Interesting article I read today: ” WASHINGTON (AP) — Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drug maker, will pay a record $2.3 billion civil and criminal penalty over unlawful prescription drug promotions.”
Pfizer is being fined for illegal marketing of the following drugs: Bextra (the pain killer with such side effects as heart attack, stroke and death), Lyrica (the epilepsy treatment), Geodon (schizophrenia medicine) and Zyvox (antibiotic), Yahoo news reports.
The State's attorney general Andrew Cuomo said to reporters that “Pfizer's corrupt practices went so far as sending physicians on exotic junkets as well as wining and dining health care professionals to persuade them to prescribe the company's drugs for patients in taxpayer-funded programs.”
I'd like to pause here to address an issue discussed with my friend David about trusting doctors when it comes to prescribing medicine and vaccines because “they went to medical school.” Consider the influence of drug companies such as Pfizer who, obviously, has no problem paying $2.3 billion fine and spending possibly even more on wining and dining of doctors and advertizing in medical journals.
Further more, in this article I discovered that Pfizer also owns Pharmacia, a company recently involved in the criminal investigation for attacking a group of journalists in Ukraine.
If one continues to follow the thread of ownership, one would find Pfizer's association with Monsanto Company, which is also associated with Army Times Publishing, which is owned by Ganett Co, who also owns USA Today and other newspapers, television and internet media.
Pfizer is world known for its production and marketing of Zoloft, Lipitor, Norvasc, Zithromax, Aricept, Diflucan, and Viagra.
Prizer has been recently involved in the scandal in Nigeria where the company came to “rescue” children from measles, cholera and bacterial meningitis in 2001. Wikipedia states the following:
“In 2001, families of the children, as well as the governments of Kano and Nigeria, filed lawsuits regarding the treatment[22]. According to the lawsuits, Pfizer administered the trovafloxacin (now marketed as Trovan) without parental consent. The lawsuits also accuse Pfizer of using the outbreak to perform unapproved human testing, as well as allegedly under-dosing a control group being treated with traditional antibiotics in order to skew the results of the trial in favor of Trovan. Pfizer denied these claims, and subsequently produced an approval letter for testing from the Nigerian Ethics Committee; the Nigerian government claims it is a fake…”
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Pfizer is also working on developing drugs for cancer and AIDS. Also not without scandals.
“The European AIDS Treatment Group (EATG), collection of activists from 31 European Countries,[37] said the design of the trial for Pfizer's CCR5 inhibitor Maraviroc (previously known as UK-427,857) is putting people with HIV infection at unnecessary risk of developing AIDS” says Pfizer's Wikipedia profile.
Educate yourself, please.
Don't rely on doctors or anyone else.