Janesdiggo's List: Corporate

• According to company e-mails unsealed in civil lawsuits, AstraZeneca “buried” — a manager’s term — a 1997 study showing that users of Seroquel, then a new antipsychotic, gained 11 pounds a year, while the company publicized a study that asserted they lost weight. Company e-mail messages also refer to doing a “great smoke-and-mirrors job” on an unfavorable study.
• “When I started speaking for companies in the late 1980s and early ’90s, I was allowed to say what I thought I should say consistent with the science,” he recalls. “Then it got to the point where I was no longer allowed to do that. I was given slides and told, ‘We’ll give you a thousand dollars if you say this for a half-hour.’ And I said: ‘I can’t say that. It isn’t true.’ ”
• While drug companies are prohibited from promoting drugs for conditions for which they have not been proved safe and effective, their paid consultants, researchers and educators may do that for them verbally and in company-sponsored studies.
• For their part, doctors are free to prescribe any approved drug for any medical condition they choose, even if the drug hasn’t been approved for that specific treatment.
• DOCUMENTS produced in recent litigation and in Congressional investigations show that some leading academic doctors have worked closely with corporate benefactors to expand the use of antipsychotics.

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• According to government investigators and plaintiffs’ lawyers, many of the studies of antipsychotics were conceived in marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies, written by ghostwriters and then signed by prominent physicians — giving the illusion that the doctors were undertaking their studies independently.

   Such practices continue.
• “The content is preplanned,” said one doctor who has worked as an uncredited medical writer for antipsychotic studies. Data is used selectively and interpreted for company benefit, said the doctor, who still works in medical writing and spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve future job prospects.
• Pfizer paid more than 250 child psychiatrists to promote its antipsychotic, Geodon, at a time when it was approved only for adults, according to a government filing with the Pfizer settlement last year.
• the payment amounted to just 2.4 percent of the $21.6 billion AstraZeneca made on Seroquel sales from 1997 to 2009.

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• Mr. Kindler is operating under Pfizer’s third corporate accountability agreement, a five-year promise to the federal government to reform sales behavior, monitor employees and disclose misconduct. The first was signed in 2002 for withholding rebates for Lipitor. The second, in 2004, was for illegal marketing of the seizure drug Neurontin. The third, last year, was for illegal marketing of the painkiller Bextra.
• Pfizer officials say they inherited the first two situations with their acquisitions of two other companies, Warner-Lambert and Parke-Davis.
• Mr. Morris says some companies are “too big to debar” from government contracts,
• • First banks were 'too big to fail' now pharam companies are 'too big to debar' ... amazing how all this is done under the guise of protecting the rest of us.

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• The industry continues to market antipsychotics aggressively, leading analysts to question how drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for about 1 percent of the population have become the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest sellers — despite recent crackdowns.

• environmentalist dubbed the region a "national sacrifice area."
• oil production soared in the Gulf of Mexico
• safety and environmental regulators never did catch up to the rush there
• yields a story with an echo of the recent financial crisis. Both stemmed from collective national drives toward a laudable goal
• Florida Sen. Bob Graham
• "an enormous and shared failure of public policy.
• "The industry convinced nearly everyone in government that what they were doing was so sophisticated that it was both totally safe and impossible for government to understand, much less regulate,"
• "There was never a thought that we were sacrificing safety,"
• "Everyone involved, from the regulators to the companies themselves, agreed that [offshore drilling] was a safe endeavor."
• Companies typically paid around 12% of all oil produced in royalties to the U.S. Treasury. But the relief act waived payments for the initial production—and the deeper the project, the better the royalty relief. An industry publication praised Mr. Clinton "as the new champion of the exploration sector."
• The number of new deep-water leases soared, topping 1,200 in 1997, compared with 326 the year the law passed.
• MMS let the industry establish its own "best practices," which regulators would oversee.

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• Something new is happening, said Daniel Carpenter, a government professor at Harvard who is an expert on the drug agency. The population is aging, many have chronic diseases. And companies are going after giant markets, huge parts of the population, heavily advertising drugs that are to be taken for a lifetime.
• “Here is a wide-scale institutional failure,” he said. “We have placed far more resources and requirements upon premarket assessment of drugs than on postmarket.”

• Polygone wants to force Mr. Leblanc to reveal the identity of a key source as part of its defence against a $35-million federal lawsuit
• Two years ago, a Quebec Superior Court judge ordered Mr. Leblanc to divulge the identity of an anonymous source
• The Globe launched an appeal of the order.
• Polygone lawyers argued that the rights of a person who leaks information cannot take precedence over the livelihood of a company that is trying to defend itself in a serious lawsuit.
• the Polygone ruling will be crucial for the public, because people rely on the news media to police governments and corporations on their behalf.
• “The Globe is trying to protect a key source who helped unravel a major government corruption scandal.

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• some medical experts and advocates see Meridia as an example of deep-rooted problems in the drug-safety system that urgently need to be fixed.
• “I think it took a decade or more to establish that sibutramine is really not a safe enough compound, and that’s too long,” said Gregory Curfman, executive editor at the New England Journal of Medicine,
• Science simply has not identified an effective weight-loss treatment that does not come with serious side effects, Dr. Curfman said.

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• The panel says that of four tests conducted in February and April by Halliburton, only one - the last - showed the mix would hold.
• The results conclude the cement mix was unstable, raising questions about the validity of Halliburton's final test.
• BP, as part of its internal investigation, also conducted tests that showed the cement mix was flawed, but its analysis was criticized by Halliburton, which said it was not the correct formula. The company also said the testing Halliburton did on the cement was incomplete.

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• the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.
• The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it,
• Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.
• Halliburton has said in public testimony that it tested and used a proper cement formula on the well and said BP’s flawed well design and poor operations caused the disaster.
• The mixture failed nine separate stability tests designed to reproduce conditions at the BP well and did not pass any, according to Chevron’s test results, which were returned to the commission this week.
• On April 19, just before technicians began pumping cement slurry down the well, Halliburton conducted one last test of the cement slurry. The company changed some of the conditions of the test, and appeared satisfied with the result, although those findings were not communicated to BP until after the well explosion, the commission found.
• “Halliburton may not have had — and BP did not have — the results of that test before the evening of April 19, meaning that the cement job may have been pumped without any lab results indicating that the foam cement slurry would be stable.”
• Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable, but neither acted upon that data.
• “Because it may be anticipated that a particular cement job may be faulty, the oil industry has developed tests, such as the negative pressure test and cement evaluation logs, to identify cementing failures,”
• It has also developed methods to remedy deficient cement jobs. BP and/or Transocean personnel misinterpreted or chose not to conduct such tests at the Macondo well.

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• Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature.
• The Patent and Trademark Office has sided with the proponents and has issued thousands of patents on genes of various organisms, including on an estimated 20 percent of human genes.
• But in its brief, the government said it now believed that the mere isolation of a gene, without further alteration or manipulation, does not change its nature.
• While the government took the plaintiffs’ side on the issue of isolated DNA, it sided with Myriad on patentability of manipulated DNA.

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• Mr. Wall argues Saskatchewan’s dominant position in the potash industry – with 53 per cent of the world’s reserves – should not be handed to a global multinational to develop, and that Canada needs corporate champions in key resource sectors

  • The company is 49% + or - owned by an American firm. Who's really behind the push to stop the takeover? The company wanting to buy in is Australian
• In a statement Tuesday, Mr. Clement denied that a recommendation has been made by Investment Canada, and said no decision has been made.
• The minister added that he - not the prime minister - would make the decision. However, multiple sources close to government say Mr. Harper will have the ultimate approval.

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• “I'm in grave danger of agreeing with the NDP,'“ said Joseph d'Cruz of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, who said he is not normally sympathetic to NDP policies. “But on this one, I think they're on the right track. I think having public hearings is pretty healthy,”
• On an important public policy issue, I think confidentiality is not healthy.”
• Prof. d’Cruz said the existing rules leave the bureaucrats virtually no room to determine that a deal is not to Canada’s benefit, something he said needs to be changed.
• The federal government has only once before used the Investment Canada Act to block a foreign takeover. In 2008, the Harper government turned down a proposed acquisition of aerospace company MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. by U.S.-based Alliant Technology. It was followed in 2009 with new legislated amendments to the act that allow national security concerns to factor in to decisions on foreign takeovers.

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• The unusual nature of Canada’s potash reserves — about half of the global supply comes from Canada — and widespread bitterness over other foreign takeovers of Canadian mining companies had created pressure from even prominent business leaders to block the deal.
• It was only the second time that the Canadian government had turned down a bid in the 25-year history of the current foreign investment law.
• On Wednesday, a Russian financial newspaper reported that PhosAgro, a Russian fertilizer maker, was putting together a bid which could give Russia control of 70 percent of the world’s potash.
• By contrast, opponents of BHP’s offer include many prominent people in business and many residents of Alberta, the province that is the power base of the federal Conservatives.

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• Where the stiff-necked moral right of a copyright holder to control usage rubs up against the practicalities of allowing an entire industry's capacity for cultural exchange and use, the law usually responds by converting the moral right to an economic right.
• The composers damned the record companies as pirates; the record labels damned the radio for its piracy; broadcasters vilified the cable companies for taking their signals; cable companies fought the VCR for its recording "theft." Big entertainment tried to kill FM radio, TV remote controls (which made it easy to switch away from adverts), jukeboxes, and so on, all the way back to the protestant reformation's fight over who got to read the Bible.
• So a balanced and evidence-based copyright policy is one that requires creators to show a need for protection, and also that the protection sought will deliver more benefit than the cost it implies.
• YouTube's users produce 29 hours of video every minute and the vast majority of it is not infringing TV and movie clips, it is independently produced material that accounts for more viewer-minutes than television.

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• a system that they hope will one day greatly increase the number of organs collected for transplant.

  • This is completely disgusting; they are intent on turning us into commodities, even down to our organs

• With some in the financial world willing to bet on almost anything, it should be no surprise that a few would see the potential to profit from the often contentious and emotional process of ending a marriage.
• So far, the number of companies investing in divorce is small
• But other businesses are gearing up.
• A New York start-up, Churchill Divorce Finance, also is planning to enter the business. The company’s chief executive previously co-founded a publicly traded Australian company, ASK Funding, that has invested tens of millions in divorce cases there.
• Banks, hedge funds and boutique firms like Balance Point now have a total of $1 billion invested in lawsuits at any given time,
• initially focused on personal injury cases, but over time they have sought new frontiers, including securities fraud cases brought by disgruntled investors, whistleblower claims against corporations and property development disputes.

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• Lawyers who finance other civil cases generally keep at least a third of the winnings.
• “Anything south of $15 million, when you divide that in half and take out the legal fees, you’re not in the same house, you’re not taking the same trips — your life is different,” she said. “You can’t maintain that same quality of life that you’re used to.”
• she says she will not take clients who seem unwilling to compromise, fearing that their pursuit of justice will undermine Balance Point’s pursuit of profit.
• But Ms. Napp concedes that clients are attracted to Balance Point in part because she did not settle her own case.

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• “That is the problem. To get the actual data, you need the raw data,” not just annual reports, said Kevin Timoney, an Alberta ecologist and oil sands researcher. “They release just enough so they can say that they did, but they don’t give you enough to see what’s really going on.”
• Just over half RAMP’s steering committee is made up of industry representatives,
• The body acts on industry's expertise and the recommendations of industry-paid contractors.
• Much of the raw data collected by RAMP is kept private, deemed proprietary because of the industry funding.

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• The closest thing critics point to as a baseline is a 1982 Alberta Environment study of the Athabasca which tagged 17,000 fish and noted no such problems. Author Peter McCart said his researchers “were highly experienced. They would have known if there was a highly unusual incidence of deformed fish.”
• Those fish still sit in a freezer at the University of Alberta, and have been given names by researchers. There’s Big Red, a whitefish whose skin is uncharacteristically crimson; Lumpy, who had a golf-ball-sized growth on its back; and Stumpy, whose tail was unusually short. Without them, Ottawa may not have reviewed RAMP. What it does now depends on the unreleased report.