Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…The bigger picture of this is you’re an outspoken critic of pharmaceutical companies, big pharma. What is the biggest problem with big pharma and how can it be fixed? Well, the problem could be fixed with regulation. But the pharmaceutical industry is… I don’t want to say because this is going to seem extreme that a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history, that is an applicable characterization, for example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer, and Glaxo, four companies that make all of the 72 vaccines that are now effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade. And I think since 2000, about 79 billion. So these are the most corrupt companies in the world. And the problem is that they’re serial felons. They do this again and again and again. So Merck did Vioxx, which, Vioxx, they killed people by falsifying science. And they did it. They lied to the public. They said, “This is a headache medicine and a arthritis painkiller.” But they didn’t tell people that it also gave you heart attacks. And they knew, we’ve found when we sued them, the memos from their bean counters saying, “We’re going to kill this many people, but we’re still going to make money.” So they make those calculations and those calculations are made very, very regularly. And then when they get caught, they pay a penalty. And I think they paid about $7 billion for Vioxx. But then they went right back that same year that they paid that penalty, they went back into the same thing again with Gardasil and with a whole lot of other drugs. So the way that the system is set up, the way that it’s sold to doctors, the way that nobody ever goes to jail, so there’s really no penalty that it all becomes part of the cost of doing business. And you can see other businesses that if there’s no penalty, if there’s no real… look, these are the companies that gave us the opioid epidemic. So they knew what was going to happen. And you go and see, there’s a documentary, I forget what the name of it is, but it shows exactly what happened. And they corrupted FDA. They knew that oxycodone was addictive. They got FDA to tell doctors that it wasn’t addictive. They pressured FDA to lie. And they got their way. And so far they got a whole generation addicted oxycodone. And now when they got caught, and we made it harder to get oxycodone, and now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying. And this year it killed 106,000. That’s twice as many people who were killed during the 20-year Vietnam War. But in one year, twice as many American kids. And they knew it was going to happen and they did it to make money. So I don’t know what you call that other than saying that’s a criminal enterprise. Well, is it possible, within a capitalist system, to produce medication, to produce drugs at scale in a way that is not corrupt?…

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