by Frank Holmes, reporter
Do you take generic prescription medication? If so, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris may be letting your company poison you.
A blockbuster new report finds that the Biden-Harris administration has done all it can to look the other way when it comes to its huge donor: The pharmaceutical, vaccine, and drug industry known as “Big Pharma.”
Under Biden and Harris, the Food and Drug Administration is hardly doing half as many drug manufacturing facility inspections as it did under the Trump administration.
Overall inspections have fallen 40 percent since 2019, a tally taken by media investigators finds.
They’re ignoring 42 percent of all firms that make drugs in the U.S.
In fact, inspectors for the Biden-Harris administration has not set foot in 2,000 drug plants at all since 2019.
“Under FDA’s own guidelines, factories that haven’t been inspected in five or more years are considered a significant risk and are supposed to be prioritized for inspection,” reported the Associated Press.
The FDA blames the backlog on the COVID-19 pandemic…which ended years ago.
The Biden-Harris administration leaders claim so many people quit during The Great Resignation that they can’t train enough people to take their place.
“We aren’t able to keep up with the pace of attrition and we have a number of investigators who are not as fully trained as their predecessors,” FDA Associate Commissioner Michael Rogers told the press.
But he claimed he plans “to get this group of investigators up to the same level we were able to utilize pre-pandemic.” Honest.
It may be worth asking why so many inspectors quit rather than try to do their jobs under the Biden-Harris administration.
But even at this relaxed pace—perhaps too relaxed for the hundreds of millions of Americans who rely on these medications each day—the FDA finds awfully fishy material.
During an inspection of Intas Pharmaceuticals in India in November-December 2022, FDA inspectors found that the employees “destroyed (company) records by pouring acetic acid in a trash bin containing analytical balance slips for testing.” The FDA also found “plastic bags filled with torn and discarded original (company) documents.”
Pharmaceutical employees destroyed paper printouts with raw data inspectors needed to evaluate drugs. One plant employee admitted outright that “he did not report all the test results, further stating that in some instances balance printouts were discarded in the trash.”
Overall, the company had “numerous gaps” in its “audit trails, saving electronic data and preventing clock alterations.”
That’s just one plant, in one part of the world. What’s happening at the other 2,000 plants Biden is ignoring?
And why exactly is the Biden-Harris administration turning a blind eye to the adulteration of Americans’ prescription medication? Do they hope older people, who tend to be more conservative, will get sick and die off? Do they hope people on Medicare and Medicaid will gradually drop off the rolls, to keep those bloated government programs solvent?
And, as much as it pains to ask it, could campaign cash have anything to do with it?
It turns out Big Pharma made up one of the pillars of the Biden-Harris campaign’s funding.
In 2020, 58 percent of all Big Pharma contributions went to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org.
Although the campaign finance tracker doesn’t have 2024 broken down by percentages, the pharmaceuticals industry’s donations lean far to the Left.
The biggest of the Big Pharma firms fund the Democrats by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Pfizer gave the Democratic Party nearly a quarter of a million dollars more than GOP candidates, donated just under $100,000 to outside groups—all of them liberal.
Vaccine manufacturers like Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca also showered Democrats with campaign donations.
The largest imbalance comes from Stiefel Laboratories, which gave $1,486,541 to Democrats… and not a single dollar to Republicans.
This is huge money. After all, prescription medicines will rake in an unbelievable $1.9 trillion worldwide by 2027.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The collusion between Big Pharma and the government in general (and the Biden-Harris administration in general) has gone on for years.
No one has spoken out about it more often or more eloquently than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RFK Jr. called the unholy union of Big Pharma and Big Government a “huge problem” in 2022—looking at data going back to the last millennium. “Analysis of 27 years of ‘ongoing, systematic wrongdoing’ by Big Pharma shows DOJ levied billions of (sollars) worth of fines against pharma. The fines support government budgets but do nothing to reform the industry’s criminal behavior.”
Yep! Huge problem… Analysis of 27 years of “ongoing, systematic wrongdoing” by Big Pharma shows DOJ levied billions of $ worth of fines against pharma. The fines support government budgets but do nothing to reform the industry’s criminal behavior.https://t.co/jrOgYBAZMW
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 9, 2022
After Big Pharma buys off inspectors, it gins up demand by issuing phony articles praising its products in medical journals.
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson revealed that the drug maker Wyeth-Ayerst created deesire for its diet drug, Redux, by hiring a company called Excerpta Medica to place PR puff pieces posing as real medical studies.
“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,” explained Attkisson.
Sometimes, people in the industry admit their cozy relationship with the government and easy relationship with ethics.
An official with Pfizer got caught on an undercover camera two years ago admitting the existence of “a revolving door for all government officials,” especially those in the FDA, with his company. “Once (bureaucrats) stop being regulators, they want to go to work for the companies.”
… And they regulate accordingly.
“It’s pretty good for the industry, to be honest,” he said. “It’s bad for everyone else in America.”
BREAKING:
Senior Pfizer employee confirms BMJ investigation that drug regulators have been financially captured by Big Pharma. They’ve gone from protecting us from the corporate psychopath to enabling the psychopath.
Result? A Public health disaster https://t.co/KlMu0zDm2Q pic.twitter.com/eFxVj757iU
— Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) January 28, 2023
Turns out that it’s also good for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.