"Diagnosis: Greed" (NYT Judith Warner)

[Mort Zuckerman]

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Subject: "Diagnosis: Greed" (NYT Judith Warner)

Date: Oct 10, 2008 4:53 AM

And everyday I beech, and none of the people copied
in here lifts a finger and they haven't for nearly
8 years, since I first explained to the FDA how Lyme
and LYMErix were FRAUD:
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/01/slides/3680s2_11.pdf

We still can't get the FDA or USDOJ to investigate
whether or not there were two diagnostic standards
for Lyme, even though Blumenthal's office understands
it (and they're lawyers).

As we know, it's not just a matter of understanding it,
but, like everything else in this country, the biggest
porkers (Black welfare queens) are the government employees,
themselves. It's mainly the CDC, covering up for the
crimes of their own staff, like Alan Barbour and Allen Steere.

The CDC doesn't actually care if Lyme/Borreliosis has become
a pandemic.

AND, oddly, Crazy Eddie McSweegan is still on the NIH
payroll, despite his ridiculous notion that there could
ever be a vaccine against Relapsing Fever:
http://www.actionlyme.org/GOLDWATER_LETTER.htm

The government never hired a stupider scientist. There has
NEVER been anything close to that kind of stupidity. McSweegan
did not even understand why Borreliae were called "Relapsing
Fever" organisms. No one can figure out how he ever got
a degree in microbiology. At that time, URI must have been
the equivalent of the Wily E. Coyote Mail-Order ACME Academy
of STUPID SCIENCE.
http://www.actionlyme.org/RICOCHRON.htm


Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.relapsingfever.org

===================================================

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/diagnosis-greed/

October 9, 2008, 9:00 pm
Diagnosis: Greed

For a break from the news of the financial meltdown, The Times on
Saturday offered
a page one story about Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, a prominent
psychiatrist at Emory
University, who violated federal research rules regarding conflicts of
interest
and made millions of dollars consulting for the pharmaceutical
industry.

Yet the story of Nemeroff, who earned $2.8 million in fees from 2000
to 2007, and
had at one point consulted for 21 drug and device companies
simultaneously, wasn’t
really a departure from the news of the week – or of this whole
benighted era –
at all.

It was, rather, yet another iteration of the ever-unfolding saga of
greed and how
the deregulation of absolutely everything has brought our country to
this painful
season of reckoning. Because Nemeroff’s story – which is hardly unique
– belongs
uniquely to this time in our nation’s history.

It is a product of legislative and cultural changes that have altered
the practice
of medicine, the work of research universities and the relationship
between those
universities and industry. And it is marked, like so much of what’s
gone off the
rails in our era, by the failure of our government to step in to
protect citizens.

Nemeroff didn’t bring down any banks, didn’t freeze the American
credit markets,
hasn’t plunged the world economy into recession. But his extensive,
excessive and
untransparent ties to the pharmaceutical industry are all too common,
unfortunately,
among his cohort of “thought leaders” in psychiatry and other medical
specialties.
And these relationships have led to a dangerous crisis of confidence
in the basic
integrity and validity of America’s medical research.

Nemeroff’s case, which has many twists and turns involving allegations
of conflicts
of interest and nondisclosure of payments going back over the years,
is only the
latest to issue from the office of Senator Charles E. Grassley.

Grassley, Republican of Iowa, patron saint of whistleblowers, would-be
regulator
of hedge funds and now-seemingly prescient critic of the Securities
and Exchange
Commission, has, since this past spring, been investigating drug
makers’ payments
to prominent psychiatrists whose research bears the imprimatur of
prestigious universities
that frequently receive federal grant money. In June, his office
reported that Dr.
Joseph Biederman and Dr. Timothy Wilens, psychiatrists at Harvard
Medical School,
under-reported earnings of more than $1.6 million each from drug
makers, possibly
in violation of federal and university rules. More recently, Grassley
raised conflict-of-interest
allegations concerning Dr. Alan Schatzberg, the chairman of the
psychiatry department
at Stanford and the incoming president of the American Psychiatric
Association,
who is said to have controlled more than $6 million worth of stock in
a company
while serving as lead investigator on a study involving one of that
company’s products.

And these cases are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Conflicts
of interest
between the pharmaceutical industry and prominent research physicians
now “permeate
the clinical research enterprise,” writes Dr. Marcia Angell, author of
the 2004
book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies,” in the Sept. 3 issue of
The Journal
of the American Medical Association.

In one review that Angell cites, about two-thirds of academic medical
centers had
financial stakes in companies that sponsored research within their
facilities. In
another study, two-thirds of medical school department chairs were
found to receive
departmental income, and three-fifths received personal income, from
drug companies.

Scientists in government agencies aren’t above suspicion, either:
Angell cites a
study of 200 government panels that issued practice guidelines, which
found that
more than a third of the authors had some financial interest in drugs
they recommended.
And “perhaps most importantly,” she writes, many members of 16
standing committees
that advise the Food and Drug Administration on drug approvals also
have financial
ties to drug companies. “Although these individuals are supposed to
recuse themselves
from participating in decisions about drugs made by specific companies
with which
they have a financial relationship, that requirement is frequently
waived by F.D.A.
authorities,” Angell writes.

Universities have all kinds of conflict-of-interest rules too, of
course, as do
the National Institutes of Health, which hand out grant money to
researchers. But
the federal government counts on universities and researchers to
police themselves,
and I think we know all too well from recent events on Wall Street
where self-regulation
leads.

The upshot: No one can be trusted. “Not only do the researchers have
the complete
conflicts of interests, but the medical schools and the universities
do too,” Angell
told me this week in a telephone interview. “The Biedermans, the
Schatzbergs, they’re
rainmakers for the institutions. It’s a broken system.”

How did all this happen?

It’s a familiar story: About three decades ago, it became possible to
make serious
money as a university researcher. Not that the money was so bad
before, of course.
It was respectable. But it wasn’t Wall Street-type money.

That changed in the early 1980s with the passage of legislation that
allowed universities
to patent their publicly funded research results and then grant
exclusive licenses
to pharmaceutical companies. The public-private wall came down. The
universities
received royalties on the drugs, and the royalties were split between
the researchers
and the departments. Start-up companies were spun off and sold.
University researchers
became, essentially, partners to industry.

The change wasn’t just structural, however. There was a cultural
shift, a kind of
boundary melt.

“Greed became respectable,” Angell, a professor of global health and
social medicine
at Harvard Medical School and the former editor in chief of The New
England Journal
of Medicine, recalled. “There used to be a sort of tension between
doing well and
doing good for medical researchers. If they wanted to make a lot of
money in a high-risk
sort of job they could work for industry. If they wanted to do
important, exciting
research they stayed in academia and they had a comfortable life but
not great wealth.

“Before 1980, they were aware of this tension,” she said. “Before
1980, those who
went into industry were held in some disdain. With Reagan, all this
changed. There
was a strong feeling that the world divided into winners and losers.
In medical
research this just has had enormous implications.”

It’s had enormous implications for our world generally. On Wall
Street, change had
to come via catastrophe. Let’s hope it won’t take a disaster to bring
sense back
to medicine.