Dealing Boldly with Big Pharma
By Phil Mattera for the Dirt Diggers Digest
Three days after Donald Trump took
office in 2017, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America trade
association launched a multimillion campaign to
bolster its image in the face of criticism from across the political spectrum
of exorbitant drug price hikes.
Under the banner of Go Boldly, PhRMA
sought to persuade lawmakers and the public that biopharmaceutical producers
were doing great things to improve our quality of life and were not just
price-gouging crooks.
Two years later, the campaign is
still in operation, apparently because the public has not been won over. That’s
not surprising, given that Big Pharma is still behaving badly.
Relieved that the Trump
Administration’s drug cost initiative turned out to be toothless, major drug
makers are implementing new rounds of price increases.
Promoting the idea that the industry is preoccupied with innovation is also being made more difficult by the announcement that Bristol-Myers Squibb is seeking to spend $74 billion to acquire rival Celgene. The deal would unite two companies that each have been struggling with their cancer treatments.
Bristol’s Opdivo drug has been
losing ground to Merck’s Keytruda while Celgene has been experiencing setbacks
in clinical trials and is facing a patent expiration in 2022 for its major
product Revlimid. A marriage of the two companies would serve mainly as an
excuse to eliminate jobs and raise prices, while doing little that would
benefit patients.
The merger would also bring together
two companies that have checkered legal and regulatory track records.
According to Violation Tracker, Bristol has racked up
nearly $1 billion in fines and settlements for a wide range of offenses.
These include a $515 million
settlement with the Justice Department of allegations relating to drug
marketing and pricing; a $150 million settlement with the SEC concerning
accounting fraud; a $14 million settlement of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
allegations; and a $3.6 million settlement of Clean Air Act violations.
It has also faced criminal charges,
including one case in which it paid $300 million and got a deferred prosecution
agreement to resolve allegations of accounting manipulation and another in
which it pled guilty to lying to the federal government during an investigation
of a secret agreement to thwart a generic competitor to its blood thinner
Plavix.
For its part, Celgene paid $280 million in 2017 to resolve
allegations that it promoted two cancer drugs for uses not approved by the Food
and Drug Administration.
The prospect of one ethically
challenged and market weakened drug company paying $74 billion to acquire
another is emblematic of what is wrong with the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.
It provides additional justification
for aggressive reforms such as the bill introduced by Bernie Sanders and Ro
Khanna that would allow the federal government to authorize generic
alternatives to overpriced drug or the proposal by Elizabeth Warren and Jan
Schakowsky that the federal government itself produce generic alternatives
under certain circumstances.
If we want to Go Boldly, let’s do it
with alternatives that empower patients not drugmakers.