Robert Califf doesn’t think his many ties to pharmaceutical companies will affect his objectivity in regulating the industry. Congress seems to agree, but we don’t. Action Alert!
Last Tuesday, President Obama’s nominee to take charge of the federal Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Robert Califf, defended his longstanding ties to Big Pharma in a Senate confirmation hearing in which few lawmakers seemed to oppose his candidacy.
By now, Dr. Califf’s lucrative dealings with the drug industry are well known. He ran a clinical research center at Duke University that received the majority of its multi-million dollar budget from Pharma. According to financial disclosures from last year, Dr. Califf received money for consulting with at least seven drug and medical device companies, and six other companies supported his university salary including Merck, Novartis, and Eli Lilly. The conflict of interest section of a paper he wrote for the European Heart Journal last year lists financial support from more than twenty companies.
All of this has led Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard political science professor and an expert on the FDA, to call Califf the “ultimate industry insider.” Indeed, the New York Times notes that “he has deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any FDA commissioner in recent memory.”
The FDA has increasingly been doing the bidding of Big Pharma, since the drug companies pay the agency’s bills and provide lucrative post-government employment opportunities. Califf’s nomination shows that federal officials are dropping all pretenses of picking someone who would actually protect public health or stand up to industry, and instead are baldly installing a fox to guard the henhouse.
Action Alert! Tell Congress to oppose the nomination of Dr. Califf to FDA Commissioner. Please send your message immediately.
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No worries, we can string you all up and burn you at the gallows just the same. Your corruption and conflict of interest doesn’t change that.
P.S. I like to use no hangman’s noose knot so you strangle and I light you on fire as you choke to death. Every single corrupt p.o.s in the world deserves this and worse. BURN!
The action page crashed IE every time I clicked the submit button!
If he has no worries about changing his mind because of his connections – that would be because he has already decided that he is going to sell us out at every opportunity.
What makes idiots think that corporate leadership has ANY place in govt? They are supposed to have different goals, they have different organization, authority, restrictions, freedoms, etc. Most of the time a corporate agenda is CONTRARY to good government – in today’s fed/state govt an oxymoron – true.
To state that there is no problem is like saying that putting Monsanto sock puppet Michael Taylor into the FDA had nothing to do with the FDA breaking every food law possible in illegally allowing ANY GMO into our food system.
It is like saying that Congress itself isn’t magically passing almost all legislation for the benefit of their rich friends instead of to help we the people…..
They are all fools, and as Reality states – there WILL be repercussions. Note: we are frequently told to write respectfully to “our” govt EMPLOYEES – but how is that working for us? Not too……
So – when you DO write respectfully – they know you think they are redeemable, they will listen. i’ve gotten beyond that to reach reality, and reality is that people are EXTREMELY pissed off with congress, the Prez, the Supreme Court Moron-jority, and the alphabet soup agencies run only for the benefit of the corpse-orations that WE are supposed to be protected from.
LET THEM KNOW that they are NOT respectable or looked up to. They do not deserve respect and politeness as they rip our country apart and rape our freedoms and life opportunities, our health and children’s survival. Fork ’em all. Let them know fear.
Obama must be in on it too .Does anyone know if America politicians get their payoff’s in large brown paper bags, like Canadian politicians.
Big Pharma is really hurting us. The constant advertising on TV of their deadly drugs is too much. Then they pass on that cost to us..Congress is full of people in there so long that they have lost all sense of reality in the real world..The seniors are hit too hard…They are the ones needing some drugs and they cannot afford to buy them…There is a church nearby here that takes up some of the slack. Get rid of the FDA altogether…they do more harm than good now…We need much reform if the drug area.
My congressman is one of the better ones but he too has no idea the severity of our food supply. Since O would like us all dead, congress goes along to get along.
Open the floodgates and let us get our prescriptions from anywhere in the world…as many do…Let us walk into OUR drug stores and buy our prescriptions over the counter as many other countries allow…Stop the US madness and control…They flood us with illegal drugs and then forbid us getting the drugs we need for our conditions.
Just great. First Obama appoints a GMO food lord to oversee our food (USDA) and now a big pharma drug lord to oversee (the FDA) drugs. Now we have two, one, Michael Taylor who was and is one of Monsanto’s key player’s and now we have Robert Califf who is the guy who took money from 23 drug companies, and denied the harm caused by Vioxx, and who thinks the FDA should function as a partner for the drug companies?
Like every other regulatory agency in the corrupt, criminal government regime now running America, the FDA and the USDA answers to no one and its leaders are not elected.