Drug giants fined $11bn for criminal wrongdoing

Drug giants fined $11bn for criminal wrongdoing




The global pharmaceutical industry has racked up fines of more than
$11bn in the past three years for criminal wrongdoing, including
withholding safety data and promoting drugs for use beyond their
licensed conditions.



In all, 26 companies, including eight of the 10 top players in the
global industry, have been found to be acting dishonestly. The scale of
the wrongdoing, revealed for the first time, has undermined public and
professional trust in the industry and is holding back clinical
progress, according to two papers published in today's New England
Journal of Medicine. Leading lawyers have warned that the
multibillion-dollar fines are not enough to change the industry's
behaviour.
The 26 firms are under "corporate integrity
agreements", which are imposed in the US when healthcare wrongdoing is
detected, and place the companies on notice for good behaviour for up to
five years.
The largest fine of $3bn, imposed on the UK-based
company GlaxoSmith-Kline in July after it admitted three counts of
criminal behaviour in the US courts, was the largest ever. But GSK is
not alone – nine other companies have had fines imposed, ranging from
$420m on Novartis to $2.3bn on Pfizer since 2009, totalling over $11bn.
Kevin
Outterson, a lawyer at Boston University, says that despite the eye
watering size of the fines they amount to a small proportion of the
companies' total revenues and may be regarded as a "cost of doing
business". The $3bn fine on GSK represents 10.8 per cent of its revenue
while the $1.5bn fine imposed on Abbott Laboratories, for promoting a
drug (Depakote) with inadequate evidence of its effectiveness, amounted
to 12 per cent.
Mr Outterson said: "Companies might well view such
fines as a quite small percentage of their global revenue. If so,
little has been done to change the system. The government merely recoups
a portion of the financial fruit of firms' past misdeeds."
He
argues that penalties should be imposed on executives rather than the
company as whole. He cites a Boston whistleblower attorney, Robert
Thomas who observed that GSK had committed a $1bn crime and "no
individual has been held responsible".
Following GSK's admission
that it had withheld safety data about its best-selling diabetes drug
Avandia, the company pledged to make more clinical trial information
available. But the pledge has "disturbing exceptions", according to Mr
Outterson, and in any case is made under the corporate integrity
agreement, which expires in five years.
Trust in the industry
among doctors has fallen so low that they dismiss clinical trials funded
by it, even when the trials have been conducted with scientific rigour,
according to a second paper in the journal by researchers at Brigham
and Women's Hospital, Boston. This could have serious implications
because most medical research is funded by the drug industry and "if
physicians are reluctant to trust all such research, it could hinder the
translation of … research into practice," said Aaron Kesselheim, who
led the study.
Andrew Witty, the chief executive of GSK, said at
the time of the $3bn settlement last July that it had resolved
"difficult, long-standing matters" for the company and that there had
since been a "fundamental change in procedures" including the removal of
staff engaged in misconduct and changes to incentive payments.
The
Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry said practices in
the industry had improved and more changes to "build greater levels of
trust" would be made. The UK Medicines and Healthcare Products
Regulatory Agency said it monitored the conduct of companies and took
"appropriate action" when it uncovered malpractice.
Alzheimer's funding 'must continue'
Governments,
universities and charities should step in to ensure funding is
maintained for research into Alzheimer's disease, following a series of
failed drug trials, experts said yesterday.
They were responding to a report in The Independent
that the world's leading drug companies are giving up on the search for
a cure, scaling back their neuroscience departments and focusing on
symptomatic, rather than disease-modifying, treatments.
A
spokesman for the Alzheimer's Society said: "This is not the time to
back away from dementia research. Despite costing the economy more than
cancer and heart disease, funding for research into dementia is only a
fraction of these conditions. More funding is urgently needed if we are
to defeat it."
Jeremy Laurance


Source:-
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/drug-giants-fined-11bn-for-criminal-wrongdoing-8157483.html