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Exposing the Global
Healthcare Agenda
JACKY LAW
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JACKY LAW is a pharmaceutical journalist. For the past 25 years she
has written about health issues. For seven years she worked as associate
editor for Scrip Magazine, a monthly international pharmaceutical title.
She left in 2004 to write Big Pharma.
Jacky Law acknowledges the enormous contribution of her editor, Dan
Hind, and agent, Jessica Woollard, in making this book possible.
Mention must also be made of those who offered valuable perspective in
what are complex and often, contentious areas. They include Professor
Martin Bobrow, Dr Philip Brown, Professor Joe Collier, Dr Peter
Fletcher, Dr John Griffin and Professor Eric Topol. Jacky would also like
to thank everyone at the top pharmaceutical titles Scrip Magazine and
Scrip World Pharmaceutical News (www.scripnews.com) with whom she
worked for seven years. Last but not least, she sincerely thanks all her
friends and family for encouraging and putting up with her.
Big
Pharma
Exposing the Global
Healthcare Agenda
JACKYLAW
CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS
New York
Carroll & Graf Publishers
An imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
245 W. 17th Street
11th Floor
New York
NY 10011-5300
www.carrollandgraf.com
AVALON
oiiblisbinq group Incorporated
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2006
First Carroll & Graf edition, 2006
Copyright © jacky Law, 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-78671-783-5
ISBN-10: 0-7867-1783 I
Printed and bound in the EU
Contents
Preface 1
Part 1 Not wanting to know 5
1 The cost of convenience 7
2 The company of giants 28
3 A question of trust 45
4 Old pills in new bottles 62
Part 2 When the good stay silent 85
5 The story of Vioxx 87
6 The SSRI story 104
7 A crisis in medicine 121
8 A bit of a lottery 140
Part 3 Counting the cost 161
9 The people vs pharma 163
10 The European patient 178
11 Genes, germs and general behaviour 196
12 Patients take the lead 216
Appendix 236
Notes 237
Index 257
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/bigpharmaexposinOOIawj_0
Preface
When medicine is not an
option ...
On 5 June 1981, the first official report of what is now a global pandem¬
ic appeared in the weekly newsletter of the US Federal Centers for
Disease Control. The report stated that a rare parasitic lung infection
had shown up in Los Angeles in five young men. Moreover, all the men
had an inexplicably depressed immune function. This date is now
known as the start of the worst plague in modem history, AIDS
(acquired immune deficiency syndrome).
Before then, young men like Stewart Anderson had been diagnosed
with what was known as Gay Syndrome, a mystery plague that mostly
killed gay men. I interviewed Stewart in 1987, at around the time
Princess Diana famously shook hands with an AIDS patient on national
television. It may be hard for younger readers to appreciate the fear most
people felt knowing a transmissible killer disease was at large. Official
health advice, for example, included not having sex with Americans, so
little was known about it. And ambulance men could be seen wearing
full ‘spacesuit’ protection when dealing with patients suspected of carry¬
ing the mystery plague.
Stewart had been living with AIDS for some years and just moved into
a brand new and unusually bright basement flat in Hammersmith. He was
a skinny guy in his 20s with a toothy smile and a face covered in the
purple blotches characteristic of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin cancer common
in AIDS patients. He said from the outset he wasn’t sure I was going to
be able to convey what he wanted to say. I said I would do my best.
It wasn’t until I visited him at the old Chelsea and Westminster
Hospital a week or two later that I began to appreciate what he might be
trying to express and what became the germ of an idea for this book.
1
PREFACE
Nothing could have prepared me for the despair I felt in that ward of
young men who should have been out starting lives, not visibly wasting
away. The fear was palpable, and the many doctors, busily reading charts
and talking among themselves, could do nothing to assuage it. They had
nothing to offer.
Stewart, who had been booked in for a blood transfusion, was
nowhere to be seen. I wanted to ask the doctors if they felt the course of
the disease could be altered by anything patients might do, knowing as I
did how hard Stewart was fighting to extend his life. But I knew the
answer already, and the doctors seemed to have more than enough to do.
The question I should have asked was addressed in a special Newsweek
report on the twentieth anniversary of AIDS, in June 2001. Sharon
Begley, the writer, talked about how AIDS had changed what it meant
to be a patient. The despair I had felt in those wards did eventually find
channels of expression. ‘People with AIDS stormed scientific confer¬
ences, banded together in ways no other patients ever had,’ she wrote.
‘[They] helped revolutionize the process of testing experimental drugs
and they inspired others.’
Stewart was nowhere to be seen because he had discharged himself.
His main battle was to be optimistic, and hospital didn’t help. He was
one of the world’s longest surviving patients, despite his Kaposi’s sar¬
coma having spread to his stomach and lungs. Just months before we
met, he had developed the lung infection that had been the original
diagnosis. It very nearly killed him. On the eve of 1987, he couldn’t
stand up for longer than three minutes. ‘This kind of illness changes your
attitude to life,’ he said. ‘Each breath is precious. I was determined to
start the new year on my terms. There are things I still have to do. It is
easy to give in and die.’
Stewart fought tenaciously for the right to make sense of his disease
on his terms, and this was the message he wanted to convey. He went on
to do a series of interviews, mine included, something very few people
did at the time given the fear and prejudice surrounding the disease. He
embarked on a strict macrobiotic diet and programme of cycling
and swimming. He also founded, with seven others, the self-help group
Body Positive.
Stewart was just trying to make sense of his life before it was gone. All
he knew was that he wanted as little medical interference as possible and
that there must be some upside to his situation - Tui his life should not
pass by in vain. ‘When you look in the mirror and see marks all over your
body it is hard to feel good about yourself,’ he said. ‘But I have learned
2
