answer-for-crimes-against-humanity/
It makes interesting reading.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
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