Pharma-funded Republicans go to bat for drug industry as Medicare moves to negotiate prices

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
August 31, 2023

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) (Photo: X)

"Did a Big Pharma CEO write these talking points for you on the back of a campaign check?" one critic asked Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.

Polling data released this week shows that nearly 90% of Republican voters support allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies.

But congressional Republicans—many of whom receive substantial funding from the pharmaceutical industry—have staked out the opposite position, bashing the Biden administration's rollout of the initial list of medications that will be subject to price negotiations and parroting drugmakers' arguments against the popular reforms.

"The Inflation Reduction Act's socialist drug price controls will stunt the development of lifesaving treatments and cures while granting the government more unnecessary control over Americans' lives," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wrote on social media, invoking the well-worn and misleading narrative that curbing medicine costs would stifle innovation.

Blackburn received $215,500 in campaign donations from pharma and other health product PACs between 2017 and 2022, according to OpenSecrets.

"Did a Big Pharma CEO write these talking points for you on the back of a campaign check?" Tennessee State Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-90) wrote in response to Blackburn. (Johnson is currently exploring a U.S. Senate run against the Republican.)

Every GOP lawmaker in the U.S. House and Senate voted against the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which requires Medicare to negotiate the prices of a subset of high-cost prescription drugs. After the legislation passed, Republicans swiftly began working to roll it back, taking specific aim at Medicare's new authority to negotiate drug prices, which are far higher in the U.S. than in other wealthy nations.

Republican presidential candidates—including former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination—have also vocally criticized the law and suggested they would work to repeal it if they win in 2024.

Earlier this week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services listed the first 10 drugs it plans to negotiate, drawing predictable backlash from the pharmaceutical industry, which lobbied against the IRA's passage and is now suing over the drug pricing provisions. Several of the drugs included on the initial list were already set to face generic competition in the coming years.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the IRA's drug pricing reforms will save Medicare $160 billion over the next decade.

"Any effort by far-right Republicans to paint lowering the costs of prescription drug prices for Americans as a bad thing is laughable."

With President Joe Biden looking to make the drug price negotiations a centerpiece of his 2024 reelection campaign, Republican strategists are urging the GOP to aggressively counter the White House with messaging that mirrors industry claims about the IRA's potential impact on innovation—claims that advocates have long dismissed as false and self-serving.

"Republicans have to figure out how to go after it," Joe Grogan, a Republican strategist who served as a domestic policy adviser for Trump, toldPolitico. "They go after it by taking it head on: it is killing clinical programs, fundamentally restricting the amount of treatments."

Some GOP lawmakers are taking just that approach.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), whose campaign received $253,400 from pharma and health product PACs between 2017 and 2022, said in a statement Tuesday that Medicare price negotiations "risk reversing decades of progress on bringing lifesaving treatments and medical breakthroughs to American patients."

Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who has received donations from drug companies that are suing the Biden administration over the price negotiations, added that "the Biden administration is trying to take a victory lap while at the same time they are pricing seniors out of their healthcare and ensuring future cures never reach those who need them."

A 2021 report by Patients for Affordable Drugs concluded that "Big Pharma's innovation argument just does not stand up to scrutiny," noting that "the money that U.S.-based drug companies make by charging Americans high prices is 76% greater than what's needed to fund their entire global research and development expenditures."

Democrats have vowed to combat attempts by the pharmaceutical industry and Republicans to sabotage or repeal the IRA, which represents a modest effort to rein in drugmakers' power to drive up prices.

"The products that will now be subject to negotiation are used by millions of seniors in Medicare each year, costing each of them thousands of dollars," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee. "I will be following the negotiation process closely and will fight any attempt by Big Pharma to undo or undermine the progress that's been made."

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) argued Wednesday that "any effort by far-right Republicans to paint lowering the costs of prescription drug prices for Americans as a bad thing is laughable."

How Big Pharma twists the law to its will and leaves Americans worse off

A pharmacy technician fills a prescription. 

(U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Amber E. Jacobs)

Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute January 10, 2020

Big Pharma spends a small fortune every year buying politicians to make sure we can’t import prescription drugs from Canada, but they’re more than happy to sell us contaminated medications from countries with weak manufacturing controls and exploitable labor that ensure high-profit margins.

A toxic compound that doesn’t belong anywhere near medicine known as NDMA was first discovered in some blood pressure medications in 2018, and the FDA issued an alert and wrote a complaint letter to the raw materials supplier to Big Pharma companies. It turns out the meds follow the very common pattern of being made in India with raw ingredients coming from China. And they are sold by big companies for obscenely high prices to U.S. consumers.

More recently, NDMA contamination provoked a nationwide recall of the popular anti-heartburn medication Zantac and all its generic versions.

And now the world’s most widely prescribed drug of all, which is used to treat and prevent Type 2 diabetes called metformin, is contaminated with NDMA.

NDMA (N-Nitrosodimethylamine) is, according to the World Health Organization, produced by “the degradation of dimethylhydrazine (a component of rocket fuel) as well as from several other industrial processes. It is also a contaminant of certain pesticides.”

And it’s one of the world’s most potent carcinogens, at least for humans and other mammals. Our livers produce an enzyme that converts it to methyldiazonium that then leads to O6-methylguanine, both of which alter a process at the cellular level called methylation that is a cancer turbocharger.

Because it’s such a potent biological agent, NDMA is also extremely poisonous; a Chinese medical student put a few drops in his roommate’s water and killed him. Ditto for a Canadian grad student, who injected it into a colleague’s apple pie.

It’s so poisonous that the FDA has set the “acceptable” amount for human daily intake at 96 nanograms, or 0.000096 of 1 milligram (a single grain of salt is about a milligram). In some of the generic brands of the blood pressure medication, just one tablet was found to have NDMA levels almost 20 times higher than the “acceptable” 96 nanograms, and nearly all were drugs that are taken daily.

Once it gets into groundwater, NDMA is wicked hard to get out, as citizens of numerous California cities found out in the late 1990s. Its “miscibility” (rapid solubility) with water is extreme, meaning that a few drops of it rapidly spreads through miles of underground aquifers or other water supplies in a matter of hours or days at most. Because of this, it’s nearly impossible to isolate the contamination once it happens, the only solution then being radical and expensive water treatment everywhere in the aquafer, principally using ultraviolet light.

Ever since 1987 when Congress and the Reagan administration cut a corrupt deal with Big Pharma to ban the retail import of pharmaceuticals into the U.S., Democrats have pushed to allow Americans to get their prescription drugs from other countries when they’re too expensive here (which is nearly always the case; we pay about twice as much for drugs as any other country in the world).

In 2000, Congress passed a law to allow imported retail drugs, but the Clinton administration, heavily funded by the health care industry, killed it administratively.

Nonetheless, progressive Democrats have pushed for years for the elimination of the ban. I first met Bernie Sanders when I lived in Montpelier, Vermont, around the turn of the century and he was organizing busloads of Vermont seniors to travel the two hours to Montreal to fill their prescriptions.

And now, in another popular policy position “borrowed” from progressive Democrats (who have also opposed neoliberal trade deals for decades), the Trump administration is talking about letting American consumers buy drugs from Canada or overseas.

The downside of this is that generic drugs sold in Canada are just as likely to be made in India and China, and thus just as contaminated, as drugs sold here. The upside is that because Canadian drugs will be cheaper, some of us can afford to buy the name-brand versions made in Germany, Switzerland or Ireland and sold in Canada, and not worry about getting cancer from NDMA in our generic drugs. (Yes, I mean this sarcastically.)

There was a time when virtually all drugs sold in the U.S. were manufactured here, including generics, or in Switzerland and Germany. Congress passed a special tax break for American drug manufacturers who’d move their factories to Puerto Rico, and for decades that was the hub of U.S. drug manufacturing. But in past decades neoliberalism has won out, and only a fraction of the pharma facilities in and around San Juan remain in operation.

Trump ran on the traditionally Democratic and progressive position of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., a project that progressive senators including Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have worked on their entire modern political careers.

It’s time to apply it to manufacturing pharmaceuticals or at least insist on global regulations that can protect everyone.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 25 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BIG+PHARMA

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=OPIOID 

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=DRUGS

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HEALTHCARE

INDIA’S VACCINE MAKERS ARE PANDEMIC PROFITEERS, NOT HUMANITARIANS

The Indian government’s free-market approach to vaccine distribution has privileged profit over lives.

A health care worker holds a vial of Covishield at a vaccination center in Sopore, in the Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir on May 3, 2021. 

Photo: Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto via AP

Aparna Gopalan
June 19 2021, 1:00 a.m.

IN APRIL, a deadly Covid-19 surge overtook India as the country’s overflowing hospitals and crematoria made global headlines. While new daily cases are now reportedly in decline, the overall death toll continues to rise — estimated to exceed official figures at well over 1 million. At the height of the surge, India’s vaccination rate began falling, and just 3.5 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated.

Most global media coverage has attributed the ongoing crisis to two key causes: the Indian government’s mismanaged pandemic response and Big Pharma. Over the last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right government engaged in superspreader theatrics rather than disaster mitigation. Meanwhile, by upholding patents on Covid-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Europe have denied low- and middle-income countries the ability to produce lifesaving vaccines, creating a system of global vaccine apartheid that devalues non-Western lives.

Amid the censure of the Modi government and Big Pharma, India’s health care capitalists have gone largely unnoticed. Aided at each step by the government’s free-market approach to vaccine distribution, India’s very own Big Pharma has used the pandemic to strengthen market shares, grow profits, and place vaccines behind a paywall unscalable for most people in a country riven with dire systemic inequalities.

“The Indian vaccine ‘market’ is held in a vise-like grip of a vaccine duopoly,” journalist V. Sridhar, who has written about the country’s vaccination failures for the Indian news magazine Frontline, told me in a message. “What else would you call this duopoly but vaccine barons?”

Almost all of India’s vaccine supply comes from the country’s two largest vaccine producers: Serum Institute of India, led by CEO Adar Poonawalla, and Bharat Biotech, run by founder Krishna Ella. While both companies have repeatedly advertised their vaccines as the cheapest in the world, they seldom mention that those vaccines are also the world’s most profitable. For each dose sold to private hospitals, Serum makes profits of up to 2,000 percent — what Poonawalla might consider “super profits” — and Bharat Biotech up to 4,000 percent. In comparison, based on the estimated cost to make one dose, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s profit margins are 650 percent and 500 percent, respectively.

“Disasters are a fabulous business,” journalist P. Sainath writes in his recent piece on India’s widening wealth inequality. “There is always money to be made in the misery of the many.” India’s Covid-19 disaster is no exception.
The Prince of Profit

Poonawalla is one of India’s premier pandemic profiteers. He is the 40-year-old son of India’s eighth-richest man, from whom he inherited the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. Among Western progressives, generics are often discussed as a public health solution to Big Pharma profiteering. Generics manufacturers like Poonawalla, however, are still businesspeople working for profit, not humanitarians motivated by the public good.

Pune-based Serum makes 1.5 billion doses of various vaccines every year and sells them across 170 countries. Poonawalla sees Serum, with its sizable production capacity, as “almost designed for [a pandemic],” and the company has seized on its “once-in-a lifetime opportunity.” In 2020, Serum entered a partnership with British-Swedish company AstraZeneca through which Serum could produce the Oxford University vaccine in exchange for royalties. With the resulting vaccine — known in India as Covishield — Serum captured 90 percent of the country’s vaccine market share. The company also committed up to 200 million doses for export to the global vaccine-sharing initiative COVAX.

Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, at the company’s Hadapsar plant in Pune, Maharashtra, in India, on Jan. 22, 2021.
Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images


Despite Serum’s lucrative licensing agreement with AstraZeneca, Poonawalla has been one of the loudest voices decrying global vaccine inequality and Western Big Pharma. In March, Poonawalla objected to U.S. President Joe Biden’s use of the Defense Production Act, which stipulated that U.S. companies manufacturing vaccine raw materials must prioritize U.S. government contracts. Poonawalla criticized the move and in April tweeted at Biden to “lift the embargo.”

Recent analysis notes how Poonawalla’s demand for raw materials “placed him at the heart of several heroic imaginations.” This was especially true once India’s Covid-19 surge became front-page news in April. Indian, global, and even socialist media picked up and amplified Poonawalla’s rebuke, pointing to U.S. hoarding of raw materials as a humanitarian concern right alongside India’s pressing need for oxygen and personal protective equipment. As activist and humanitarian pressure to release the raw materials mounted, Biden removed export restrictions on bags, vials, filters, and other materials. A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the U.S. had agreed to release “specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine.”

The spokesperson was mistaken, as was much of the global media. Poonawalla went on the record multiple times to clarify that his request was not for Covishield or indeed for any vaccine approved to inoculate Indians. Since January, Serum has had the capacity to produce around 5,000 doses of Covishield per minute. Rather, the raw materials Poonawalla sourced from the U.S. are for a new Covid-19 vaccine Serum is producing in commercial partnership with U.S. company Novavax. Poonawalla was able to benefit from activist outrage to secure vaccine raw materials that would do nothing to mitigate India’s public health crisis. Serum declined to comment on the record for this piece.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus Crisis


Media coverage has facilitated Poonawalla’s enterprising use of the gray zone between humanitarianism and commerce during the pandemic. While Serum has always emphasized its “philanthropic philosophy,” the company’s founding family has mostly been known for their ostentatious wealth — be it their majestic farmhouse where they hosted Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; their luxury car collection that includes a one-of-a-kind Batmobile; or the refurbished aircraft that houses Poonawalla’s office.

But ever since Poonawalla became an early investor in the AstraZeneca vaccine, news stories have praised him as a “vaccine prince” — a risk-embracing entrepreneur with a moral mission. The media’s acceptance of how Poonawalla presents himself explains how easily he has been cited as an advocate for global public health rather than as a billionaire CEO advancing his company’s commercial interests. Journalistic sympathy for Poonawalla often comes at the cost of fair reporting. For instance, the media’s portrayal of Serum’s vaccine exports as a charitable “bid to protect the world” obscures the fact that Serum is charging poorer countries up to $7 for the same vaccine dose that the European Union is getting from AstraZeneca at $2.
Westward Expansion

Poonawalla has been cast in news coverage not just as a disinterested advocate of public health, but also as a decolonial challenger to Big Pharma seeking to “save the world from coronavirus — and then radically remake the international pharma landscape.” Poonawalla’s supposed desire to transform the global pharmaceutical industry is extrapolated from his opposition to vaccine patents, especially as calls to “free the vaccine” from intellectual property restrictions have found salience in Western leftist circles.

“We’re seeing a new system of vaccine apartheid coming into place,” says Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, an initiative that campaigns to remove Covid-19 patents. Many public health experts agree that a temporary waiver of the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, provision is a necessary first step toward increasing vaccine production and access and creating a more competitive pharmaceutical industry worldwide. With sustained pressure from activists, last month the Biden administration signaled its support for a temporary TRIPS waiver, a measure initially proposed by the governments of India and South Africa.



Related
The Vaccine Divide


On the surface, Poonawalla has echoed activist concerns about pharmaceutical patents. But his fight against patents is not the same as activists’ fight for a people’s vaccine. Poonawalla’s interest in a TRIPS waiver comes from his admitted intention to poach competitors’ shares in Western markets. “Though we’re already in 165 countries, I will also expand our global reach: pushing into Europe and the United States — markets that we’ve never been able to enter as we’ve been blocked by Big Pharma,” he told GQ India last year. “These are the new and final frontiers.”

Serum has expanded into those frontiers. In 2012, the company acquired Bilthoven Biologicals from the Netherlands government and since then its European presence has only grown. In May, as Covid-19 ravaged India and the country’s vaccine supply dried up, Poonawalla sequestered himself in his $69,000-a-week rental mansion in London as the British government announced that Serum would invest over $330 million in the U.K. to create a new sales office, expected to generate business worth over $1.4 billion. If the clinical trials mentioned in the announcement are any indication, the vaccines developed as part of this deal might target European markets.

Serum’s global ambitions illuminate Poonawalla’s real problem with Big Pharma. It is not that Poonawalla is against the commercialization or patenting of lifesaving drugs; rather, he opposes Big Pharma insofar as it blocks his own access to Western markets. This is why, while campaigning against the hoarding of U.S. raw materials or supporting calls to waive U.S. drug patents, Poonawalla had also been working with then-President Donald Trump to escape the “stupid rules and regulations” that prevented him from selling his products in the U.S.

The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s viral surge that enriches Poonawalla.

If these restrictions — raw material embargoes, patents, regulatory requirements — were waived for Covishield in Western markets, even at a price as high as $10 a dose, Covishield could easily outcompete the more expensive Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines while making a considerable profit. By undercutting competitors’ prices for Covid-19 vaccines, Serum could both expand its operations and trigger a race to the bottom, pushing other producers to consolidate or outsource to lower their prices. Back in 2016, Poonawalla had diagnosed that the pharmaceutical industry was experiencing “the lull before the storm” of acquisitions or mergers. If it succeeds in using the pandemic to break into Western markets, Serum could find itself riding the coming tidal wave of pharmaceutical industry consolidation.

The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s coronavirus surge that enriches Poonawalla. The waiver could enable Serum to keep profiting from the AstraZeneca vaccine without paying royalties. Serum may also be able to develop a replica of the vaccine, the patent for which it could hold within India even as global patents are suspended. Several of the experts I interviewed saw the probability of such a vaccine monopoly emerging.

Poonawalla has done little to dispel these fears. Even as he stresses that Serum’s production capacity must increase to vaccinate the world’s poor, Poonawalla also maintains that there is no need to bring other manufacturers into the vaccine market to help increase supply.

Serum’s primary goal isn’t to equitably vaccinate the world or break down monopolies; it is to corner new markets while maintaining dominance within India. Without curbs on Serum’s power, the removal of global patents would not result in “freeing” the vaccine, only freeing streams of profit.

Krishna Ella, founder and chair of Bharat Biotech, holds a package of the typhoid vaccine Typbar-TCV during a press conference in Hyderabad on Jan. 3, 2018.
Photo: Noah Seelam/AFP via Getty Images

Immunity for Sale

Serum is not the only Indian company engaging in vaccine profiteering. Bharat Biotech, which developed Covaxin with public funds, has been charging Indians exorbitant rates for each shot — up to about $5.40 for states and about $16 for private hospitals — despite founder Ella’s early assurance that the vaccine would cost less than a bottle of water. Bharat Biotech has also been expanding commercial Covaxin exports despite India’s recent export restrictions.

Unlike Serum’s Covishield, Covaxin is not restricted by any Big Pharma patent. The Indian government controls part of Covaxin’s intellectual property rights, yet Bharat Biotech inexplicably monopolized production until a month ago, when the government finally greenlighted manufacturing of the vaccine in its own production facilities. Bharat Biotech declined to comment for this piece.

Throughout the pandemic, the Modi government has refused to curb pharmaceutical profiteering. Despite using taxpayer money to provide clinical trial support and sizable production advances to Serum and Bharat Biotech, the government has failed to ensure affordable vaccines for India’s people. Until May, the central government had procured all the doses for $2 each — a price at which the vaccine companies are reported to have made between 188 percent to 500 percent in profits. But they wanted more.

“When you’ve got low supply and high demand, what happens to the price? It skyrockets,” Poonawalla has said in describing how U.S. drug companies insulate themselves from competition with generics. Yet Poonawalla essentially politically engineered the same reality in India.

“By self-admission, India’s monopolistic vaccine producers were deeply unhappy with the ‘normal profits’ they earned at the regulated prices,” R. Ramakumar, a development economist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, told me in a message. “They lobbied to ‘free’ prices. Not surprisingly, vaccine prices more than doubled, even tripled and quadrupled, over just one week.”
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The Indian government enabled the rise in prices with its “liberalized” vaccine distribution policy, deliberately manufacturing a seller’s market. Starting May 1, the central government stopped procuring and distributing all the country’s vaccines as it and almost every other government in the world had been doing up until then. Instead, the central government began buying only half of the vaccine supply, leaving India’s 28 states and private hospitals to compete for the remaining doses on the private market — at prices set by the vaccine companies. The Indian health ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists. With a quarter of the country’s vaccine stock reserved for private hospitals, and vaccine producers vocalizing their preference to sell to those hospitals at higher prices, India’s vaccination drive was designed to favor private-sector monopolization.

The resulting inequalities have been stark. Private hospitals have outcompeted cash-starved states: In May, just nine hospital chains had cornered 50 percent of all doses. While India’s states pledged to vaccinate people for free, private hospitals voiced no such intention. Absent price caps, most of India’s impoverished population has either been paying exorbitant amounts to get vaccinated at private hospitals or waiting for government hospitals to acquire scarce doses.

By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists.


“Imagine if the vaccine is sold at $10 to a family of four and they each need two doses,” health journalist Vidya Krishnan says. “How are they going to be able to afford it?” The average person in India makes an estimated $50 a month. Add to the mix the Modi government’s disastrous economic policies from prior years, and vaccination becomes unattainable for most Indians.

India’s vaccination plan for almost one-fifth of the world’s people has been so alarming that even the country’s judiciary and Modi’s own allies have joined journalists, opposition politicians, and medical experts in asking: Why no price standardization or price ceiling? Why not go back to centrally procuring vaccines instead of making states compete? Why not, as Krishnan asks, use the decades-old public vaccination system that was used to eradicate polio? Why not, as experts I interviewed suggest, waive patents within India and issue compulsory licenses so that more than two big companies could make vaccines?

In response to months of public outcry, last week Modi announced a partial reversal of his vaccine distribution “experiment.” Starting June 21, the central government will procure 75 percent of the country’s total vaccine stock directly from the companies, which it will give to state governments to distribute to their residents for free.

The change reverses one of the most politically controversial aspects of the previous policy but still leaves plenty of room for profiteering. A quarter of India’s vaccine stock will remain reserved for private hospitals and, consequently, for the rich. Even with price caps at private hospitals, vaccine manufacturers’ rates of profit will reach over 1,000 percent. As Yogesh Jain, a founder of the rural health care nonprofit Jan Swasthya Sahyog, wrote on Twitter, India’s vaccination capabilities will remain “publicly provided, and privately guzzled.”

The Modi government has tweaked India’s profit-centric vaccine policy, but as Ramakumar says, what is needed is an overhaul. Instead of using the powers at its disposal on behalf of the people, the Indian government continues to privilege profit over lives.

Employees work on the production line to make vials of Covishield at the Serum Institute of India’s Hadaspar plant in Pune, Maharashtra, in India, on Jan. 22, 2021.
Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Profiteering as the Public Good

The failures of India’s vaccination drive are reflective of the country’s overall pandemic response, characterized by the government’s strong support of private profiteering. India’s Supreme Court has repeatedly suggested that the central government has the power to speed up the manufacturing of oxygen and other essentials by investing public funds, which Indian cities like Madurai and states like Kerala have done successfully. But not only did the central government do nothing to increase its critically low oxygen capacity, it also allowed India’s industrial oxygen exports to rise by over 700 percent over the course of the pandemic instead of redirecting oxygen production to medical needs. Unsurprisingly, the stock of oxygen corporations like Linde India shot up even as countless people gasped to death.

“The government of India has withdrawn from the central social responsibility of an enlightened welfare state,” Ramakumar told me. “It has also opened the floodgates for a vulgar form of predatory capitalism to take over the stage amid the raging human tragedy.”

Poonawalla has claimed that “even God” couldn’t have foreseen the gravity of the crisis, but India’s pandemic disaster was long foretold. Things did not have to play out this way. India could have had medical supplies, PPE, testing kits, and vaccines ready if public health dictated production and distribution, rather than profits. Wherever vaccines have been administered on a mass scale, it has happened because at key moments of reckoning, public health advocates challenged the profit motive. But in India, profiteering itself masquerades as the public good.

In India, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent.

Pandemics often exacerbate preexisting sociopolitical dynamics, argues Nivedita Saksena, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. India’s current situation is no exception. With a public health system that has been starved of funds for decades, and no viable alternative to for-profit health care, India’s Covid-19 pandemic was bound to become an opportunity for profiteering.

India’s big businesses have even managed to use aid from abroad to make money — which is why private hospitals sold airlifted oxygen cylinders to desperate patients, why vaccine raw materials from the U.S. are being used for disaster profiteering, and why a global patent waiver will likely strengthen the power of Indian Big Pharma.

To win a world where human life is truly valued above profit, we must realize that the small handful of very wealthy people who stand in the way of the public good are dispersed across the world — as much in Pune as in New York City. Their numbers are growing, as is their power within their home countries. In India alone, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent. During the pandemic, Poonawalla’s net worth rose by 85 percent in five months, as tens of millions of Indians descended into poverty. This is not a coincidence, as P. Sainath writes, in “a year when hundreds of millions of Indians were hungrier than they’d been in decades.”

“A wealth ‘surge’ usually rides on a misery surge,” Sainath says. The swelling wallets of India’s health care elites are directly linked to the bodies in the streets. Until we eliminate the profitability of misery, India’s nightmare has no end in sight.

Big Pharma Rip Off

The big name pharma companies like to whine about the need for taxpayer funded R&D funding for research. Research that coincidentally is developed by Canadas post secondary institutions. And they whine about how they need to over-charge for their products cause R&D is so expensive, an ability which was guaranteed them by the Mulroney Conservatives. Now they rip off Canadians by moving their profits offshore, just like the Irvings and Bronfmans, to avoid taxes.

Ottawa claims Merck owes it $2 billion in t tax

Citing sources, the Montreal newspaper La Presse reported that the revenue agency sent Merck Frosst a notice of assessment for $2 billion, the largest in the agency's history. The bill, the newspaper reported, stems from profits Merck Frosst made on the asthma drug Singulair, which was developed in Montreal. Several years ago, the patent for Singulair, along with some of the profits, were transferred to Barbados, the paper said.

It's not like they can't afford to pay what they owe us...

Merck earnings fall but top forecasts

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Merck & Co. reported reduced earnings, but still managed to edge past Wall Street expectations, even though Vioxx-related lawsuits against the company continue to mount.

The drugmaker earned 51 cents a share in the third quarter, excluding a charge for plant closings and staff cuts. That's down from the 65 cents a share of net income a year earlier, but above the 50 cent a share forecast of analysts surveyed by First Call.

Looking forward, the company raised its full-year 2006 earnings guidance slightly, to a range of $2.48 to $2.52 earnings per share.

And while everyone was awaiting the Tories Hot Air Plan the Harpocrites snuck in this legislation that extends the old Mulroney give away to Big Pharma....Canadians to pay more for drugs

New regulations give additional dose of protection to drug companies

OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government quietly unveiled controversial new regulations Wednesday that will extend market protection for some drugs produced by brand name firms in a move critics predict will lead to higher costs for consumers and provinces already facing skyrocketing medicare bills.

The new rules, which took effect earlier this month, increase exclusive selling rights for all brand name drugs to eight years from five, with an additional six months of protection granted to drugs involved in pediatric studies.

The change will affect 25 per cent of manufactured drugs those that are not protected by the usual 20-year patents that exist on the majority of pharmaceuticals.

Changes to Drug Patent Rules Will Drive Up Prescription Drug Costs

Toronto, October 18, 2006 – Changes announced today to Canada’s drug patent rules will drive up prescription drug costs for taxpayers, employers and consumers, Jim Keon, President of the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA) said today. “On whole, regulatory amendments announced today by the federal government will only add to the huge problem of soaring prescription drug costs in Canada,” said Keon. “Big Pharma is the big winner while taxpayers, employers, consumers and Canada’s generic drug makers lose out.” Keon said the federal government’s changes that provide brand-name drug companies with an eight and a half year ban on competition go far beyond the five years required under international trade agreements such as NAFTA and will add hundreds of millions to Canada’s prescription drug bill. “Had the current rules been in place over the past five years, it would have added an additional $600-million to prescription drug costs in Canada,” Keon said.

Opps didn't see that one coming did ya.

Not in a week where the Tories kicked out Garth Turner, kicked out Kyoto and kicked the dog.

See:

The Mulroney Legacy

AIDS


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Novo Nordisk hit with two-year suspension from UK pharma group after online marketing breaches

By Fraiser Kansteiner

Mar 16, 2023 

Before Novo’s membership can be reinstated, the company is on the hook to show it’s charting a “rapid return to industry compliance standards,” ABPI said. (Novo Nordisk)

Last month, Novo Nordisk’s general manager in the U.K. stepped down as president of a national pharma group as the company weathered fallout from an ill-fated LinkedIn campaign. Now, the other shoe has dropped.

Novo has been suspended from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) for two years thanks to “serious breaches” of the organization’s code of practice, ABPI said in a press release Thursday. This marks the eighth time in 40 years ABPI has issued “such a significant sanction,” the group pointed out, specifically chastising Novo for behaviors “likely to bring discredit on, or reduce confidence in, the pharmaceutical industry.’”

Novo’s infractions revolve around a LinkedIn post about an obesity webinar. While the training was sponsored by Novo, the involvement of the company—which sells weight loss drug Saxenda in the U.K.—wasn’t immediately clear. The original complaint leveled against Novo suggested that the LinkedIn post did not say whether the webinar was promotional or non-promotional.

Back in December, the U.K.'s drug marketing regulator, The Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA), reprimanded Novo and several other pharma companies for various code breaches.

PMCPA and its appeal board were so concerned about Novo’s behavior that it reported the company to ABPI for an audit, ultimately prompting Novo's U.K. general manager Pinder Sahota to resign as ABPI president in February.

Novo Nordisk did not immediately respond to Fierce Pharma’s request for comment on the situation.

“The Board expressed significant concern about Novo Nordisk’s compliance activities and the very serious issues identified,” Susan Rienow, ABPI’s president-elect, said in a Thursday statement. Regarding the suspension, she noted “[s]uch measures are never taken lightly, but will ensure a rapid return to industry compliance standards as set out in the ABPI Code of Practice.”

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Before Novo’s membership can be reinstated, the company is on the hook to show it’s charting a “rapid return to industry compliance standards,” ABPI added.

For the time being, Novo will remain beholden to ABPI code and the PMCPA’s jurisdiction, though it won’t be able to access the “wider benefits” of ABPI membership. The Danish drugmaker is temporarily exiled from all ABPI groups, including the organization’s board, and it loses access to “any ABPI information and briefing.”

Late last year, Novo was indicted on 11 violations of ABPI code. Aside from potentially bringing “discredit” upon the industry, the majority of Novo’s breaches related to the company’s failure to adequately outline its involvement in the aforementioned obesity webinar.

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While Novo appears to be at the center of the ABPI scrutiny, it’s far from the only company to enter PMPCA and ABPI’s crosshairs in recent months. Back in December, PMCPA also chastised AstraZeneca, Biogen, Daiichi Sankyo, Lundbeck and UCB for marketing breaches.

As of yet, those other companies don't appear to be experiencing the same level of sanctioning from the national pharma group.

Pfizer the biggest TV drug ad spender at the Oscars, as HHS also spends big on COVID messaging

By Ben AdamsMar 16, 2023 

While pharma and the government spent millions on ads Jimmy Kimmel gave Novo Nordisk's Ozempic some major free publicity. (Disney - ABC Television Group / CC BY-ND 2.0)

While Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Ozempic was the talk of the town, it was Pfizer that spent the most on TV drug ads at this year’s Oscars.

That’s according to new data out from real-time trackers at iSpot.TV, which estimates that the Big Pharma spent $5.7 million on its new COVID-19 drug ad: “If it’s COVID, it’s Paxlovid” during a single Oscars airing on Sunday, March 12.

This put Pfizer, which was also a sponsor of the event, at the top of list of five major companies and one government agency that spent big on TV ads during the biggest event in Hollywood.

Pfizer was also joint second with its second COVID ad of the night: “A Whole Different Ball Game,” featuring, fittingly, a load of celebrities, including P!nk, Questlove, Michael Phelps and Jean Smart.

Pfizer spent $3.8 million on that spot, the exact same figure ViiV Healthcare spent on its HIV PreP drug Apretude’s TV Spot, “Prep Without Pills."

In fourth was an unusual entrant: Not a pharma company, but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its TV Spot, “Updated COVID Protection.”

The agency spent $1.9 million on the 30-second COVID awareness ad that aims, with no pharma branding, to get people to think about signing up for the latest COVID boosters amid “fading protection”.

Last but not least is Novartis and its commercial for breast cancer drug Kisqali “Long Live”. The Big Pharma spent just shy of $1 million on the single spot.

In all we saw $14.2 million spent on these ads for the Oscars but it was, strangely enough, Novo’s Ozempic that took center stage when host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel singled out for one of his jokes, quipping: “When I look around this room, I can’t help but wonder, ‘Is Ozempic right for me?’”

This is a reference to its frequent, off-label use as a weight-loss drug for celebrities. The drug is actually only licensed for diabetes; Novo’s actual weight-loss drug is Wegovy, so the pharma was likely not laughing along.

The Mulroney Legacy

The reason that Canada cannot produce or distribute generic AIDS drugs falls directly in the lap of the Conservative government. The government of Brian Mulroney that is. It was his government that passed legislation allowing the big Pharmaceutical oligopolies to hold exclusive patents for twenty years, which puts a strangle hold on generic drug manufacturers.

The Mulroney legacy of free-trade denies a free market.

The Mulroney government brought in three pro-big pharma laws. In 1987, Bill C-22 was enacted which weakened the government's ability to use licensing arrangements to allow the public greater access to cheaper, Canadian-made generic drugs. In 1993, Bill C-91 was passed, allowing the big pharmaceutical companies, largely based in the U.S., to extend their brand name patent protection from 17 to 20 years. Also, in 1993, amendments were made to the Patent Medicines Regulations Act, giving Health Canada more tools for rejecting generic drug approval besides simply allegations of patent infringement.Big Pharma's Healthcare Fix

From a public policy perspective, the most important and relevant question regarding the pharmaceutical patent regime is whether or not it is serving the interests of Canadians.

Nearly 20 years after the introduction of Bill C-22, which gave brand-name drug companies longer periods of market monopoly, and more than 10 years after the introduction of the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations of Canada’s Patent Act, it is evident that the shift in Canada’s pharmaceutical policy in favour of brand-name drug companies has been a failure in virtually every measurable outcome.

It is clear that nearly 20-years of concessions to the multi-national brand-name pharmaceutical industry by the Government of Canada has not served the interests of Canadians

The Real Story Behind Big Pharma’s R&D Spending in Canada

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AIDS


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CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M BIG PHARMA

South Africa ‘held to ransom’ by big pharma, overcharged for COVID vaccines

J&J, Pfizer charged South Africa between 15 and 33 percent more for COVID vaccine doses, contracts reveal.

A vial of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine

 [File: Robyn Beck/AFP]

By Sumayya Ismail
Published On 6 Sep 2023

Johannesburg, South Africa – Big pharmaceutical companies “bullied” South Africa into signing unfair agreements that forced the country to overpay for COVID-19 vaccines compared with Western nations, according to a nonprofit that lobbied for the details to be released.

The details were revealed on Tuesday in an analysis by the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), a South African NGO campaigning against public health inequality after it won a court bid last month to get the government to release its contracts.

During the height of the pandemic, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) charged South Africa 15 percent more per dose of its COVID vaccine than it charged the European Union, while Pfizer-BioNTech charged South Africa nearly 33 percent more than it reportedly charged the African Union, according to vaccine contracts between the pharmaceutical companies and the government.

“In simple terms, Big Pharma bullied South Africa into these conditions,” HJI director Fatima Hassan told Al Jazeera. “Amid a deadly pandemic, when scarce vaccines were only going to the richest countries, the companies exploited our desperation.”

“Put simply, pharmaceutical companies held us to ransom,” a HJI press release stressed.

(Al Jazeera)

South Africa was liable for payments of at least $734m, HJI said, including advance payments of almost $95m, with no guarantees of timely delivery.

“I wouldn’t say we were bullied, but we were in a catch-22 situation to save lives of South Africans against all odds,” Foster Mohale, spokesperson for South Africa’s Department of Health, told Al Jazeera. “The Department entered into these agreements to secure vaccine doses to protect the lives of South Africans against the deadly virus which claimed more than hundred thousand lives in South Africa.”

Hassan told Al Jazeera. “We hope that more countries will publish their contracts with Big Pharma, so that the world can see how the industry really conducts business.”

‘Pharmaceutical bullying’

The analysis of the documents also showed unfair practices by the Serum Institute of India – which charged South Africa 2.5 times more for a generic version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine than the United Kingdom – and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), which is meant to improve equitable access to vaccines.

Gavi gave no guarantees to South Africa about the number of doses it would receive, or the delivery date, HJI said, but South Africa remained liable to pay for everything it ordered – even after it had to order more doses directly from pharmaceutical companies when Gavi failed to deliver.

The HJI criticised “the pernicious nature of pharmaceutical bullying and Gavi’s heavy-handedness”, saying that “the terms and conditions are overwhelmingly one-sided and favour multinational corporations”.

It said the “most egregious example” of this was J&J, which traded supplies under “extractionist terms and conditions”. J&J charged South Africa $10 per dose while the EU reportedly paid $8.50, and non-profits paid $7.50.

However, Kafi Mojapelo, a spokesperson for J&J, told Al Jazeera the number was “incorrect” and “no customer paid more than $7.50 for our single-dose vaccine”.

“Johnson & Johnson … supplied our vaccine to South Africa at our final global price of $7.50 per dose, transferred our technology to Aspen Pharmacare in Gqeberha to enable the local fill and finish of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine and later enabled Aspen to manufacture, market and sell its own COVID-19 vaccine, ‘Aspenovax’,” a statement from the company said.

On Pfizer’s pricing, HJI said the company was “equally problematic” and “extracted over the top concessions” from South Africa, which had to pay it $40m in advance, half of it non-refundable. Pfizer also charged $10 a dose, but it charged the AU $6.75. The company is yet to respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment on the matter.

“It is unconscionable, imperial and unethical,” HJI said.

The contracts also stipulated that South Africa needed to get permission from the pharmaceutical companies if it wanted to donate or sell doses it had already paid for.

“Frankly, in a global pandemic this is paternalistic and imperialist, harms public health programming and deliberately reduces the autonomy of African states,” HJI said.

It highlighted the “deference to and fear of pharmaceutical power” and said that a regional and global solution as well as a “legally binding international agreement” was needed to solve the problem before future pandemics.

Another Capitalist Myth

Another myth about competition lowering costs to consumers bites the dust. Give business a break and they will take it, while still screwing you and me.

And while our prices are cheaper than in the U.S. you and I are in effect subsidizing generic drug manufacturers in Canada.

Oh yes and don't forget that the largest increase in health care costs is drugs.

The benefits of strong competition in Canada's generic drug sector are not finding their way into consumers' pocketbooks, Canada's Competition Bureau said in a report released on Monday.

The report found that one of the reasons generic drugs are more expensive in Canada than other countries is the existence of a rebate system that discourages pharmacies from passing along savings to customers.

In most of Canada's provinces, drug manufacturers compete with each other by offering pharmacies rebates of an average 40 percent off the invoice price as an incentive for the retailers to choose their products, the bureau said.

But the rebates are typically not reflected in the prices that consumers pay for drugs.

"They're giving (pharmacies) a break," Commissioner of Competition Sheridan Scott said in response to reporters' questions at a press conference. "That's a normal thing. The question is, why is the money staying at the pharmacy level."

The study found that the rebate system gives manufacturers little incentive to compete through lower prices.

And these are the same guys who whine about unfair competition from the Big Pharma establishment. They are as much a part of Big Pharma as the established drug companies. Horse of a different colour.

SEE:

Merck Tax Rip Off

Big Pharma Rip Off

The Mulroney Legacy

Profits Up Jobs Cut

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Successful GOP repeal of Obamacare would give the richest Americans a massive tax break: report


Published on October 6, 2020 By Common Dreams

Justice Brett Kavanaugh and President Donald Trump at U.S. Supreme Court investiture ceremony (White House photo)

New research released Tuesday shows that if the Supreme Court next month sides with the Trump administration and 18 state attorneys general seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act, more than 20 million people would lose health insurance and millions more would be forced to pay more for healthcare—in the middle of a pandemic—while Big Pharma and the richest 0.1% would enjoy major tax cuts.

“The stakes in this case, always extraordinarily high”—wrote Tara Straw and Aviva Aron-Dine in one of several reports (pdf) published this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)—”are even higher now amidst a global pandemic and an economic crisis that has caused more people to lose health insurance and become eligible for help from the ACA.”

Last week, President Donald Trump claimed on Twitter that a Supreme Court decision striking down the ACA “would be a big WIN for the USA!” Trump said that he would replace “Obamacare” with something “MUCH better,” but another new report (pdf) from CBPP shows that “none of the supposed alternatives to the ACA offered by the Trump administration or congressional Republicans” would protect people with pre-existing conditions.

Countering Trump’s assertion that eliminating the ACA would be a national victory, economist and former labor secretary Robert Reich explained exactly which class of Americans would win and who would lose were the law to be repealed during a pandemic and recession.

If Trump gets the Supreme Court to strike down ACA, the richest 0.1% would get a tax cut $198,000 a year. Big Pharma would get a tax cut of $2.8 billion.

But millions of seniors would pay billions more for prescription drugs. And 20 million would lose their health insurance.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) October 6, 2020

“While the legal arguments against the law are extremely weak,” Straw and Aron-Dine explained, the Republican Party’s efforts to overturn the ACA have been given a boost by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the president’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, “who has been critical of the Supreme Court’s reasoning for upholding the ACA in prior cases.”

The GOP-led Senate has made expediting Barrett’s confirmation a priority, even as an overwhelming majority of voters have indicated that they would prefer for Congress to pass an economic relief package, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell also recommended Tuesday hours before Trump announced that he was postponing stimulus negotiations until after the election.

A disgrace: McConnell has been blocking COVID relief for 144 days but will help Trump confirm Barrett to a lifetime Supreme Court seat where she can invalidate the ACA amid the pandemic. Cruel and dangerous. Stacking the courts and entrenching power is truly all they care about. https://t.co/mmFjL12Kf3
— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) October 6, 2020

According to Straw and Aron-Dine, overturning the ACA “was expected to cause 20 million people to lose coverage” prior to the economic crisis. “If the law were struck down during a recession… millions more would likely lose coverage… with commensurately larger impacts on access to care, financial security, health outcomes, and racial disparities in coverage and access to care.”

Repealing the ACA in the midst of a pandemic “would also impede efforts to address the public health crisis,” Straw and Aron-Dine wrote, and the elimination of “the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions could make it harder for the more than 7 million people who’ve had COVID to obtain affordable, comprehensive coverage in the future.”

Not only would striking down the ACA directly harm tens of millions of Americans “covered through the ACA marketplaces or benefiting from its protections for people with pre-existing conditions,” explained CBPP senior policy analyst Jessica Schubel, but it would cause additional damage by disrupting Medicare and “jeopardizing states’ ability to administer their Medicaid programs even for those who remain eligible.”

In contrast to all of the ways that a successful GOP repeal of the ACA would hurt working class Americans by undermining their access to healthcare amid the coronavirus crisis, millionaires and Big Pharma would stand to pocket massive amounts of cash.

“This doesn’t get the attention it should,” tweeted CBPP senior health policy fellow Judy Solomon. “If the Trump administration succeeds in overturning the ACA, not only will millions lose health coverage, but millionaires will get big tax cuts.”

This doesn't get the attention it should. If Trump Administration succeeds in overturning #ACA not only will millions lose health coverage, but millionaires will get big tax cuts. https://t.co/qjRaDSiQFa
— Judy Solomon (@JudyCBPP) October 6, 2020

According to CBPP, if the ACA is struck down, the highest-income households in the country would be given a “windfall.” The richest 0.1% of households, whose annual incomes are greater than $3 million, would receive tax cuts averaging nearly $200,000 per year, while households with annual incomes over $1 million would receive tax cuts averaging over $40,000 per year.

The cost to the federal government of tax cuts for households with annual incomes over $200,000 would be $30 billion in 2020, which is more than one-third of the cost of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults—enough to “pay for health coverage for over four million people.”

Other beneficiaries of an ACA repeal would be pharmaceutical companies, which would pay $2.8 billion less in taxes each year. Big Pharma’s victory would come at the expense of millions of seniors who would pay billions more each year for prescription drugs.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that many wealthy Americans rushed to file claims for refunds of ACA taxes paid in previous years in case the Supreme Court invalidates the law.

With Trump out of the hospital Monday and still battling his own Covid-19 infection, Reich provided a reminder that “our tax-dodging billionaire president is getting publicly-funded healthcare while his lawyers are in court trying to rip yours away.”

by Kenny Stancil