Big Pharma

Psychiatry’s Damage To Self And Culture

October 8, 2026 Bruce E. Levine, Counter Punch. Educate! Big Pharma, Health Care, mental health, Psychiatry

People come to mental health professionals in pain—the pain of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, inattention, and a variety of other mental pains. Psychiatric “treatment” routinely is directed at getting rid of these pains as quickly as possible so that an individual can “function.” In this sense, we should be grateful that psychiatric treatment has been such a failure, a reality that has now even been acknowledged by some in the mainstream media including the New York Times, which concluded in 2021: “Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

Other Countries Are Not To Blame For High Drug Prices

September 23, 2026 Brandon Novick, Center for Economic and Policy Research. Educate! Big Pharma, Drug Prices, Pfizer, Trump Administration

The Trump administration is colluding with drug companies to blame other countries for high drug prices rather than the undeniable cause: corporate greed and patent monopolies. Public Citizen recently published redacted versions of the deals the Trump administration struck with Pfizer and Eli Lilly to lower certain drug prices for Americans. However, these deals are incredibly limited and unlikely to affect what most Americans pay for their medicines. One unredacted provision of the deal with Pfizer provided a notable revelation: “Pfizer agrees to share with HHS … [a] portion of the net increased net revenue that Pfizer realizes from sales of the ex-U.S. version of Covered Products resulting from increased net prices of such ex-U.S. version of Covered Products.”

Mexico Raises The Flag For Health Sovereignty

July 20, 2025 Outra Saude, People's Dispatch. Create! Big Pharma, Claudia Sheinbaum, Health Care, Medicines, Mexico

The first week of July could go down in history as a milestone in Mexico’s pursuit of health sovereignty. At a press conference held on Friday, July 4, President Claudia Sheinbaum, along with Health Secretary David Kershenobich and Alejandro Svarch, head of IMSS-Bienestar (a public agency providing healthcare services), announced an ambitious plan to boost domestic production of medicines and medical supplies, aiming to reduce the country’s reliance on imports. The urgent need for such a policy shift was outlined during the mañanera – the daily press briefing hosted by Sheinbaum and her administration – recordings of which are available online.

Reclaiming Drug Discovery: Why We Need Public Pharma

July 16, 2025 David Franco, People's Dispatch. Create! Big Pharma, Health Care, Innovation, Public ownership

Big pharma loves to present itself as the driving force of medical breakthroughs – an industry tirelessly pushing the boundaries of science to deliver life-saving treatments. Yet, behind the grand narratives of “innovation”, the truth is far more calculated. Rather than committing to the expensive, high-risk process of true scientific discovery, pharmaceutical giants like Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Roche, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), Merck, and AstraZeneca have refined a more strategic and profitable approach: let others take risks, then swoop in to take the rewards.

Big Pharma Front Groups Muddle Debate Over Drug Prices

May 22, 2025 Mike Ludwig, Truthout. Educate! Astroturfing, Big Pharma, Health Care, Media, Pharmaceutical Drugs

The brief videos posted by a group called Seniors 4 Better Care to YouTube look just like the political ads that take over the airwaves during campaign season. The voiceover in one breezy video claims without context that former President Joe Biden “broke” Medicare, the popular government insurance program for seniors, and that only President Donald Trump can “fix it.” Another video suggests policies left over from the Biden era are thwarting research into a cure for cancer, while Trump’s election will bring a “golden age” and the elusive cure for cancer by “promoting innovation.” The video fails to mention that the Trump administration’s massive cuts to federal health agencies are causing mass layoffs at the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of cancer research in the world.

The Cost Of Corporate Profit In US Health Care Reaches $2 Trillion

November 10, 2024 Pete Dolack, ZNetwork. Educate! Big Pharma, Health Care, Iowa, Medicare for all, Worker Rights and Jobs

As has long been the case, the U.S. health care system is by far the world’s most expensive while providing the worst results among the world’s advanced capitalist countries. And that expense continues to get larger and more unaffordable. Just how large is the cost of private profit in health care? Almost two trillion dollars! Unbelievable? It certainly seems so. But that is indeed how much more money the people of the United States spent on health care in 2022 than they would otherwise have spent if the U.S. had a single-payer system.

Mapped: How Big Industries Hope To Sway The UN Biodiversity Talks

October 30, 2024 Hazel Healy and Rachel Sherrington, DeSmog. Educate! Activism, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Biodiversity, Colombia, COP16, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Food and Agriculture, Pesticides, Social Justice, United Nations (UN)

Under thundery tropical skies, and amid ever more dire warnings on the precarious state of the world’s ecosystems, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference is unfolding in Colombia. This year’s summit, known as COP16, follows on from the last biodiversity conference held in Montréal in 2022, when negotiators struck an historic deal – the equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change – to “halt and reverse” nature loss. Now, government representatives from nearly 200 countries, along with scientists, Indigenous groups, and environmental activists, are gathered in the southern city of Cali to negotiate how to put this plan into action: protect earth’s habitats and the people who depend on them.

Diabetes Patients Are Starting To Beat Big Pharma’s Price Gouging

October 18, 2024 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! Big Pharma, Diabetes, Health Care, Insulin, Victory

T1International was born out of anger. Elizabeth Pfiester had lived with type 1 diabetes since she was four years old. The daughter of a Monticello, Illinois railroad worker and library clerk, Pfiester and her family together had to learn the daily regimen of insulin injections, finger pricks for blood testing, and constant fear of blood sugar spikes and crashes. Fortunately, her dad’s railroad job provided solid health coverage, which got even better when Pfiester enrolled in the London School of Economics, where she qualified for the U.K.’s National Health Service program.

The Supreme Court And The Sackler Bankruptcy Settlement

July 1, 2024 F. Douglas Stephenson, Counter Punch. Educate! Big Pharma, Opioid crisis, Purdue, Sackler Family, SCOTUS, Supreme Court

Allen Frances, M.D., distinguished former chair of psychiatry at Duke University school of medicine wrote in a Oct., 2017 New Yorker magazine expose, “Their name (Sackler/Purdue Pharma) has been pushed forward as the epitome of good works and of the fruits of the capitalist system. But, when it comes down to it, they’ve earned this fortune at the expense of millions of people who are addicted. It’s shocking how they have gotten away with it.” Long overdue, the Sacklers and Big Pharma are finally starting to pay for the opioid crisis. In a recent 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Purdue Pharma’s controversial bankruptcy settlement that protected the billionaire Sackler family from further liability for the opioid epidemic in the USA.

Public Pharma For Europe, A Game-Changer For Access To Medicines

February 11, 2024 People's Health Dispatch, People's Dispatch. Create! Big Pharma, Europe, Health Care, Patents, Public ownership

“It’s time to step up, promote health justice, and meet the real needs of people,” says Alan Silva from the European chapter of the People’s Health Movement (PHM), addressing the need for revolutionizing pharma policies in Europe. A long-time advocate for access to medicines, Silva understands how important it is for Europe to change the way it thinks about research and development, but also production and distribution of health technologies. If the region were able to de-link itself from the interests of transnational pharmaceutical companies, it would be a true game changer, he says. “We need public pharma in Europe so we can stop relying on health solutions driven by profit,” he says.

The Final Nail In Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin

January 18, 2024 Bruce E. Levine, Counter Punch. Educate! Antidepressants, Big Pharma, Health Care, Medications, mental health, Psychiatry

Historically, there have always been some patients who report that any treatment for depression—including bloodletting—has worked for them, but science demands that for a treatment to be deemed truly effective, it must work better than a placebo or the passage of time without any treatment. This is especially important for antidepressant drugs—including Prozac, Zoloft, and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as well as Effexor, Cymbalta, and other serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—because all of these drugs have uncontroversial troubling side effects.

Health Activists Reveal Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Vaccine Heist In South Africa

September 7, 2023 People's Health Dispatch. Educate! Big Pharma, COVID-19, Global South, Janssen, Pfizer, South Africa, Vaccine apartheid, Vaccines

In August this year, a coalition of civil society organizations in South Africa, which includes the Health Justice Initiative (HJI) and the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM), achieved a remarkable breakthrough in the discussion surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. This milestone was reached after the Pretoria High Court issued an order instructing the Department of Health to disclose the contracts and proceedings of meetings pertaining to the procurement of COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer, Janssen, the Serum Institute of India, and the public-private global health partnership Gavi.

This Is How We Challenge The Power Of Big Pharma

September 4, 2023 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Podcast - Clearing The FOG Big Pharma, Capitalism, Drug Shortages, Health Care

People in the United States pay the highest prices for pharmaceuticals, and Big Pharma spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year for lobbying to keep it that way. The United States is also experiencing a growing shortage of medications from antibiotics to cancer treatments and more despite being a wealthy country. Clearing the FOG speaks with Dana Brown of the Democracy Collaborative to understand what is behind the high prices and shortages. She also describes solutions to these crises and how states across the country are taking action to directly confront the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has over our lives.

Big Pharma’s American Con

September 3, 2023 Andrew Perez, The Lever. Educate! Big Pharma, Capitalism, Health Care, Joe Biden

In response to this week’s launch of a new program letting Medicare negotiate lower prices for a handful of medicines, drugmakers are insisting the initiative will limit patients’ access to medicine and stifle the development of new cures. However, all 10 of the drugs up for negotiation are already being sold in other countries at fractions of what pharmaceutical companies are charging for them in the United States, according to a Lever review — and drugmakers are reporting huge revenues from those foreign sales. In some cases, Americans — whose tax money subsidizes the development of virtually all medicines approved for sale in the U.S. — are being charged 1,000 percent more than foreign patients for the same drugs.

Drug Patents Are Stifling Progress And Making Us Sicker

August 16, 2023 Mike Pappas, Left Voice. Educate! Big Pharma, Capitalism, Health Care, Patents

The healthcare system in the U.S. shows time and time again that under capitalism, profit maximization trumps individual and societal well-being. We saw a recent example from Gilead Sciences manipulating patent laws to extend the life of one of their drugs and delay the release of another, potentially safer option. Gilead’s efforts serve as just one example of how under capitalism patent laws are used to maximize profits at the expense of public well-being. In the world of HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, many of the more recent treatments center on using a combination of different drugs that target different parts of HIV’s replication cycle.

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