A VERY CORRUPT AND INFILTRATED FDA!
Friday, October 18, 2013 by: Ethan A.
Huff, staff writer
Tags: total corruption, drug
companies, FDA advisory panels.
(NaturalNews)
It is now an undeniable fact that the pharmaceutical industry weaseled its
way onto key U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panels, which
were instrumental in shaping the way drugs are safety tested and approved. According to The Washington Post (WP), a recent public
records request has revealed that drug companies purchased special access
onto these panels, where they were given the keys to the kingdom in swaying
decision-makers about official drug policy.
Based
on critical information gathered from hundreds of leaked emails,
pharmaceutical companies have doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars over
the years to attend private meetings with the FDA, many of which were geared
towards the regulation and approval of painkiller drugs. Drug companies would reportedly shell out upwards of $25,000
or more per meeting to have their voices heard, a small price to pay for
direct access to the $9 billion American painkiller market.
According
to the WP, officials from both the FDA and the U.S. National Institutes of
Health (NIH) would regularly meet with pharmaceutical representatives in
private to discuss regulatory protocols, co-write scientific papers and
collaborate on various ways to help streamline the drug approval process. And the only parties who actually paid to attend such
meetings were the drug companies, a fact that one official from the NIH
expressed serious concerns about in an email, referring to the whole scheme
as a "pay to play process."
Others
who have since reviewed the emails agree, noting that, while the FDA did not
necessarily benefit financially from these private meetings, many FDA
officials went on to work as pharmaceutical consultants. In other words, FDA staff who agreed to grease the palms of
the drug industry during these private meetings were later rewarded with
high-paying positions in the drug industry. This is just one glaring example
of how the line between the regulator (FDA) and the regulated (pharmaceutical
companies) has been blurred beyond recognition.
"These
e-mails help explain the disastrous decisions the FDA's analgesic division
has made over the last 10 years," said Craig Mayton, the Columbus, Ohio,
attorney who made the public records request to the University of Washington,
to the WP. "Instead of protecting the public
health, the FDA has been allowing the drug companies to pay for a seat at a
small table where all the rules were written."
Big
Pharma, FDA corruption runs deepIt is no longer a conspiracy theory, then,
that the drug industry owns the FDA. In
this particular case, it was two academics by the names of Robert Dworkin,
from the University of Rochester, and Dennis Turk, from the University of
Washington, who allegedly orchestrated the painkiller plot. But there have
been many other plots with the same ultimate end, a fact that NaturalNews and
many others in the so-called "alternative" media have been shouting
from the rooftops for years, but that the mainstream media has ignored, until
now.
"Shame
on the FDA and NIH for sending representatives to this panel, cooked up by
two unethical professors and their drug company cronies," wrote one WP
commenter about the scandal. It
should be noted that FDA officials actively participated in the painkiller
scheme, all the while knowing full well that the private meetings they
attended were hatched by Big Pharma. "Congress
should come down hard on both agencies for participating in what was clearly
pay-to-play, with awful consequences for the health of many suffering
Americans."
 -Present FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg-(She and husband Philip have an estimated networth of $50 million dollars from having relations within the medical industry and from medical stock)
Such consequences
include a flood of dangerous analgesic drugs to the market that were approved
based on questionable or flawed safety studies. According to MedpageToday.com, the drug industry was
successful during these meetings in convincing the FDA to adopt an
"enriched enrollment" guidance for safety trials that eliminated
patients who experienced adverse reactions. These and other modifications made it much easier for drugs
to be declared safe and effective, and thus gain rapid approval.
Sources for this article include:
http://www.washingtonpost.com
http://www.medpagetoday.com
http://seattletimes.com
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