Tag: big pharma

Dem Sen. Elizabeth Warren Freaks Out Over Prospect Of RFK Jr. Suing Big Pharma Companies

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) lost her cool while questioning Donald Trump Health and Human Services appointee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during his Wednesday confirmation hearing.

At one point, the senator questioned whether Kennedy will use his position to benefit himself financially “down the line.”

“I’ll comply with all the ethical guidelines,” RFK tried answering before Warren interrupted, “That’s not the question!”

Kennedy told Warren, “Senator, you’re asking me to not sue vaccine, pharmaceutical companies,” causing her to shout, “No, I am not! My question is stop enriching yourself! No one should be fooled here.”

The Democrat politician continued berating RFK, claiming he will prevent parents from vaccinating their children, that “kids might die” while “Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in.”

Warren also asked Kennedy to promise he won’t take a job at a major pharmaceutical company after leaving his position as head of HHS.

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Thiel-Linked HHS Nominee Threatens MAHA Ambitions with Biotech Stance

Late last November, President Donald Trump announced Jim O’Neill as his nominee for deputy secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he would work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for HHS secretary upon confirmation. As deputy secretary, O’Neill would essentially function as the Chief Operating Officer of the department, overseeing “the day-to-day operations of all sub-agencies” as well as leading “public health emergency preparedness,” i.e. the government’s policy responses to bio-terror events, pandemics, etc. In addition, O’Neill would “oversee the development and clearance of HHS regulations” and ostensibly be the main implementer of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) policy agenda.

Built on a promise to eliminate industry capture of public health regulatory agencies and curb the influence of Big Pharma and Big Food, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement played a crucial role in funneling would-be Kennedy voters into the Trump camp. MAHA, in essence, granted the Trump campaign a tinge of populist legitimacy among Covid era dissidents, which grew out of the shuttering of RFK Jr.’s independent presidential run.

However, O’Neill’s business connections, both past and present, as well as his previous statements on public health policy, strongly suggest that he is not only unlikely to implement the policies that MAHA-centric voters are expecting, but that he may in fact pursue an agenda that stands in direct conflict with the main tenets of the MAHA movement. Specifically, he advocates reforming the FDA to deregulate and accelerate the pathway from drug development to legalization. This would notably aid the biotech industry, which has long struggled to get its products approved outside of an “emergency”-based deregulatory paradigm.

When considering the investments and board positions that O’Neill himself has made and held in biotechnology companies, this would likely include mRNA products that Kennedy and other MAHA influencers have spent years criticizing since the Covid-19 pandemic — a clear contradiction between O’Neill’s views on public health, and those which the MAGA base were sold on the campaign trail.

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Purdue Pharma and owners to pay $7.4 billion in settlement of lawsuits over the toll of OxyContin

Members of the family who own OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, and the company itself, agreed to pay up to $7.4 billion in a new settlement to lawsuits over the toll of the powerful prescription painkiller, the attorneys general from several states announced Thursday.

The deal, agreed to by Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family members who own the company and lawyers representing state and local governments and thousands of victims of the opioid crisis, replaces a previous settlement deal that was rejected last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the new one, the Sacklers agreed to pay up to $6.5 billion and give up ownership of the company, which would pay nearly $900 million. The maximum contribution from family members is $500 million more than the previous deal.

It’s among the largest settlements reached over the past several years in a series of lawsuits by local, state, Native American tribal governments and others seeking to hold companies responsible for a deadly epidemic. Aside from the Purdue deal, others worth around $50 billion have been announced — and most of the money is required to be used to stem the crisis.

The deal still needs court approval, and some of the details are yet to be ironed out. An arm of the federal Department of Justice opposed the previous settlement, even after every state agreed, and took the battle to the U.S. Supreme Court. But under President Donald Trump, the federal government is not expected to oppose the new deal.

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Pfizer Agrees to $60 Million Settlement in Kickback Scandal for Allegedly ‘Bribing’ Doctors to Promote Migraine Drug — Defrauding Medicare and Other Federal Health Programs

Big Pharma Pfizer has agreed to a hefty $59.7 million settlement to resolve allegations of a kickback scandal that has defrauded Medicare and other federal healthcare programs.

The scandal revolves around Biohaven Pharmaceutical, a company acquired by Pfizer in October 2022, which engaged in unethical practices to push prescriptions of its migraine medication, Nurtec ODT, also known as Rimegepant.

Whistleblower Patricia Frattasio, a former sales representative at Biohaven, played a crucial role in bringing these malpractices to light, leading to a qui tam lawsuit under the False Claims Act in 2021.

The U.S. Department of Justice disclosed that from March 2020 through September 2022, Biohaven manipulated the healthcare system by offering kickbacks—including speaker honoraria and lavish meals at upscale restaurants—to healthcare professionals.

Allegations include that Biohaven paid some healthcare providers over $100,000 to boost prescriptions of their migraine medication, Nurtec ODT, resulting in fraudulent claims to federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

This egregious scheme involved not just ordinary incentives, but also repeated, unnecessary educational programs that offered no real benefit to attendees, turning these events into mere facades for bribery.

This practice, aimed at increasing Nurtec ODT prescriptions, breached anti-kickback statutes designed to keep medical decisions free from financial influence.

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Purdue Pharma, Sackler family owners agree to landmark $7.4B opioid settlement

Purdue Pharma and its Sackler family owners have reached a new $7.4 billion settlement to resolve thousands of lawsuits alleging that the pain medication Oxycontin caused a widespread opioid addiction crisis in the US, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said Thursday.

The settlement was announced nearly seven months after the US Supreme Court upended the company’s previous attempt to resolve the lawsuits in a bankruptcy settlement that would have granted the Sacklers sweeping civil immunity from opioid lawsuits in exchange for a payment of up to $6 billion.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Sacklers, who did not file for bankruptcy themselves, were not entitled to legal protections meant to give bankrupt debtors a “fresh start.”

Under the new settlement, the Sacklers will pay $7.4 billion, without fully shutting off lawsuits from states, local governments, or individual victims of the opioid crisis. Those who do not wish to join the settlement are free to pursue lawsuits against the Sacklers, who have said they would vigorously defend themselves in court.

The deal was negotiated by 15 states, including New York, California, Connecticut, Oregon, Texas, Florida and West Virginia. The other states will be asked to sign on the settlement, which must be approved by a US bankruptcy judge before it becomes final.

Connecticut attorney General William Tong said that the settlement would help provide closure to victims of the opioid crisis.

“It’s not just about the money,” Tong said. “There is not enough money in the world to make it right.”

The latest settlement is meant to address a drug addiction crisis that has led to over 700,000 opioid overdose deaths in the United States over the past two decades.

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J&J’s ketamine-derived nasal spray approved by FDA to treat depression

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Johnson & Johnson’s ketamine-derived nasal spray to help millions of U.S. patients suffering from severe depression.

Spravato, approved as a standalone treatment, is “the first and only monotherapy for adults living with major depressive disorder who have had an inadequate response to at least two oral antidepressants,” the pharmaceutical giant said Tuesday. 

An estimated 21 million adults in the U.S. are living with major depressive disorder, one of the most common psychiatric disorders, but one-third of them will not respond to oral antidepressants alone, hindering their quality of life, according to Johnson & Johnson. 

“Treatment-resistant depression can be very complicated, especially for patients who do not respond to oral antidepressants or cannot tolerate them. For too long, healthcare providers have had few options to offer patients much-needed symptom improvement,” Bill Martin, global therapeutic area head of Neuroscience at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, said in a statement. 

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FDA Orders Pfizer to Add PARALYSIS WARNING to RSV Vaccine Labels

Last Wednesday, the FDA ordered Pfizer and GSK to add Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) as a serious adverse event risk warning to both Pfizer’s Abrysvo and GSK’s Arexy Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccine labels.

RSV is the leading cause of respiratory infection in adults over the age of 60. Prior to 2023, the CDC has not published data on the incidence of RSV death in babies and children. In 2023, the CDC estimates that approximately 100 children under the age of 5 died from RSV. Despite these low numbers, the CDC recommends that pregnant women receive an RSV vaccine to ‘protect’ their baby from RSV.

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Moderna’s only real “FDA approved” product, an RSV mRNA injection is a failure

It goes without saying that RSV is a made up “virus” and there is no need to inject anyone with any alleged vaccines for it. This will only cause damage – scroll down to the part of this article where I discuss the FDA approved labeling for these shots. Sadly some people are still in a coma missing the lessons of the past 4 years of “safe and effective” so I hope that this information will help you with your efforts to wake those people up.

Despite being fully approved by the FDA in 2024, NOT as an EUA countermeasure (as best I can determine), the total revenue for this miracle of science is $10M so far. It’s refreshing to see that most people did not fall for the bullshit of RSV. I am willing to bet that even the $10M came from obligatory purchases by HHS to “stockpile” and assassinate an occasional Native American grandma, some prisoners, or other unfortunate subjects of the government healthcare services. In other words, no real uptake is happening.

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With more Americans able to access legalized marijuana, fewer are picking up prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications – new research

In states where both medical and recreational marijuana are legal, fewer patients are filling prescriptions for medications used to treat anxiety. That is the key finding of my recent study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

I am an applied policy researcher who studies the economics of risky behaviors and substance use within the United States. My collaborators and I wanted to understand how medical and recreational marijuana laws and marijuana dispensary openings have affected the rate at which patients fill prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications among people who have private medical insurance.

These include:

  • Benzodiazepines, which work by increasing the level of gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, a neurotransmitter that elicits a calming effect by reducing activity in the nervous system. This category includes the depressants Valium, Xanax and Ativan, among others.
  • Antipsychotics, a class of drug that addresses psychosis symptoms in a variety of ways.
  • Antidepressants, which relieve symptoms of depression by affecting neurotransmitters such as serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. The most well-known example of these is selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

We also included barbiturates, which are sedatives, and sleep medications – sometimes called “Z-drugs” – both of which are used to treat insomnia. In contrast to the other three categories, we did not estimate any policy impacts for either of these types of drugs.

We find consistent evidence that increased marijuana access is associated with reductions in benzodiazepine prescription fills. “Fills” refer to the number of prescriptions being picked up by patients, rather than the number of prescriptions doctors write. This is based on calculating the rate of individual patients who filled a prescription in a state, the average days of supply per prescription fill, and average prescription fills per patient.

Notably, we found that not all state policies led to similar changes in prescription fill patterns.

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8 Bombshell Findings In Florida’s Grand Jury Report On Big Pharma’s Covid Shots

On Tuesday, a Florida grand jury released its final report on potential “criminal or wrongful activity” regarding the creation and promotion of the Covid jabs.

Requested by Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and authorized by the Florida Supreme Court in December 2022, the grand jury was tasked with looking into whether individuals and entities, “including, but not limited to, pharmaceutical manufacturers (and their executive officers) and other medical associations or organizations” possibly violated state law related to the development, clinical testing, and marketing of the mRNA shots. The jury previously released interim reports in February and May 2024, respectively, which undercut much of the pseudo-science pushed by government “experts” on subjects such as masking, lockdowns, and natural immunity.

Following its investigation, the grand jury ultimately declined to charge any individual or entity in the case after the jurors “did not find any statute that [they] believed would be an appropriate vehicle for a criminal indictment based on the facts” in its final report. The grand jury did, however, note that such a conclusion does not absolve entities of engaging in unethical behavior.

“We want to be abundantly clear that this does not mean we believe the actions of these sponsors were always appropriate, or that the statements they made turned out to be factually correct,” the report reads. “It just means that those actions and statements are not sufficient bases to support criminal prosecutions.”

Despite the lack of criminal charges, the jury did unearth numerous major findings in its report that shine a light on deceptive behavior and actions surrounding the development and promotion of the Covid shots. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the analysis.

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