Big Pharma Is Hijacking the Information Doctors Need Most - Time magazine
BY JOHN ABRAMSON APRIL 28, 2022 4:10 PM EDT
Dr. Abramson is author of the new book, Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It, and serves on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he teaches public health policy.
Back in 1982, when I first began my career as a family practitioner in a small town of Boston, I was confident that the care I’d provide would be as effective as the care patients receive anywhere in the world. At the time, the death rate for Americans was lower than that of comparable countries, resulting in 128,000 fewer deaths annually. Although healthcare was expensive—costing 2.3% more of our GDP than the average of 11 other wealthy countries—the rapid growth of HMOs and managed care plans promised to make our healthcare even more effective and efficient.
Over the ensuing four decades, however, the opposite has occurred. The same age-adjusted mortality rate has improved so much more in comparable countries that, by 2017, an excess 478,000 Americans were dying each year. This translates into an extra 1,300 deaths daily, equivalent to three jumbo jets crashing every day. The everyday poor health of Americans and the inability of our healthcare system to mitigate preventable deaths amounts to a crisis that dwarfs even the COVID-19 pandemic. And our excess spending has risen to 6.8 percent of GDP, or $1.5 trillion per year.
...
To this day, Big Pharma companies remain unwilling to disclose their underlying clinical trial data. The most recent example involved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. In September 2021, one month after the vaccine had been granted full approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a group of medical researchers and scientists sued the agency for the release of 451,000 pages of scientific documents it had evaluated prior to granting the vaccine full approval. Even though the agency required only 108 days to sufficiently evaluate these documents before granting the vaccine formal approval, the FDA (with Pfizer wanting to join the lawsuit), argued that the fastest they could release the data was five hundred pages per month, meaning that it would take seventy-five years before the documents were released in full. On January 6, 2022, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ruled that the FDA must release 55,000 (not 500) pages of the documents each month until complete.
...
The industry’s control over what doctors believe about optimal therapeutics explains why new, expensive drugs are used more liberally in the U.S. than other countries. Without access to the actual clinical trial data, medical journals are publishing unvetted articles that doctors then rely on to treat their patients. Although prescription drugs “only” account for 17% of U.S. health-care expenditures, this has become a “tail wags dog” situation: The drug companies control the “knowledge” that informs doctors’ clinical decisions. This leads to soaring pharmaceutical profits and crippling healthcare costs, while doctors have no way of knowing which therapies are more effective—or more efficient. Americans deserve better.
https://time.com/6171999/big-pharma-clinical-data-doctors/
This article explains how academic researchers were forced to turn to private companies for funds when Ronald Reagan slashed government funding for university-based medical research. Also, the 1980 University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act (Bayh-Dole Act) enabled nonprofit institutions and researchers to benefit financially from federally funded research.
Here is a link to a 2020 web page for the "Bayh-Dole Coalition:"
https://bayhdolecoalition.org/new-coalition-launches-to-celebrate-and-protect-the-bayh-dole-act/
Check out the partial list of members at the bottom.
Where will this focus on profit in our medical/pharmaceutical system lead us?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Response to barbaraann (Original post)
