Big Pharma

Medicine For All: The Case For A Public Option In The Pharmaceutical Industry

September 12, 2019 By Dana Brown, Thenextsystem.org Create! Big Pharma, Medicine, New Economy

Too many Americans are suffering and dying prematurely because we have ceded control over a key part of our infrastructure for public health—the pharmaceutical industry—to unaccountable corporations, for whom the pursuit of profit trumps the needs of patients and communities. Instead of continuing to push the boulder of regulation up the hill in hopes that it one day finally proves effective, we can displace corporate power over our health and lives by moving towards a democratic, publicly-owned pharmaceutical sector, designed to respond to public health needs and deliver better health outcomes at lower costs.

Exclusive: OxyContin Maker Prepares ‘Free-Fall’ Bankruptcy As Settlement Talks Stall

September 6, 2019 Mike Spector and Jessica DiNapoli, Reuters.com Educate! Bankruptcy, Big Pharma

(Reuters) - OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP is preparing to seek bankruptcy protection before the end of the month if it does not reach a settlement with U.S. communities over widespread opioid litigation, three people familiar with the matter said, after some states balked at the company’s $10 billion to $12 billion offer in August to end their lawsuits as part of a negotiated Chapter 11 case. On Friday, Purdue lawyers had documents prepared for a Chapter 11 filing at a moment’s notice, Reuters has learned. A federal judge, who expects plaintiffs to update him on settlement progress this week, wants 35 state attorneys general on board with a deal...

Big Pharma: Gouges, Casualties, And The Congressional Remedy!

August 9, 2019 Ralph Nader, Nader.org Educate! Big Pharma, Congress, Reform

The Congress can overturn the abuses of Big Pharma and its “pay or die,” subsidized business model for its drugs. Big Pharma’s trail of greed, power, and cruelty gets worse every year. Its products and practices take hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. from over-prescriptions, lethal combinations of prescriptions, ineffective or contaminated drugs, and dangerous side-effects. The biggest drug dealers in the U.S. operate legally. Their names are emblazoned in ads and promotions everywhere.

Which 2020 Democrats Are Taking Money From The Healthcare Industry?

July 22, 2019 By Karl Evers-Hillstrom and Jessica Piper, Opensecrets.org Educate! 2020 Elections, Big Pharma, Electoral Politics, Health Care

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called on fellow Democratic presidential candidates to reject contributions from the healthcare industry this week, a renewed effort to distinguish himself from a progressive field that has often adopted his policy positions. The Vermont senator’s announcement came days after campaigns filed their second quarter finance reports, which showed that a number of the 2020 presidential candidates, including Sanders, had accepted contributions from healthcare and pharmaceutical executives.

‘Big Pharma’ Is The Big Winner Of The USMCA

June 25, 2019 Veronika J. Wirtz, Warren A. Kaplan and Kevin Gallagher, Thehill.com Educate! Big Pharma, Trade, USMCA

The longstanding debate in the United States on its sky-high prescription drug prices and access to health care is raging where you might least expect it — within the pages of President Trump’s new trade deal: the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Critics of the USMCA are very concerned that it would increase medicine prices in North America and strengthen the hand of one of the world's most powerful industries. At Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center and School of Public Health, we have been studying the impact of trade treaties on access to medicines and can confirm that there is real truth to these concerns. They require policy action.

Demanding Medicare For All, Nurses Use Band-Aids To Plaster GoFundMe Pages To Big Pharma Headquarters

April 30, 2019 By Jake Johnson, Commondreams.org Resist! Big Pharma, health, Health Care, Medicare

"Nobody should have a GoFundMe account to pay for their healthcare, and we're here to make sure that that stops." Hundreds of nurses and their allies from across the country rallied Monday outside the headquarters of the pharmaceutical industry's top lobbying group and plastered the GoFundMe pages of Americans "suffering in an immoral healthcare system" to the building's walls and windows. "The people inside this building spent $28 million on lobbying last year to keep prescription drug prices so unaffordable that some of our patients needlessly die."

4 Pharma Companies Saved $7 Billion From GOP Tax Law

April 13, 2019 Bob Herman, Axios.com Educate! Big Pharma, Taxes

Four pharmaceutical companies — Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck and Abbott Laboratories — collectively kept $7 billion in tax savings in 2018 due to Republicans' 2017 corporate tax overhaul, according to a new Oxfam report. The bottom line: Oxfam's results mirror our reporting, which shows pharmaceutical companies in particular have benefited from bringing back billions of dollars in overseas profits that have sat untaxed. However, this report says the tax savings have not led to other social goods, like more research investment in new drugs or lower drug prices.

Fentanyl Maker Donates Big To Campaign Opposing Pot Legalization

February 13, 2019 Steven Nelson, Usnews.com Educate! Big Pharma, Legalization, Marijuana

AN EMBATTLED pharmaceutical company that sells the powerful painkiller fentanyl has donated $500,000 toward defeating a ballot initiative that would make recreational use of marijuana legal under Arizona law. It's hard to imagine a more sinister donor than Insys Therapeutics Inc. in the eyes of pot legalization proponents, who long have claimed drug companies want to keep cannabis illegal to corner the market for drugs, some addictive and dangerous, that relieve pain and other symptoms. Insys currently markets just one product, according to an August filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission: a sublingual fentanyl spray it calls Subsys.

Massive Protest Breaks Out Over Guggenheim Museum’s Ties To Big Pharma: ‘Lock Them Up’

February 11, 2019 Commondreams, Alternet.org Resist! Big Pharma, Opioids, Protests

Demonstrators inside New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum staged a “die in” and dropped thousands of paper slips designed to look like of OxyContin prescriptions Saturday night to protest the facility’s ties to the billionaire Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma and has been accused of deliberately fueling the opioid epidemic for profit. “Education facilities at the Guggenheim, including a theater and an exhibition gallery, are housed inside the 8,200-square-foot Sackler Center for Arts Education, identified by the museum as ‘a gift of the Mortimer D. Sackler Family,'” the New York Times reported.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Curbs Executives’ Ties To Industry

January 13, 2019 By Katie Thomas, The New York Times, and Charles Ornstein, ProPublica. Educate! Big Pharma, Corporatism, Health Care

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the world’s leading research institutions, announced on Friday that it would bar its top executives from serving on corporate boards of drug and health care companies that, in some cases, had paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Hospital officials also told the center’s staff that the executive board had made permanent a series of reforms designed to limit the ways in which its top executives and leading researchers could profit from work developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering, a nonprofit with a broad social mission that admits about 23,500 cancer patients each year.

Before Big Pharma Kills Us, Maybe Public Pharma Can Save Us

September 21, 2018 Dana Brown, Prospect.org Create! Big Pharma, Drugs

Drug-resistant “superbugs” are predicted to kill more people per year than cancer by 2050. Already, more than two million Americans annually are infected with bacteria that have evolved to resist antibiotics with at least 23,000 dying as a result. Given the nature of infectious disease, antibiotic resistance is increasingly seen as a threat to national security, with potential consequences for trade, global development, and even counterterrorism. Despite the many incentives being thrown their way, however, major pharmaceutical companies are pulling out of antibiotic research and development at alarming rates, citing a lack of market incentives. In an industry that has a bad case of market-incentive syndrome, it is time to consider the establishment of public pharmaceutical companies as an antidote.

Rosemary Gibson On America’s Dependence On China For Medicine

August 30, 2018 By Russell Mokhiber, Counterpunch.org Educate! Big Pharma, China, FDA, Medicine

At one time, decades ago, penicillin, vitamin C, and many other prescription and over-the-counter products were manufactured in the United States. But now, antibiotics, antidepressants, birth control pills, blood pressure medicines, cancer drugs, among many others are made in China and sold in the United States. The result – millions of Americans are taking prescription drugs made in China and don’t know it. China makes essential ingredients for thousands of medicines found in American homes and used in hospital intensive care units and operating rooms. In China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine (Prometheus Books, 2018), Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh argue that there are at least two major problems with the United States relying on China for its medicines.

700 Pound Heroin Spoon Installed Outside OxyContin Manufacturer

July 1, 2018 Nate Freeman, Artsy.net. Resist! Art, Big Pharma, health, Opioids

Connecticut - Art dealer Fernando Luis Alvarez installed a gigantic spoon-shaped sculpture by the artist Domenic Esposito in front of the headquarters of Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Connecticut, on Friday morning. Police soon arrived on the scene, told Alvarez that the sculpture needed to be removed, and issued him a ticket for “obstructing free passage.” When he refused to move the 700-pound work himself, he was arrested for “interfering with the police,” handcuffed, and briefly detained before going free. The work was then removed using a front loader.

If You Want To Kill Drug Dealers, Start With Big Pharma

April 6, 2018 By Domenica Ghanem, Otherwords.org Educate! Big Pharma, Corporations, Drugs, Opioids

At a recent rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump called for the death penalty for drug traffickers as part of a plan to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States. At a Pennsylvania rally a few weeks earlier, he called for the same. Now his administration is taking steps toward making this proposal a reality. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo on March 21 asking prosecutors to pursue capital punishment for drug traffickers — a power he has thanks to legislation passed under President Bill Clinton. Time and again, these punitive policies have proven ineffective at curbing drug deaths. That’s partly because amping up the risk factor for traffickers makes the trade all that more lucrative, encouraging more trafficking, not less. But it’s also because these policies don’t address the true criminals of the opioid crisis: Big Pharma.

In Memory Of Zahara Heckscher

March 7, 2018 Staff, Citizen.typepad.com Resist! Big Pharma, Medicine, TPP

All of us at Public Citizen lift up in loving memory our dear friend and peaceful warrior Zahara Heckscher, who passed away on February 24 at the age of 53, after her years-long battle with breast cancer. Among her many talents as a writer, poet, teacher and facilitator, Zahara was a fierce, creative and committed activist. As she valiantly battled advanced breast cancer, she became determined to fight for all patients to have access to the cutting-edge cancer medicines that extended her life. When she learned that prescription drug companies were using the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations to lock in extended monopolies that threatened access to affordable medicines, Zahara became a passionate trade justice advocate on behalf of cancer patients around the world.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 »

Daily movement news and resources