NYT on "Foreign Corrupt Practices" (incorrect)
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: NYT on "Foreign Corrupt Practices" (incorrect)
Date: Aug 14, 2010 4:59 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
=======================================
Well, "Lyme Disease" is clearly False
Claims and RICO.
Allen Steere (CDC officer) made the false
claim with scientific fraud in Europe
alone:
http://www.actionlyme.org/STEERE_IN_EUROPE.htm
with the bogus "high-passage" strains and
recombinant OspA-B with NO LIPID ATTACHED
(not likely to produce antibodies without
the lipid moeities attached).
And, as I told the FDA Vaccine committee,
no one among the *invited* labs (to the
Dearborn conference) agreed with Steere's
crazy proposal:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.diseases.lyme/browse_thread/thread/cfd279c2912bad9c?hl=en#
- -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act
"The Act establishes liability when any person or entity improperly
receives from or avoids payment to the Federal government—tax fraud
excepted. In summary, the Act prohibits:
1. Knowingly presenting, or causing to be presented a false claim for
payment or approval;
2. Knowingly making, using, or causing to be made or used, a false
record or statement material to a false or fraudulent claim;
3. Conspiring to commit any violation of the False Claims Act;
4. Falsely certifying the type or amount of property to be used by the
Government;
5. Certifying receipt of property on a document without completely
knowing that the information is true;
6. Knowingly buying Government property from an unauthorized officer
of the Government, and;
7. Knowingly making, using, or causing to be made or used a false
record to avoid, or decrease an obligation to pay or transmit property
to the Government.
- - -
The Lyme crymes are easier to prosecute
under False Claims and RICO, although the
Yale-UConn PEDIATRIC CRIMINAL LYME TRIAL took
place in the Czech Republic:
http://www.actionlyme.org/UCONNS_ABUSE_OF_CZECH_CHILDREN.htm
And why is Lyme RICO?
Because only Imugen and Yale's L2 Diagnostics
were partnered with Corixa to use the RICO
method. This is in evidence in the US Attorney's
orifice in New Haven, CT, but since the filing of
the RICO complaint, Corixa was purchased by SmithKline:
http://www.actionlyme.org/CORIXARICO.htm
Either this NYT article is wrong or the FBI is lying
because the FBI and the USDOJ has heard from me at
least 200,000 times:
http://www.actionlyme.org/USDOJ_COMPLAINT_RICO.htm
They never follow up on anything.
Think about it: They're cops. Cops are even
more stupid, paranoid, arrogant and unable to
think outside the box than lawyers. They're
as pitifully dense as an addict. It's the
same *DISORDER* of the *mind* to think you're
better than everyone else and therefore don't
have to think.
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.relapsingfever.org
=========================================================================================
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/health/policy/14drug.html?adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1281774183-jpRd43IF8ahuhnYZAREYUw
August 13, 2010
U.S. Inquiry of Drug Makers Is Widened
By GARDINER HARRIS and NATASHA SINGER
At least a dozen major drug and device makers are under investigation
by federal prosecutors and securities regulators in a broadening
bribery inquiry into whether the companies made illegal payments to
doctors and health officials in foreign countries.
In previous investigations, federal officials have charged that some
companies made these kinds of payments to encourage doctors abroad to
order or prescribe their products. In the United States, companies
routinely hire doctors as consultants to market drugs and devices to
their colleagues and other health professionals at medical conventions
and small gatherings. Such consulting arrangements are legal in the
United States as long as the companies do not pay doctors directly to
write prescriptions for their products.
But in much of the rest of the world, doctors are government
employees. And even consulting arrangements that would be considered
routine in the United States might violate the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act, particularly if the payments are outsize or the
arrangements are not disclosed to the governments.
Of even greater concern to prosecutors in the United States are
unusually large payments made to foreign doctors who oversee the
growing number of clinical trials that drug and device makers conduct
abroad, according to Kirk Ogrosky, a former top federal prosecutor who
now represents drug and device makers at a Washington law firm.
More than 80 percent of the drugs approved for sale in 2008 involved
trials in foreign countries, and 78 percent of all people who
participated in clinical trials were enrolled at foreign sites,
according to a recent investigation by Daniel R. Levinson, the
inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Medical ethicists have long worried that many of these trials are
conducted in countries that federal auditors rarely visit and where
research controls may be scant.
Now, prosecutors are investigating whether the payments made to
doctors who conducted these studies abroad were appropriate. If
evidence shows that such payments have influenced the results of some
clinical trials, prosecutors will be inspecting the trials closely,
Mr. Ogrosky said. An article about the inquiry appeared Friday in The
Financial Times.
Last month, a federal drug official reported that he found repeated
instances in a landmark clinical trial of Avandia, a controversial
diabetes medicine, in which patients taking Avandia appeared to suffer
serious heart problems that were not counted in the study’s crucial
tally of adverse events. Many of the study’s trial sites were in
foreign countries, and the study is a main reason that Avandia remains
on the market in the United States. Government officials have not
accused GlaxoSmithKline, the trial’s sponsor, of fraud.
“At the Justice Department, investigations that involve allegations of
patient harm rise straight to the top and will attract the immediate
attention of the F.B.I.,” Mr. Ogrosky said.
The pharmaceutical industry may be more vulnerable to such
investigations because its representatives overseas work on a daily
basis with officials or doctors employed by state health systems.
Because pharmaceutical companies “are in the health care sector and
because, in so many foreign countries, heath sector employees could be
considered foreign officials, there is a heightened risk there,” said
Jay Darden, a Washington lawyer and former federal prosecutor who
specialized in health care and foreign corrupt practice cases. But, he
said, just because some companies have publicly disclosed that they
are under investigation does not automatically mean they have violated
the foreign bribery law.
Indeed, a number of drug makers and medical device companies have
reported in recent regulatory filings that they are under
investigation for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices
Act.
In a regulatory filing earlier this month, for example, Merck said it
was cooperating with a federal investigation seeking information about
the company’s activities in a number of countries.
Johnson & Johnson said in a regulatory filing that it had voluntary
disclosed to federal agencies that company subsidiaries abroad may
have made improper payments in connection with the sale of medical
devices in two countries.
Eli Lilly said it was cooperating with a federal investigation into
the activities of subsidiaries in Poland and other countries.
Meanwhile, the device maker Medtronic said it was cooperating with a
federal investigation into the company’s activities in a number of
countries, including Greece, Poland, Germany, Turkey, Italy and
Malaysia. The device maker Zimmer also said it was the subject of
federal investigations in connection with the sale of its products in
a number of foreign countries.
In a speech in November, an official at the Justice Department alerted
drug makers that the agency would be focusing on the drug industry.
“In some foreign countries and under certain circumstances, nearly
every aspect of the approval, manufacture, import, export, pricing,
sale and marketing of a drug product may involve a ‘foreign official,’
” as defined by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Lanny A. Breuer,
the assistant attorney general for the agency’s criminal division,
said in the speech. “The depth of government involvement in foreign
health systems, combined with fierce industry competition and the
closed nature of many public formularies, creates, in our view, a
significant risk that corrupt payments will infect the process.”
The federal inquiry is part of a broader reassessment of the financial
relationships between medical product companies and doctors, who even
in the United States serve a government procurement role when they
order drugs or devices for patients whose care is paid for by
Medicare, Medicaid or another government health program.
Federal law will soon require companies to publicly disclose
consulting payments made to doctors; some companies have already
started making information about such payments public. A number of
medical schools and professional medical societies have recently
issued rules banning or restricting some of these financial
arrangements.
Nearly a dozen companies have already settled foreign bribery charges
with prosecutors in a string of cases that started in 2002 with a
settlement by Syncor. The company paid a relatively modest fine of
$2.5 million to resolve criminal and securities charges that the
company used gifts, inflated invoices and improper referral payments
to encourage doctors in state-owned hospitals abroad to order company
products and send patients to company-owned imaging centers.
Last year, Novo Nordisk, a Danish company, agreed to pay a $9 million
fine to settle charges that it had paid former government officials in
Iraq to obtain government contracts to provide insulin and other
drugs. Novo paid the former Iraqi government about $1.4 million by
inflating the price of its contracts by 10 percent before submitting
them to the United Nations for approval, according to a Justice
Department press release.
Since the fines paid so far are relatively modest, the current federal
inquiries into possible foreign bribes may end up having a larger
impact on the marketing strategies of medical product makers than on
their bottom lines.
Even so, Mr. Darden, the former Justice Department official, said drug
company executives would do well to remind their foreign subsidiaries
not to bribe local officials or doctors.
“They should set a tone at the top that makes it clear to a company’s
international sales force that these types of payments are
unacceptable,” he said.
KMDickson
Lipanj
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> Subject: NYT on "Foreign Corrupt Practices" (incorrect)
>
> Date: Aug 14, 2010 4:59 AM
>
> ARTICLE BELOW
> =======================================
>
> Well, "Lyme Disease" is clearly False
> Claims and RICO.
> Allen Steere (CDC officer) made the false
> claim with scientific fraud in Europe
> alone:http://www.actionlyme.org/STEERE_IN_EUROPE.htm
> with the bogus "high-passage" strains and
> recombinant OspA-B with NO LIPID ATTACHED
> (not likely to produce antibodies without
> the lipid moeities attached).
>
> And, as I told the FDA Vaccine committee,
> no one among the *invited* labs (to the
> Dearborn conference) agreed with Steere's
>
> - -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act
corrupts...He sure has aged since his "young fledgeling" CDC draft
dodger days. None of us will live forever....we all have to answer
to our maker.
The proud shall be dammed . the humble shall be exalted.....Quote from
article "Stalking Steere" "Oh that is just the way I feel in ref to
the situation." Yea egotistic maniac... Gee I wonder why Polley
Murray has nothing to do with him anymore.
She did most of the sleuth work really...We owe to her and Willy
Burdorfer.
Mort Zuckerman
I'd like to say that Steere would have
been better off stickin with the violin,
but he was no good at any kind of
fiddlin. Most particularly in the lab.
Lipanj
I said the same thing before - too bad he didn't stick to the
violin....the jerk---plus draft dodger. Actually did you notice all
those ones on the political side really if you look especially in
their eyes --I am a bit physic --something very evil.
even Wormser - his eyes look like blue or grey but something really
evil like ---I bet Steere must be almost 80 yrs old now or late 70's?
I hate to say it but his photo in that NY Times article stalking
steere---of him standing in lab with that white coat - he really looks
like a devil.......if any of them are married - I wonder who would be
such a jerk to get married to any of them...I bet most are
not.....because-----------------
Kathleen
Willy thinks Steere is a total ignoramus:
http://underourskin.com/blog/?p=191