AGENCY CAPTURE: Purdue at SCOTUS, George Watts v. DoD
It’s a great time to be a freelance investigative reporter because the mainstream media doesn’t do investigative reporting anymore.
At the same time, it’s hard to keep up with all of the extraordinary and dramatic stories that break every day.
Today’s theme is AGENCY CAPTURE—something that RFK, Jr. has been writing about for years. A couple of days ago, former CDC director Robert Redfield paid Kennedy the following compliment in an editorial he penned for Newsweek.
Kennedy is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA’s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies.
NIH is cozy with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs NIH licenses to pharma. And as the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I know the agency can be influenced by special interest groups.
It’s a nice vindication for Kennedy and likeminded observers who have been trying to warn the citizenry about this for years. Coincidentally, one of the most spectacular cases of agency capture was recently the subject of litigation that went all the way to the Supreme Court. As was just reported in JAMA:
In late June, the US Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited opinion reviewing Purdue Pharma’s $6 billion settlement in the national opioid litigation in Harrington v Purdue Pharma.
1 The settlement had been challenged because it included a bankruptcy deal that allowed Purdue’s family owners, the Sacklers, to contribute their own money in exchange for a shield for the family from future civil litigation.
The case has significant implications for public health. As a result of the ruling, those affected by opioid misuse will have to wait longer to see any money from this settlement and they may ultimately receive less, as the Court sent it back to the bankruptcy court for a do-over that will not include the special release from litigation for the Sacklers.
However, the case also sends a signal to many other industry defendants who are likewise trying to use the bankruptcy process as a shield against public harms litigation and the accountability and information production that comes with it.
The news of Purdue at SCOTUS reminded me of my reflections on this catastrophe in our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the BioPharmaceutical Complex:
In 2017, I read a fascinating piece in the New Yorker titled “The Family that Built an Empire of Pain.” It was the story of the Sackler family of New York and their company, Purdue Pharma, which reportedly made $35 billion selling OxyContin.
I’d already sensed that the OxyContin story was an indictment of the US Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, but I was still stunned by the scope of the corruption described in this article.
From 1996-2001, Purdue Pharma used a network of academics, doctors, lobbyists, publicists, regulatory agency friends, medical associations, and an army of sales reps to push its opioid.
At the heart of this operation was the systematic denial or downplaying of the drug’s (long understood) addiction risk. Consequently, millions of Americans became addicted to OxyContin with catastrophic consequences.
For many, the substance was a gateway drug to more dangerous opioids such as fentanyl. The OxyContin story was not an aberration, but the culmination of Arthur Sackler’s extraordinary work in developing Big Pharma’s bag of tricks. ….
When Arthur died in 1987, he bequeathed his playbook to his brothers, and in 1995 their company, renamed Purdue Pharma, received FDA-approval for OxyContin. As the New Yorker reported the process:
Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” …
The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.
The OxyContin story was a shocking example of how the representation of a phenomenon—in this case a dangerously addictive substance—can be manipulated on a massive scale.
For years, U.S. institutions, agencies, and the mainstream media somehow failed to notice what OxyContin was doing to American society. It was only in 2017 that the New Yorker published Patrick Radden Keefe’s report. In that same year, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services declared the Opioid Epidemic a public health emergency and estimated that 70,000 Americans would die of opioid overdose in that year alone. According to the CDC, between 1999 to 2019, nearly 841,000 people died from a drug overdose.
More than 70% of overdose deaths were caused by an opioid prescription, heroin or fentanyl. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, that number rose to 100,306. Most of the victims were younger than 55-years-old.
On April 17, 2021, Patrick Radden Keefe’s comprehensive book on the story, Empire of Pain, was published to great critical acclaim and popularity.
Major newspapers and television pundits gave the book a glowing review, but none remarked that the corruption it revealed within the US Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex was relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I continue to marvel at the fact that while much of the public was enthralled by Keefe’s book and the Dopesick miniseries on Hulu starring Michael Keaton, not a single reporter except me noted that the agency capture documented in this story perfectly applied to the COVID-19 vaccines.
Speaking of agency capture, fellow Substack author Sasha Latypova just reported the appalling news that George Watts v DOD case dismissed by federal court claiming “sovereign immunity”
For readers unfamiliar with this story—a perfect expression of President Eisenhower’s warning about the undue influence and power of the Military-Industrial Complex—the 24-year-old college student George Watts, Jr. died (autopsy confirmed) of vaccine-induced myocarditis.
His family sued the Department of Defense for propagating the fraudulent claim that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is safe. A federal court just dismissed the lawsuit under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
In other words, when it comes to matters of so-called “public health,” injured citizens will have one hell of a time getting justice from U.S. agencies. Uncle Sam is above the law in this domain. In a contest with him, the message is clear: “Abused citizens are free to f—k off and die.”
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