Consequences for doctors and nurses spreading misinformation

[Belk]

Plenty of scientists and doctors have spoken up. They have been attacked and silenced.

No offense whatbogsends, I know you are an intelligent man with a good head on your shoulders, but this sounds like a conspiracy.

 

[FreeinChrist]

It doesn't appear that you actually read the post you just quoted which listed 2 major lawsuits in which criminal culpability was determined for Pfizer.

Of course, you can find this information as easily as i can.

In addition to the criminal fines in 2009 and 2020:

2004:

Pfizer Admits Guilt in Promotion of Neurontin–Agrees to Pay $430 Million
Sun, 16 May 2004

A lawsuit initiated by Dr. David Franklin, a whistleblower, has been settled: Pfizer pleaded guilty to criminal fraud in the promotion of Neurontin, and agreed to pay $430 million. This case is but an example of contemporary drug marketing, demonstrating that the current system–as overseen under the stewardship of the FDA–encourages rather than discourages fraudulent marketing of ineffective, even dangerous drugs.

Pfizer Admits Guilt in Promotion of Neurontin-Agrees to Pay $430 Million - Alliance for Human Research Protection

And in 2011

Pfizer to Pay $142.1 Million Over Neurontin Marketing


in 2012 (not a criminal conviction like the other 4, but a criminal charge that was settled):

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pfizer has agreed to pay the federal government $60 million to settle allegations that its employees bribed doctors and other foreign officials in Europe and Asia to win business and boost sales.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that Pfizer's overseas subsidiaries made illegal payments to health care officials in China, Italy, Russia, Croatia and other Eastern European countries. As early as 2001, Pfizer sales representatives tried to conceal the bribes by recording them as legitimate business expenses for travel, entertainment and marketing purposes, the agency said.

Pfizer pays $60M to settle bribery charges

How many times do they have to be caught in criminal activity before we can fairly make an assessment on their integrity?

That had to do with some bad business overseas, but was it that Neurotin itself was a bad drug? nope.

 

[Belk]

I understand the efficacy of the theory of vaccination.

Just because vaccination can be an effective strategy doesn't mean that all vaccines are necessarily safe and effective. Only a fool would make that argument.

And that is certainly a fair assessment. I make no claims that the vaccine is totally safe as it has been shown it can have a negative impact. My only contention is that it is not going to be a bunch of woo peddlers who have it correct. That it is only the scientific community who can make a valid assessment.

 

[Hans Blaster]

. Why not have a 5 night 3 hour debate with Fauci and his pals verses Simone Gold and hers.

Is that permissible under the terms of her bail?

GOLD, Simone Melissa

 

[sfs]

Are you honestly that naive that you think the medical industry does not profit off of millions of people being on establishment-pushed drugs? Be real.

That is absolutely the case. That's why all scientific studies have to include a statement about conflicts of interest: they matter. But the vast majority of researchers studying vaccines and their effectiveness and safety do not have a financial stake in their success. And biomedical researchers are themselves overwhelmingly vaccinated, so if there's a conspiracy afoot no one has bothered to tell us about it.

 

[whatbogsends]

That had to do with some bad business overseas, but was it that Neurotin itself was a bad drug? nope.

So, despite Pfizer being criminally convicted at least 4 times, and involved in bribery, kickbacks, and misrepresenting of their products, you still believe they're a trustworthy company?

Your perspective seems entirely detached from reason to me.

 

[FreeinChrist]

So, despite Pfizer being criminally convicted at least 4 times, and involved in bribery, kickbacks, and misrepresenting of their products, you still believe they're a trustworthy company?

Your perspective seems entirely detached from reason to me.

Something for you to read:

Fact check: Resolved lawsuits against Pfizer alleged marketing fraud

Interesting that the lawsuits do not involve vaccines or that the drugs themselves were bad.
The Neurotin lawsuit was because they advertised the drug for two things it was not approved for - as the sole drug for epilepsy and as a treatment for bipolar disease. It is perfectly fine as a drug to use in combination with another for epilepsy and for things like parathesias and other things. It would be like if Novartis advertised hydroxchloroquine for Covid - 19.

Since there are no kickbacks for the vaccine, no bribery has been uncovered, it is not advertised for other diseases, and the lawsuits involve business folks and not the scientists that I saw, and it is under intense scrutiny, no, I am not concerned. If something comes up, I may change my view of that drug. As I am staying with my 95 year old mother who is in home hospice, I really wanted the vaccine to spare both of us.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

They swore to protect the patients under their care, and for many of them, who know and follow the science —not the consensus— this makes them go against their oath.

The fact this is being done, purportedly for the purpose of protecting the public against such a nearly bogus disease, makes it obvious the whole vaccine matter is politically driven —all the more reason not to get it.

Quick question:

How does one claim to "follow the science" while simultaneously rejecting the science?

Saying "they follow the science - not the consensus" is an oxymoron.

The scientific consensus is built based on peer reviewed studies and metanalysis.

If someone is making the claim "I reject the scientific consensus", what exactly is the science they're following? Unless these guys who reject the consensus have been commissioning large-scale peer-reviewed studies of their own, they don't really have any basis for their claim.

The only reason vaccines have been made political is because the far-right is making them political.

I miss the good old days when the only anti-vaxxerism I ran into was the very rare person who believed what they saw on a Jenny McCarthy YouTube video (which was few and far between)

 

[whatbogsends]

Something for you to read:

Fact check: Resolved lawsuits against Pfizer alleged marketing fraud

Interesting that the lawsuits do not involve vaccines or that the drugs themselves were bad.
The Neurotin lawsuit was because they advertised the drug for two things it was not approved for - as the sole drug for epilepsy and as a treatment for bipolar disease. It is perfectly fine as a drug to use in combination with another for epilepsy and for things like parathesias and other things. It would be like if Novartis advertised hydroxchloroquine for Covid - 19.

Since there are no kickbacks for the vaccine, no bribery has been uncovered, it is not advertised for other diseases, and the lawsuits involve business folks and not the scientists that I saw, and it is under intense scrutiny, no, I am not concerned. If something comes up, I may change my view of that drug. As I am staying with my 95 year old mother who is in home hospice, I really wanted the vaccine to spare both of us.

The incidents in which their drugs or products were bad killed exist, they just had civil lawsuits, not criminal lawsuits.


A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Pfizer Inc. and its Shiley Inc. subsidiary in federal court here alleging that they conspired to hide potential defects in the manufacturing of heart valves whose fractures have resulted in about 250 deaths.
...
“They didn’t take any precautions to assure the safety of the patients who were having the heart valves implanted,” Gonzalez said. “What they were most concerned about was making a profit. They continued to market the product knowing it was defective. This is a case of corporate greed. There was a massive cover-up.”
...
The suit was filed on behalf of five individuals. Three of the plaintiffs claim they have sustained physical injuries from the valve and two, who are still in good health, say they suffered all kinds of psychological problems including “severe mental anguish and suffering, shock and injury to their nervous system, emotional distress and fright” knowing the valve could fracture at any time.

Suit Alleges Pfizer, Shiley Tried to Hide Heart Valve Defects - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

They settled that suit for $10.75 million.

Pfizer Inc. agreed Friday to settle a lawsuit over the diabetes drug Rezulin after a jury earlier in the day awarded $43 million to a Texas woman who said it destroyed her liver. The settlement was the first of what could become a series of payouts involving the drug that has been blamed for 63 deaths and dozens of other serious liver failures worldwide.
...
The Rezulin controversy also cast a shadow on the Food and Drug Administration, which, a Los Angeles Times investigation showed, gave the drug fast-track approval despite concerns within the agency over its safety.
...
Rezulin’s withdrawal from the U.S. market on March 21, 2000, followed negotiations between the drug’s manufacturer and the FDA. Senior FDA officials had long stood behind the drug despite a mounting death toll and Rezulin’s absence of proven lifesaving benefits.

The position of the FDA officials stood in contrast to their counterparts in Britain, where Rezulin was removed effective Dec. 1, 1997.

At the time Rezulin was withdrawn in the U.S., the FDA said it was aware of 90 liver failures, including 63 deaths, that “possibly or probably” were caused by the drug.

Pfizer Agrees to Settle Suit Over Diabetes Drug Rezulin - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

And this Xeljanz is still in progress...

Updated July 26, 2021

A Xeljanz lawsuit is a mass tort claim against the drug manufacturer Pfizer. Especially when taken at high doses, the popular rheumatoid arthritis pill Xeljanz may cause serious side effects:

• Blood clots in the lungs, pelvis, or legs,
• Pulmonary embolisms,
• Liver damage, and
• Cancer.

Xeljanz lawsuits allege that Pfizer defectively designed the drug and failed to warn people about the dangerous side effects. Therefore, plaintiffs seek compensation for:

• Medical expenses,
• Lost wages and other income, including reduced earning capacity,
• Pain and suffering, and
• Loss of consortium.

These lawsuits are progressing individually. But the claims likely will consolidate into a federal multidistrict litigation.

Xeljanz® Lawsuit - Top 6 Questions Answered (shouselaw.com)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is alerting the public that preliminary results from a safety clinical trial show an increased risk of serious heart-related problems and cancer with the arthritis and ulcerative colitis medicine Xeljanz, Xeljanz XR (tofacitinib) compared to another type of medicine called tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors. FDA required the safety trial, which also investigated other potential risks including blood clots in the lungs and death. Those final results are not yet available.

We will evaluate the clinical trial results we have received to date and will work with the drug manufacturer to obtain further information as soon as possible. We will communicate our final conclusions and recommendations when we have completed our review or have more information to share.
...
When FDA first approved tofacitinib, we required the manufacturer, Pfizer, to conduct a safety clinical trial in patients with RA who were taking methotrexate to evaluate the risk of serious heart-related events, cancer, and infections. The trial studied two doses of tofacitinib (5 mg twice daily, which is the approved dosage for RA, and a higher 10 mg twice daily dosage) in comparison to another type of RA medicine called a TNF inhibitor. Patients in the trial were required to be at least 50 years old and have at least one cardiovascular risk factor. In February 2019 and July 2019, we warned that interim trial results showed an increased risk of blood clots and death with the higher 10 mg twice daily dosage, and as a result, approved a Boxed Warning to the tofacitinib prescribing information. The clinical trial is now complete and initial results show a higher occurrence of serious heart-related events and cancer in RA patients treated with both doses of tofacitinib compared to patients treated with a TNF inhibitor. FDA is awaiting additional results from the trial.

Initial safety trial results find increased risk of serious heart-related problems and cancer with arthritis and ulcerative colitis medicine Xeljanz, Xeljanz XR (tofacitinib) | FDA

But this time, we can trust them for sure.

 

[FreeinChrist]

And all of this proves the Covid vaccine is bad?

How many drugs has pfizer produced?

 

[Brian Mcnamee]

Is that permissible under the terms of her bail?

GOLD, Simone Melissa

Indiana Doctor Addresses Board On Covid 19 Vaccine

 

[KCfromNC]

I don't believe the numbers any more than I believe the noise. Again, and no, the measures against Covid don't account for all this: How did in 2019 38,000,000 cases of flu drop to 1,800 in 2020?

Mask use and social distancing. You know, the practices which kept the death count from covid down to "only" 600,000 or so.

 

[KCfromNC]

Or at least the so-far known risks.

Known and publicly reported, that is.

Yep, there's a giant conspiracy to cover up the truth. Just like there's one to cover up the "fact" we never landed on the moon.

Come on, there's even a sub-forum created to handle this sort of stuff so it doesn't overflow into fact-based debated.

 

[KCfromNC]

And all of this proves the Covid vaccine is bad?

If the best anti-vaxx arguments can do is bring up stuff from a decade ago, it kinda makes one think that the vaccine really is as safe and effective as claimed. I mean, if there were evidence it wasn't a more effective anti-vaxx argument would be to show that using data, but since that isn't being done, it certainly makes one wonder.

 

[ThisIsMe123]

Yep, there's a giant conspiracy to cover up the truth. Just like there's one to cover up the "fact" we never landed on the moon.

Yeah, and don't forget, the earth is flat!!

 

[FireDragon76]

Therefore, remove freedom of speech and conscience...right?

Medical boards reserve the right to set their own standards, and always have.

 

[whatbogsends]

No offense whatbogsends, I know you are an intelligent man with a good head on your shoulders, but this sounds like a conspiracy.

It does sound like a conspiracy.



Dissent from the "vaccines are safe and effective" narrative is stifled, just as any mention of "lab leak" a year prior.


On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.
...
And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
...
But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?
...
Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.
...
As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.

Some of the attendees were “absolutely floored,” said an official familiar with the proceedings. That someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe, was…shocking and disturbing.”

Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places. As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box,” said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions “smelled like a cover-up,” said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it.”

Reached for comment, Chris Park told Vanity Fair, “I am skeptical that people genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.” He added that he was simply arguing that it “is making an enormous and unjustifiable leap…to suggest that research of that kind [meant] that something untoward is going on.”

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins | Vanity Fair

All it takes to control a narrative is the people at the top to make the declaration, and make it taboo to question that narrative. When a divisive political figure (such as Trump) backs the alternative position, it's even easier to get people on board into believing that questioning the narrative is out of bounds.

I'm astounded that so many people believe that the Covid vaccines are Settled Science, as they've only been developed just over a year ago, and haven't even been implemented for a full year. It seems bizarre that even raising questions about the safety of the vaccines is met with ire, as if any question regarding the vaccines is an sign of ill will.

How long were other medical products on the market before harmful side effects were quantified and eventually challenged in court? I bring up the opioid crisis because it was caused by over-prescription of opioids, under the guidance of the FDA and pharmaceutical companies, for over a decade before it was even significantly challenged.

For now, however, i think i need to take a break from these forums. I have neither the time nor energy to keep this up.

I hope all stay safe and healthy, and keep their eyes and minds open.

 

[RestoreTheJoy]

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/93877?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Weekly Review 2021-08-08&utm_term=NL_DHE_Weekly_Active&fbclid=IwAR0EH2yFqo1dBSYW7DOHF_Y1qCXid_35B1IgaLhpAq4iIH6uo_oBp9kbEQk

This should have been done a long time ago, but here we are.

This is really interesting from a political and legal viewpoint. As if all doctors must spout one approved view.

They never have before; disagreements often result in new methods to treat patients.

 

[Ponderous Curmudgeon]

This is really interesting from a political and legal viewpoint. As if all doctors must spout one approved view.

They never have before; disagreements often result in new methods to treat patients.

Actually, I think it is more like plumber licensing. If you want to get a plumbers license and call yourself a licensed plumber you basically agree to work to the standards of the license board. Publicly claiming the standards are nonsense and people shouldn't listen to them is cause for review of your license.

 

[RestoreTheJoy]

Actually, I think it is more like plumber licensing. If you want to get a plumbers license and call yourself a licensed plumber you basically agree to work to the standards of the license board. Publicly claiming the standards are nonsense and people shouldn't listen to them is cause for review of your license.

Which medical authorities is he compelled to agree with, because they disagree all over the board?

636 Epidemiologists Disagree With the CDC on This One Thing, Survey Shows

The CDC and WHO Disagree on This Major Face Mask Rule - Best Life

Opinion | Are Covid Vaccines Riskier Than Advertised?