Tag: big pharma

Pharma PR Executive Leaked Insider Criticism of NIH Vaccine Injury Center to New York Times — Paper Neglected to Mention His Industry Ties

A pharmaceutical industry public relations (PR) executive who serves on an influential National Institutes of Health (NIH) board and is an academic colleague of Dr. Anthony Fauci leaked criticism of the agency’s new vaccine injury clinic to The New York Times — which reported the criticism without disclosing the PR executive’s industry ties, according to The Disinformation Chronicle.

Jack Leslie, a senior adviser and former chairman of Weber Shandwick, the world’s second-largest public relations firm, chairs the NIH Clinical Center Research Hospital Board. Weber Shandwick represents several major pharmaceutical companies.

The hospital board oversees the NIH Clinical Center in Maryland, which will house the agency’s new Vaccinology and Immunology Center (VIC). The center will focus on researching and treating vaccine injuries. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced its launch earlier this month.

Last week, the Times reported that the NIH hospital board unanimously approved a statement criticizing the new center and Kennedy, accusing him of undermining public trust in the hospital’s work.

According to The Disinformation Chronicle, Leslie leaked the statement to Times health policy correspondent, Sheryl Gay Stolberg. The newspaper published her story within hours but did not disclose Leslie’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Paul D. Thacker, investigative reporter and author of The Disinformation Chronicle, told The Defender that he believes the Times published the story to discredit Kennedy and people who say vaccines have injured them.

“Everyone knows the pharma industry hates RFK Jr. So, it’s beyond perplexing that a New York Times reporter saw ‘news’ when PR man Jack Leslie said something denigrating about him, and spit on people harmed by their products. That’s what Big Pharma pays Weber Shandwick to do,” Thacker said.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, defended the new center in a statement to The Defender.

The VIC “reflects the Trump Administration’s commitment to restoring gold-standard science, transparency, and accountability to our public health institutions,” the spokesperson said.

“This work will help ensure that people who experience health problems following vaccination are taken seriously and studied with the same scientific rigor applied to other medical conditions,” the spokesperson added.

Pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, who attended the center’s launch event earlier this month, called the VIC “long overdue.” She accused Leslie of using his “PR skills” and “background doing public relations for multiple vaccine manufacturers” to undermine an initiative intended to study and help people who have been injured by vaccines.

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Nearly 40% of FDA Advisory Meetings Included Patient Representatives With Ties to Pharma

Nearly 40% of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee meetings held between 2013 and 2022 included patient or consumer representatives affiliated with organizations funded by pharmaceutical companies, according to a study published this month in Health Affairs Scholar.

FDA advisory committees assess the safety and effectiveness of drugs, including vaccines, and make recommendations on whether the FDA should approve them.

Researchers Genevieve Kanter, Ph.D., and Toni Mankowitz of the University of Southern California found that 38% of the meetings included representatives of industry-funded advocacy organizations.

In 11% of meetings, representatives attended on behalf of organizations funded in part by the manufacturer whose drug the FDA was evaluating.

“These prevalence rates show that these organizational relationships extend beyond isolated cases and signal a broader problem warranting FDA policy attention,” the researchers wrote.

According to the FDA website, the agency has about 50 technical and scientific advisory committees and panels. Members include “science-oriented” professionals, including doctors, researchers, biologists, chemists, statisticians and others, selected for their expertise on a specific committee’s function and topic area.

In addition, the website states, “each committee typically includes a consumer representative and an industry representative and, based on the meeting topic, a patient representative who provides the patient or caregiver experience for a particular disease, condition, or medical product.”

According to the study, which focused only on potential conflicts of interest among consumer and patient representatives:

“Although the FDA has enacted policies to curb conflicts of interest common among its scientific members, it has paid less attention to potential conflicts arising from patient and consumer representatives who have ties to organizations financially supported by pharmaceutical companies.”

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“Ask Your Doctor:” The Media’s Most Dangerous Tagline

Travelling to the US never fails to put me in touch with a part of American culture that I find particularly fascinating, but disturbing. Drugs. Drugs and more Drugs. I’m talking about the in-your-face, 24/7, marketing of the newest, most expensive pharmaceuticals on the planet.

All in the name of health, of course. 

You might argue, but so what? Every other consumer product gets advertised in the US—almost everywhere, to everyone, perhaps except tobacco. And lots of those things are bad for you too, such as junk food, alcohol, and gambling. 

However, drugs are different, and I often find myself experiencing a kind of vertigo as I stare, enthralled, at all the incessant drug advertising from screens everywhere I look—in airports, hotel lounges, restaurants, or bars. 

The plotlines are predictable. A slick 60 seconds and we see the fate of worried people suffering some sort of condition “ask their doctor” about Drug X, and soon the new prescription is magically transforming their lives. They turn into bliss and smiles as they romp their way through meadows of wildflowers while, sotto voce, we catch strange murmurs of liver failure and premature death. 

I find myself absorbed in the ads as if they are cultural artifacts of a strange race. Most of the Americans I know seem to be pretty healthy people, but any newcomer confronting all the US screens for the first time might conclude one thing: “Man, these people must be really sick.” 

They are sick, but not in the way of being physically sick. Sick as in showing all the adverse effects of living in a polluted information ecosystem where toxic levels of drug propaganda drift through the airwaves as freely as exhaust engulfs a freeway. 

Americans are so immersed in the smog of commercially-sponsored drug information that they might forget they used to live in a world where serious criticisms of drug industry products or behaviour were routinely reported on mainstream TV. Those halcyon days are over. 

The Land of the Free means drugmakers can, with near impunity, push their expensive products for Crohn’s disease, Colitis, or psoriasis—serious obesity, schizophrenia, and major depression with the most outlandish of claims wrapped up in crafty but misleading narratives. Drugs get advertised, and the stuff between the ads (ie: the programming, the sitcoms, and the news) won’t touch the subject with a ten-foot pole lest they upset the money chain. Meanwhile, everyone thinks this is normal? Wow. 

Not everyone. Earlier this summer, the consumer group US Public Citizen put out a petition urging the FDA to ban Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. They listed the usual reasons why DTCA is so toxic to consumers: Emotional manipulation, misleading benefit and risk information, inappropriate prescribing and overdiagnosis, the erosion of the patient-physician relationship, the promotion of low-value medications, and overall economic harm. Amen to all that.

What it all adds up to is a polluted environment in which careful and appropriate pharmaceutical use doesn’t happen. Americans are paying the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, yet also have the most profligate use of those drugs. 

The pollution of the airwaves by Pharma propaganda is precisely the reason every other country in the world (except tiny New Zealand) bans Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA). The rest of the civilized world looked at DTCA, recognized it as a predatory assault on public health, and banned it decades ago.

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When Did Obesity Become a Drug Deficiency?

Look at almost any photograph of an American crowd taken 60 years ago. It can be a baseball game, a high school graduation, a beach, an airport terminal, a factory floor, or simply people walking down a city street. Something is immediately noticeable to modern eyes, although almost nobody in the photograph would have considered it remarkable: most people are relatively thin.

They did not have continuous glucose monitors, smartphone applications that counted calories and macronutrients, wearable devices reminding them to stand, boutique fitness studios, bariatric surgery centers, or medications capable of producing 15 or 20 percent reductions in body weight. They were not necessarily more virtuous than we are, and they certainly did not possess superior genes. They lived in a different metabolic environment.

The data backs up what we see in those old photos. In the early 1960s, about 13 percent of American adults were obese. By August 2023, that number had jumped to 40.3 percent, with another 31.7 percent considered overweight and nearly one in ten classified as severely obese.[1] This trend isn’t just in the United States. A huge study of over 220 million people from 200 countries found a dramatic global rise in obesity between 1990 and 2022.[2] Our genes haven’t changed much in that time. Something else has.

We’re now at a turning point in medicine. Faced with one of the biggest and fastest changes in human health, we’re treating the results as a condition that needs lifelong medication. The newest drugs are very effective, and that’s important to recognize. Semaglutide and tirzepatide have led to weight loss that older nonsurgical treatments rarely matched.[3,4] Semaglutide has also reduced the risk of major heart problems in people with overweight or obesity and heart disease who didn’t have diabetes.[5] Tirzepatide has greatly improved sleep apnea in people with obesity.[6] These results are significant, and these drugs are much more than cosmetic weight-loss aids.

That’s why we need to look closely at what’s happening now. The problem isn’t that these drugs don’t work; they clearly do. The real concern is that they might work so well that we stop asking why so many people need them in the first place. We could be seeing a major medical breakthrough, but at the same time, we might be accepting that the effects of an unhealthy environment should just be managed with medication. The real question isn’t whether these “GLP-1” drugs are effective. It’s whether their success is making us stop looking for the root causes of the obesity epidemic.

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Why Are PFAS Still Used in Drugs When Alternatives Exist?

When you hear “PFAS,” you probably think of nonstick cookware, waterproof jackets, or contaminated drinking water. You probably don’t think of the prescription sitting in your medicine cabinet. Yet fluorinated compounds classified as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are built into a surprisingly wide range of approved pharmaceuticals, often not because they’re essential to how those medicines treat disease, but because they make the drug easier to formulate.

If fluorine serves the manufacturer’s design goals more than the patient’s therapeutic needs, then every PFAS-containing medicine that passes through your body and into the water supply deserves a harder look, particularly now that researchers have mapped out whether effective alternatives already exist. An analysis published in Sustainable Chemistry and Pharmacy took on exactly that question, and the answer should change how we think about drug design going forward.1

PFAS-Free Drug Alternatives Already Exist Across Nearly Every Medical Category

For the study, researchers investigated whether PFAS-containing medicines are truly necessary or whether practical alternatives already exist.2 They reviewed approved active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the part of a medicine that produces its therapeutic effect, and identified 111 PFAS-containing medicines used in humans and 28 used in veterinary medicine.3

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“Very Concerning Safety Issues”: Trump’s mRNA-Skeptic FDA Drug Chief Was Mysteriously Fired – Right Before This Drug Was Approved

Within three months of firing Tracy Beth Høeg, its top drug regulator, the FDA had approved the first mRNA flu shot, cleared a Sanofi diabetes treatment for children that she had held up, and approved a twice-rejected melanoma drug whose maker went to the White House.

“I’m worried about approvals that we’ve seen recently, like the mRNA influenza vaccine,” Høeg told journalist Paul Thacker in an interview posted Wednesday, citing “very concerning safety issues.“

Of the melanoma drugmaker’s White House meeting, she said: “I guess that’s what you do now if you’re angry that your product is not approved. One has to wonder, is it approved based on the data or do they just know the right people?”

Høeg still doesn’t know who ordered her firing. When agency lawyers came to her office on May 15, three days after Commissioner Marty Makary was pushed out, she refused to resign. The lawyers told her the order came from “someone way above their pay grade.”

The person who supposedly wrote her termination memo denies writing it or ever seeing it, she says. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. only learned of the firing after she was gone, the New York Times reported.

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Pharma Spent Record $456.9 Million Last Year on Lobbying — With No Signs of Slowing Down

Big Pharma set a new record for lobbying spending in 2025 — and 2026 is shaping up to be another year of big spending, as the industry seeks to influence U.S. healthcare policy.

The pharmaceutical and health industry combined spent $456.9 million on lobbying expenses in 2025, according to OpenSecrets, up 16.7% from 2024. According to The Boston Globe (citing STAT), it was the largest-ever single-year increase in lobbying spending.

This spending was part of what OpenSecrets called a “record” $868 million in lobbying outlays by the healthcare sector in 2025.

Big Pharma’s leading trade group — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) — led the way, spending nearly $38 million on lobbying last year, a 22% increase from 2024, according to Politico. PhRMA was joined by “nine of the 13 U.S. drugmakers on the Fortune 500,” who reported “their highest spending in at least a decade” on lobbying.

There are no signs of a slowdown. OpenSecrets data show the pharmaceutical industry has reported $245.7 million in lobbying expenses so far this year, part of the $459.3 million the health sector overall has spent in 2026.

PhRMA spent a reported $19.8 million in lobbying expenses in 2026, ranking third among business and trade organizations this year — a position it also held in 2025, when it spent $38.19 million.

Among drugmakers, Eli Lilly has spent over $7 million on lobbying this year. Pfizer has spent $6.62 million, and Merck has spent $6.58 million.

According to OpenSecrets, PhRMA’s record spending bucked the overall trend, in which “some of Washington’s biggest spenders, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Realtors, cut back from their 2024 lobbying expenditures.”

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American MAID: New York Issued About 20 Lethal Prescriptions in Just the First Month of Its Assisted-Suicide Law

New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act has been in effect for a little over a month, and the state still will not say how many people used it.

However, Columbia bioethicist David Hoffman, who works with hospitals and groups implementing the statute, told the New York Sun that he estimates about 20 prescriptions for life-ending drugs have already gone out.

That figure comes from conversations with doctors, not an official Health Department count.

Physicians must report when they write a prescription, but they do not have to say whether the patient took it.

“The state will have the data on a rolling basis. It’s an after-the-fact analysis,” Hoffman told the paper.

The law took effect August 5, after Governor Kathy Hochul signed it in February.

New York is now the 14th U.S. jurisdiction with legalized assisted suicide.

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FDA Should Demand Proof, Not Just Protein, for Duchenne

On microdystrophin, the FDA is doing what the accelerated-approval standard has always required: asking that a biomarker be shown to predict real benefit before it is trusted.

Much of the commentary around REGENXBIO’s RGX-202 has framed the FDA’s stance as regulatory inconsistency, arguing that the agency is holding one sponsor to a standard it waived for another. But the question before the FDA is simpler: whether microdystrophin expression is actually strong enough to predict clinical benefit.

The charge of inconsistency does not survive contact with the record. And it is worth noticing that its loudest version comes from a sponsor whose commercial position gives it every reason to want the bar set lower.

Nor is REGENXBIO alone in having a commercial interest in how low that bar is set. Solid Biosciences is pursuing the same accelerated-approval opening for SGT-003 while emphasizing high microdystrophin expression and other biomarker results from its early-stage trial. Solid is still gathering the controlled functional evidence that can show whether those laboratory findings actually translate into meaningful improvement for boys with Duchenne. That is precisely why the FDA cannot allow impressive protein numbers themselves to become the standard of proof.

The problem is larger than any one company. If microdystrophin expression can secure accelerated approval without convincing evidence that it predicts how patients actually function, every sponsor developing a similar therapy has an incentive to race toward the biomarker rather than wait for the harder clinical answer.

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Antidepressants (SSRI) Trigger Hyponatremia, Which Causes Severe Anxiety

Hyponatremia, or low sodium in the blood, is one of the most common electrolyte disorders seen in clinical settings, and its effects are anything but minor. Sodium keeps your nerves firing and your muscles working. When levels dip, even slightly, you feel drained, confused, or shaky. Push it further and symptoms like nausea, seizures, or fainting start to appear. In severe cases, sodium imbalance drives long hospital stays, lasting cognitive decline, and death.

Antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are routinely prescribed for mood disorders, but what often gets overlooked is how they disrupt sodium balance in your body. This translates into real-world risks like falls, broken bones, and worsening mental health. Older adults, especially women, are hit the hardest, with even short-term use setting off dramatic shifts in sodium control.

The severity of harm varies depending on the drug, the dose, and how long it’s used, yet the outcome is always unpredictable — and sometimes catastrophic. Research makes it clear that these medications disrupt sodium balance in dangerous ways, and a major study to track this problem shows exactly how quickly and severely those drops in sodium occur.

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