Fiddling Big Pharma

Hot or Not / Editor / 04 November 2008 / Leave a comment

A little off topic, but here's one about big pharma, George Bush and a one-armed violinist:

I don't really have it in for the US Food and Drug Administration, one of the many failed regulators of the Bush/Blair era, but they are in the news once more as oral arguments on Wyeth v. Levine are heard in the US Supreme Court.

Some years back Pharma persuaded Bushie to provide it with a Get Out of Jail Free Card, in the shape of regulations which provided that if the FDA approved a drug no-one could sue in State Courts should that drug turn out to be a disaster. The FDA approval would pre-empt any restitution ordered by the Courts.

To make matters worse, the FDA itself approved this measure, though investigations have turned up internal documents showing that senior staff members knew damn well that:

'[M]uch of the argument for why we are proposing to invoke preemption seems to be based on a false assumption that the FDA approved labeling is fully accurate and up-to-date in a real time basis. We know that such an assumption is false.'

http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081029102934.pdf

Ms Levine, a violinist, had to have her arm amputated after an injection of Phenergan; the Vermont Supreme Court upheld a jury award of $6.8 million based on the inadequate labelling of the product.

Wyeth, and all the other companies benefiting from the Get Out of Jail Free Card, are hoping that the Supreme Court will see things their way; Ms Levine, and all the other people on the wrong end of extraordinary State protection of corporate bodies, are presumably hoping that the Supreme Court will uphold the rights of citizens.

Hope's good, right?