Prescription drugs continue to be dangerous.
Novartis Pharmaceuticals will pay $442 million dollars in penalties for marketing an epilepsy medicine for unapproved uses and then bribing and paying kickbacks to medical doctors to prescribe it and five of its other drugs.
Johnson & Johnson continues to have legal troubles as it conducts a phantom recall by circumventing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and buying up its defective painkillers Tylenol and Motrin so no one would know. Congressmen say there is “too cozy” of a relationship between the FDA and Johnson & Johnson.
GlaxoSmithKline agrees to pay $460 million dollars to resolve lawsuits regarding its diabetes drug Avandia. It turns out the drug can cause heart attacks and strokes in diabetics – the very things it is supposed to prevent. The company is facing 10,000 lawsuits with a worse-case scenario of payments of about $500,000 dollars each. Avandia, with $3 billion in annual sales is still in the air as the FDA decides whether to pull it completely off the market.
Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion dollars for illegally marketing drugs. Yes that’s $2.3 billion dollars. Federal prosecutors called the drug maker a “repeating corporate cheat” for bribing medical doctors to sell their drugs.
Some physicians continue to prescribe estrogen despite the fact that it has caused an estimated 17,500 cases of breast cancer every year. Most women have quit these prescriptions, with a resultant dramatic drop in breast cancer cases. The first such drop in cancer incidence since the war on cancer began over 30 years ago.
Conclusion: So in today’s times, drug maker fines and penalties for fraud, cheating, bribing and lying are now running in the billions of dollars.
Sounds like just another day at the pharmaceutical office, business as usual.
Source: Health Alert; September 2010 and December 2010
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