Who are the bad guys again?

Pfizer agrees record fraud fine

US drugmaker Pfizer has agreed to pay $2.3bn (£1.4bn) in the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice.

The civil settlement also relates to allegations that Pfizer paid bribes to healthcare providers to induce them to prescribe four named drugs.

Hmmm. That rings a bell. Could this be the same Pfizer who have been paying Warwickshire PCT to prescribe their nicotine replacement drugs, as reported here in July, despite their being linked to numerous suicides and reports of induced depression? I think it might be, you know.

ASH like to bang on about those big nasty evil tobacco companies, yet appear blissfully happy to engage with the likes of Pfizer, who, as the article shows, are not averse to indulging in illegality when there are a few bucks in it for them.

So, who are the bad guys again?

All about health, is it?

This report from the New York Times is very worrying.

Suicide Warning Issued for 2 Anti-Smoking Drugs

WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators warned Wednesday that patients taking two popular anti-smoking drugs should be watched closely for signs of serious mental illness, as reported suicides among the drugs’ users mount.

Very worrying indeed.

Between the two drugs, Chantix and Zyban, the FDA have received 112 confirmed reports of completed suicides (ie real, confirmed, deaths), and 205 reports of attempted suicides.

In the interests of risk-prevention, these drugs must be withdrawn immediately, surely?

But officials emphasized that patients should not be scared away from taking the smoking-cessation medicines, Chantix, made by Pfizer, and Zyban, made by GlaxoSmithKline.

Of course not. Health authorities in the US, and over here, are balls deep in financial agreements with these pharmaceutical companies. It is impossible for them to act in the public interest due to the sponsorship and contracts to which they are tied.

A perfect UK example is Warwickshire PCT, which I talked about here recently (note: Chantix is marketed in the UK as Champix).

Contact 1: Plan strategy for quitting, including assessment for drug therapy including carbon monoxide test, access to nicotine replacement therapy, Zyban® or Champix®

Contact 2: Possible quit date
Ensure access to NRT, Zyban® or Champix®. Carbon monoxide test

And Warks PCT aggressively promote these these drugs, why?

Joint working with Pfizer around targeting of clinics/drop-ins

Joint working with Pfizer to develop more effective recruitment campaigns in N&B, also targeting health professionals to refer more and more effectively.

Can you guess why Pfizer want more effective referrals, boys and girls?

Meanwhile, back in the US.

The F.D.A. required Pfizer and Glaxo to place so-called black box warnings — the agency’s most serious caution — on the prescribing information for both drugs. Both companies will be required to conduct clinical trials to assess the mental health risks associated with the drugs’ uses.

In the clinical trial ordered by the F.D.A., manufacturers must assess risks among those with identified psychiatric disorders, because mental health problems are associated with high rates of smoking.

So, let's get this straight. The FDA have identified smoking as being associated with mental health problems, yet are not withdrawing a product which has been proven to exacerbate, or even cause, mental health problems and suicide.

Stinks, don't it?

That universally welcomed smoking ban again

Gamblers don't seem to think it's that great, either.

Smoking Ban Nearing An End? UKIP's General Election Odds Slashed

UKIP could gain a massive boost from smokers in the next General Election as they are the only main political party to have stated in their manifesto that they intend to repeal the highly Unpopular Smoking Ban which has closed thousands of pubs, clubs and bingo halls throughout the UK.

William Hill have opened a book on whether Labour or UKIP (UK Independence Party) win most seats at the Euro Elections and make UKIP 5/4 (2.25) favourites with Labour 11/8 (2.37) and a tie 11/4 (3.75), indicating further that smokers and tolerant non-smokers have been spreading the word about UKIP's policy.

It has long been argued that pubs, clubs, etc. should have the right to determine their own smoking policy. Independent evidence and statistics indicate that smoking bans INCREASE, rather than decrease, the number of smokers - the likely reason being that the general public do not appreciate being told what to do by a nanny-state Government.

To date, neither The Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties have announced any planned changes to the smoking ban.

Looks like the Tories and the Lib Dems are backing the wrong horse. 12 million smokers are a hell of a lot of voters to mess with.

Perhaps one or other of the parties might one day join the bookies in slashing the odds on a return to common sense and a repeal of the smoking ban, but then just as one will never meet a poor bookie, you'll also find it difficult to find a strapped politician recently.

The difference is that bookies deal in hard facts, they have to in order to turn a profit, whilst politicians (especially Labour) lie.

Still, the bookies have insured themselves against disaster, they are generally very astute at such practices. Politicians are a different matter entirely, it will take being voted into oblivion before they notice that they have been listening to bullshit and lies from the healthist minority.

They'll wake up one day, but meanwhile let's just revel in the fact that we have one less corrupt shit to deal with.

She is already paid between £45,000 and £50,000 a year as a consultant to the Boots chain of pharmacies, according to the House of Commons Register of Members' Interests.

She also pockets between £55,000 and £60,000 as an adviser to Cinven, which paid £1.4billion for Bupa's UK hospitals and runs 25 private care facilities in Britain.

Thanks for the smoking ban Ms Hewitt, I hope one day that the people you have put on the dole queue in order to increase your payout from your pharma paymasters, come to your house and burgle everything they can lay their hands on.

It would help tackle 'health inequalities', don't you think?

Back to the future

Referencing newspeak in the title, The Heresiarch has written an interesting piece on the rapid advancement of the destruction of our freedoms. It's worth a read in its entirety, but here is a taster.

The Sunday Times yesterday carried an interview with the historian Richard Overy, whose book on the Thirties (The Morbid Age) suggests parallels with our own fractious era. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Overy left the Labour party in 1997, when Blair was elected prime minister, and now describes himself as a nonaligned member of the (nonexistent) sceptical party. His central political position — which is not really right or left — is that we need to resist the overweening claims of the state. “We are rapidly moving towards a society that is dominated by people in uniform. The state’s claims are increasingly absolute. That’s happened in a very, very brief period of time. We are in danger of creating a worse situation than the one we are fearful about.”

A brief period of time. That's not something we hear very much. The usual language for the coming of the surveillance state - which most now recognise, and which some still welcome, though opposition is steadily increasing - is gradualist. The erosion of liberty. The salami-slicing of freedoms. A frog placed in lukewarm water that is slowly brought to the boil (Shami Chakrabarti's favourite metaphor). Function creep. Sleepwalking into a dystopian future of total state oversight. And so forth.

But it's not really that slow and gradual, if you think about it.

I think we at F2C can attest to that.

Remember, though, that we were warning others prior to our guinea pigdom, that they would also fall foul of the state-funded righteous lobby.

We were correct, of course, and now the new targets are ... err ... just about anyone who enjoys life. Not survives it. Lives it.

Starved as the country has been, by equality legislation (and there is nothing wrong with that), of groups to arbitrarily hate, the natural human urge to condescend and deride a minority has been directed towards those who were previously just, well, average Joes.

It is ochlocracy (mob rule) writ large and proscribed by government. The unclean are valid targets of ridicule and marginalisation.

The 'denormalised' have never been so 'unclean'. Minorities are now off-limits unless they are bon-viveurs, in which case, anything goes.

And, as The Hersiarch says, this hasn't happened slice by slice. It hasn't happened since 1997 when Labour, the instigators, were elected. It has happened suddenly over the past 3 years. A rumbling from Labour became a rancid fucking crusade. A charge against anyone who disagrees with the life that Labour have dicated should be lived. The life that the organisations which our runaway Department of Health have decided, in partnership with their chums in the highly-funded pharmaceutical industry, should be the norm.

It's not done for our benefit. It is done for profit, pure and simple.

And coupled with the profit, is the control it also affords our leaders. Control that they are too irresponsible to handle. Their solution is to watch our every move, to scare us when we don't want to be scared, to belittle us when they weren't elected for that purpose, and to do everything in their power to make sure that we don't walk up to the front gates of parliament and black their eyes with a heavy object.

It used to be the salami slice, but has turned into the mad chopping of a power-crazy administration drunk on power and influence.

It's time the stampede was halted. There are similarities with righteous bandwagon jumping 70 years ago, and it's time it was stopped and even, dare we say it, rolled back. Read Heresy Corner for the lowdown.

And this is science?

This is one to spread far and wide. Gawain Towler of UKIP calmly nails the current anti-smoker lies.

E-mail it to your friends, and while you're at it, ask them if they can any more be certain that what they read in the papers hasn't been manipulated, and that biased and non-scientific methods aren't being used in other areas of their lives.

Let's wake some sheep up.

Broken Promises? Yes, We Can

Straying across the pond for a moment, how about this sleight of hand from Barack Obama?

Barack Obama made no secret of his feelings for "Washington lobbyists" during the campaign and vowed that they wouldn't be staffing his White House.

Then he appointed some.

* Melody Barnes, lobbyist for American Civil Liberties Union, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the American Constitution Society and the Center for Reproductive Rights.
* William Corr, lobbyist for Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids,
* Patrick Gaspard, lobbyist for Service Employees International Union.
* David Hayes, lobby San Diego Gas & Electric.
* Eric Holder, attorney general nominee, lobbyist for bankrupt Global Crossing telecommications.
* Ron Klain, lobbyist for Asbestos Resolution, U.S. Airways, Airborne Express and drug-maker ImClone.
* William Lynn, lobbyist for Raytheon.
* Cecilia Munoz, lobbyist for National Council of La Raza
* Mark Patterson, lobbyist for Goldman Sachs.
* Mona Sutphen, lobbyist for Angliss International.
* Michael Strautmanis, lobbied for the American Association of Justice.
* Tom Vilsack, lobbyist for NEA.

The latest signing has attracted the attention of the New York Times.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says lobbyists won't run his administration, but he picked an antitobacco lobbyist with ties to the pharmaceutical industry as the No. 2 official at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The nomination of William Corr -- former executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, where he was a registered lobbyist until September -- highlights the murkiness of Mr. Obama's antilobbyist policy.

Mr. Obama requires employees to sign a pledge stating they will not "participate in any particular matter on which I lobbied within the two years before the date of my appointment." Those rules prohibit Mr. Corr from working on tobacco issues, the White House says.

So what will he be advising on?

Mr. Corr has spent a career working on health-care policy at HHS and on Capitol Hill, including a stint with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. At a confirmation hearing Thursday, senators called Mr. Corr an old friend and didn't ask about his ties to the drug industry. The Senate is expected to confirm his nomination this week.

At the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, one of Mr. Corr's jobs was pushing legislation to give HHS the authority to regulate tobacco. A measure to do so passed the House and will be considered by the Senate this year.

In the past five years, the drug industry has contributed $3.3 million, amounting to 3.2% of the Campaign's funding, said spokesman Vince Willmore.

Most of the money was donated by GlaxoSmithKline PLC, which has contributed nearly $3 million since 2004, according to Campaign records. Pfizer Inc. donated $385,000 since 2007 and Johnson & Johnson gave $50,000 for an award in 2008 and 2009.

Well, I guess it will be exactly what he has been paid for.

I think we know where this is going, don't we? Big pharma exercising their muscles once the inconvenient voters have been soft-soaped into believing a barrowload of lies.

Yet still these illiberal morons continue to push the hypothesis that it's only tobacco companies who are evil, domineering porkie-tellers.

When anyone counters anti-tobacco lies, they are deemed to be in the pay of tobacco (I've even been accused myself) to dilute their argument. Yet, if they are paid by pharma, they are given a nice office, a pair of comfy slippers, and a guiding hand on the tiller of the country.

Fuck the electorate. Fuck what was promised before the election. Socialism relies on lies or else it doesn't hold water.

Good luck with the chosen one, America. I don't know how to soften the blow here but ... you've been screwed up the 'arris with a broken bottle.

Once the BBC have come down from the huge collective climax they experienced in November, they might report this, you never know.