Trump Must End Big Pharma’s Cash Flow to the FDA to Make America Healthy Again

The “revolving door” regime which gives plum Big Pharma jobs to FDA bosses also must end

By Jules Gomes Published on December 10, 2024

President-Elect Donald Trump has dumped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into an industrial-size washing machine and turned the dial to “Heavy Duty” even before he is sworn into office. America’s dirtiest laundry is soon to be washed, rinsed, spun, and hung out to dry so that Trump can Make America Healthy Again.

I first encountered the staggering corruption of Big Pharma when I lived in India. While at university, I worked part-time at my local pharmacy. Part of my job was to go twice a week to Bombay’s pharma market and purchase drugs. The rest of the time I would dispense prescription and over-the-counter drugs to customers.

My curiosity was piqued by very poor customers buying Benadryl (a cough syrup produced by Parke Davis), downing the bottle overnight, and returning a few days later to buy another. “You’re not supposed to drink the whole bottle to cure your cough,” I would tell them.

“Well, sir, we don’t buy Benadryl for cough. We drink it to get high,” they would reply. “In fact, it gives us a high we can’t even get from booze or beer. And we can’t afford booze or beer.”

I asked my boss, a qualified pharmacist, what was special about Benadryl. He told me it contained chloroform. That was my initiation into the corrupt world of Big Pharma.

Drug Peddlers

Soon my eyes were opened to the Mafia-style racket I was part of. Pharmaceutical companies gave “special offers” to pharmacies and “gifts” to doctors — and we pushed their products. The media was silent. They trusted Big Pharma. India’s Food and Drug Administration pliantly approved unnecessary new drug combinations because Big Pharma greased their palms.

I later graduated from university and began my first job as a reporter for MID-DAY, a highly successful newspaper in Bombay which had not yet become part of the media establishment. Like a dog worrying a bone, I began investigating Big Pharma and its regulatory allies in the government.

I made sure chloroform, a carcinogen that Parke Davis had already banned in the First World, was banned from Benadryl in India. I exposed the way other companies added codeine to cough syrups and the plague of addiction it had caused in northeast India. In all, I was able to expose the corruption of seven global pharmaceutical companies, with Pfizer leading the Hall of Shame.

Diabolical Nexus

Hence, when COVID-19 buffeted the globe, I wasn’t surprised that Pfizer was leading the pack of rapacious vaccine peddlers. Back in 2009, Pfizer had already achieved the notoriety of being fined $2.3 billion for the largest healthcare fraud settlement up to that point.

Pfizer spent over $21.8 million in 2019-20 and $6.7 million between January-August 2021 on lobbying the U.S. government, making it the biggest spender of any individual drug company during the COVID-19 crisis, according to Senate Office of Public Records data.

At that point, I began to investigate the diabolical nexus between Big Pharma and the U.S.’s premier regulator, the FDA. What I learned made the incestuous relationship between the drug barons and the Indian FDA look like Lilliput before Gulliver’s Brobdingnag.

For example, the FDA gets 45%($2.7 billion) of its funding from “industry user fees.” Further, “human drugs regulatory activities account for 33% of its budget; 65% of these activities are paid for by industry user fees” — pharmaceutical companies.

“As pharma companies underwrite three-fourths of the FDA’s budget for scientific reviews, the agency is increasingly fast-tracking expensive drugs with significant side effects and unproven health benefits,” ProPublica noted.

Can anyone tell me why this isn’t one of the most egregious violations of the “conflict of interest” principle?

According to available figures, pharma companies paid 75% ($905 million) of the FDA’s scientific review budgets for branded and generic drugs in 2017.

“What we are seeing is a clear example of regulatory capture, which is a phenomenon that is at the heart of much of the evil at work in the world at present,” Ireland’s Dr. Pat Morrisey, who bravely led the fight against vaccine mandates, told me during the pandemic.

Regulatory Capture

“Another blatant example is Bill Gates’s funding of the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in the UK, which I belive is a sister organization to the FDA,” Morrisey observed. “Regulatory capture has compromised so much of public life that people seem unable to perceive the corrupting effect of it.”

In 1992, Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, moving the FDA from a fully taxpayer-funded body to one partly funded through prescription drug user fees. Pharmaceutical companies pay these fees when applying to the FDA for drug reviews.

British medical ethicist Dr. Niall McCrae told The Stream: “As a National Health Service (NHS) ethics research committee member for 11 years, I find it difficult to believe how established standards of ethical governance have been abandoned. But I have also woken up to the facade of compliance and unscrupulous practice that predates the COVID-19 scam.

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“It is now clear that drug companies such as Pfizer and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have been funding the regulatory authorities and ensuring the best commercial conditions for their global greed. Conflict of interests are not a barrier to Big Pharma; they are the modus operandi.”

A groundbreaking 2020 investigation by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealed that pharmaceutical companies spent $4.7 billion between 1999 and 2018 — an average of $233 million per year — lobbying federal agencies and Congress.

From 1999 to 2018, the industry also made $414 million worth of contributions to political candidates, including $22 million to presidential candidates and $214 million to congressional candidates — in all, over $1.3 billion on political campaign contributions.

Lobbying and Tax Evasion

Pfizer was the biggest corporate spender over the period, accounting for $219 million in lobbying and $23 million in campaign contributions.

A 2020 Oxfam report slammed Pfizer for failing to disclose how much it spent on lobbying states or trade unions:

And Pfizer does not disclose its membership in tax-exempt organizations that write and endorse model legislation, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Pfizer is also a major contributor to politically active social welfare organizations, yet the full list, disclosure about the amounts, and about possible misalignments, is lacking.

A 2018 Oxfam report titled “Prescription for Poverty” blasted Pfizer for “systematically” stashing its profits in overseas tax havens. Pfizer’s $199 billion held offshore was the second most of any US corporation.

In seven developing countries alone, Pfizer may have underpaid $22 million annually in taxes, and also may have underpaid by $1.1 billion in other developing countries. Oxfam listed the developing countries as Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, India, Pakistan, Peru, and Thailand.

“Perhaps even more galling than these corporations’ sophisticated tax avoidance is their subversion of democratic politics,” Oxfam pointed out. “They are also adept at placing their own people in powerful government posts.”

Pfizer and Big Pharma systematically engage in “tax dodging, high prices, and influence peddling” — victimizing the most vulnerable while they “funnel superprofits from people living in poverty to wealthy shareholders and corporate executives,” the Oxfam report stated.

Make America Healthy Again

This is why one of the best side effects of Donald Trump’s reelection is his nomination of surgeon and bestselling author Martin “Marty” Makary to be the next commissioner of the FDA.

Makary, like Trump’s other picks for top health posts, including J.F. Kennedy, Jr. (Department of Health and Human Services), and Indian-American cardiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (National Institutes of Health) has been labeled a “COVID skeptic” by those who have their noses in the trough of the Washington swamp and the Illness Industrial Complex.

Makary has long been a fierce critic of the agency he has now been chosen to lead. A member of the National Academy of Medicine and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he coauthored an analysis published in the British Medical Journal asserting that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States. He responded by creating a simple operating room “checklist” to eliminate surgical mistakes.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, Makary’s only way of ending FDA-Big Pharma corruption and collusion will be to end the regime of the latter funneling cash to the former. If Makary can find a way of ending the “revolving door” regime by which FDA bosses find themselves on the board of Big Pharma companies, that will probably be Trump’s greatest achievement in Making America Healthy Again.

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.