How ‘Big Pharma’ traded principles for profits: ‘Hype fears’ and ‘exaggerate supposed benefits’
In December of 2002, Sharyl Attkisson, an Emmy-winning investigative reporter for CBS News, had an unsettling interview with smallpox expert Jonathan Tucker.
In a post-9/11 world, with fears of terrorists using a long-eradicated disease like smallpox as a bioweapon, the US was preparing to bring back the smallpox inoculation program.
But to Tucker, the very idea was “agonizing,” writes Attkisson in her new book, “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails” (Harper, out Tuesday).
Why? Because it involved “weighing the risk of a possible terrorist use of smallpox . . . against the known risks of the vaccine,” Tucker told the author.
This was news to Attkisson, who couldn’t wait for her own daughter to be eligible for the smallpox vaccine. “A ‘toxic’ vaccine?” She writes. “Didn’t the smallpox vaccine save the world, once upon a time?” But as she soon discovered, it had serious side effects, including a surprisingly high possibility of death.
Attkisson witnessed firsthand how deadly the vaccine could be in April of 2003, when a colleague at NBC, journalist David Bloom, died from deep vein thrombosis while on assignment in Iraq.
He’d also recently been vaccinated for smallpox, and as Attkisson learned, thrombosis was a possible side effect of the inoculation.
Medical authorities declined to investigate, and according to Attkisson, even Bloom’s own family seemed disinterested in a vaccine explanation.
Ten years later, Bloom’s widow appeared on the “Today” show to discuss deep vein thrombosis, accompanied by a doctor who, Attkisson notes, was also a paid consultant to a smallpox vaccine manufacturer.
It launched Attkisson down a rabbit hole, and she began investigating the hidden agendas driving many drug companies, not just for smallpox vaccines but medications for every possible disease. “We exist largely in an artificial reality brought to you by the makers of the latest pill or injection,” she writes. “It’s a reality where invisible forces work daily to hype fears about certain illnesses, and exaggerate the supposed benefits of treatments and cures.”
The public is well aware that mega-corporations like Enron can and have been motivated by profit over ethics, and aren’t above committing crimes to protect their financial gains.
But “they seem incapable of fathoming that pharmaceutical companies could be capable of the same,” writes Attkisson.
But as Dr. Marcia Angell, a former editor-in-chief for the New England Journal of Medicine, told the author, both the public and physicians have been repeatedly deceived “to believe that drugs are much better and much safer than they really are.”
Yes, even doctors have been kept in the dark, and according to Attikisson, many don’t know that the medical journals they rely upon “are filled with unreliable studies hopelessly tainted by drug industry interests,” she writes.
The majority of scientific studies are funded and even dictated by drug companies. “Studies that could stand to truly solve our most consequential health problems aren’t done if they don’t ultimately advance a profitable pill or injection,” Attkisson writes.
Success isn’t measured by healthy patients but “by how many people are taking expensive drugs or getting vaccinated,” Attkisson writes. The global demand for prescription medicine is projected to hit $1.9 trillion by 2027. “These aren’t necessarily drugs designed to make us well, but ones we’ll ‘need’ for life,” writes Attikisson.
How do the drug companies get away with it, especially in reputable medical journals?
Some hire “ghostwriters” to author studies promoting a new drug, exaggerating benefits and downplaying risks, and then paying a doctor or medical expert to sign their name to it.
A glaring example of this practice happened in the late 1990s, when pharmaceutical manufacturer Wyeth-Ayerst tried to create demand for its diet drug Redux by hiring a middleman company, Excerpta Medica, to write favorable articles about Redux for several medical journals.
“Excerpta wrote the articles, hired doctors to review and sign them, and then submitted them for publication—with no mention that Wyeth was bankrolling the whole thing,” Attkisson writes. “Basically, the articles were paid ads for Redux disguised as scholarly work.”
Redux was eventually pulled from the market because of reported heart and lung problems allegedly caused by the drug.
Whether drugs are effective at all is often besides the point. In 2021, the FDA approved a new treatment for Alzheimer’s called Aduhelm, despite several large clinical studies that found it would be “futile” to continue testing it.
Why did Biogen, the drug’s maker, continue pushing it despite Aduhelm’s disappointing results?
Because they could charge around $56,000 per year per patient. “Calculating ten million hypothetical Alzheimer’s patients, it adds up to a mind boggling half-trillion dollars every year, with much of the cost presumably borne by taxpayers through Medicare,” writes Attkisson.
In addition to the costs, it would also lead to “a lot of false hope for millions of patients and their families,” says Dr. Michael Carome, who leads the Health Research Group at the watchdog Public Citizen.
Biogen finally discontinued the drug in 2024, not because of ethical concerns but because of pushback from Medicare over the exorbitant price tag.
When drug companies can’t get their endorsements into medical journals, they bring their message right to the consumer.
By 2020, around 75% of all spending on television commercials in the US, a whopping $4.58 billion, came from the pharmaceutical industry.
And many of those commercials were less than honest. In 2007, an advertisement for the birth control pill Yaz, featuring the Twisted Sister song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” included balloons labeled with words associated with premenstrual syndrome like “moodiness” and “irritability.”
“They were figuratively batting down PMS with Yaz,” Attkisson writes. “The problem is, Yaz wasn’t approved to treat PMS and shouldn’t have been promoted for that.” After numerous FDA fines for minimizing risks and overstating benefits, the ads were pulled . . . but the damage had been done. Patients had “already been misled by it,” says Carome.
Lawsuits and fines do little to halt the deceptions.
Novartis paid more than $591 million in 2020 over allegations of bribing doctors.
Teva Pharmaceuticals paid $200 million in 2023 over price-fixing charges.
Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Takeda Pharmaceutical all paid several billion each over allegations of deceptive marketing.
But it hasn’t stopped drug companies from continuing to prioritize profits over science.
Our best hope, writes Attkisson, is to question the prevailing narrative. “When highly publicized ‘fact checks’ and public health officials all seem to be saying the same thing, it’s often a sign that the invisible hand of powerful interests is at work,” she writes.
And remember that just questioning the science of vaccines and new drugs is not necessarily anti-science. “When I broke international news about deadly rollovers of Ford Explorers outfitted with Firestone tires, nobody suggested I was ‘anti-car’ or ‘anti-tire,’” Attkisson writes. “That would be absurd.”
Despite resistance to corporations pushing drugs like the COVID vaccine, the biggest concerns may be on the horizon.
Attkisson points to Ozempic, the latest medical fad, the diabetes drug that’s being sold and marketed as a weight loss medicine.
“Never mind the side effects, including thyroid tumors, pancreatitis, vision changes, low blood sugar, gallbladder issues, kidney failure, and cancer,” she writes. “Maybe it too will be pulled from the market someday.
“But in the meantime, there’s money to be made.”
