They paid out for a settlement on Avandia and now there’s issues with Paxil.

Only a week after Glaxo SmithKline (GSK) agreed to pay $460 million to settle over 10,000 personal injury lawsuits related to Avandia,  it was reported that GSK has agreed to pay $1 billion dollars to settle  800 cases related to birth defects caused by  the GSK anti-depressant Paxil, taken by pregnant women. Both of these settlements are part of the $2.4 billion GSK has set aside to resolve pending litigation, according to corporate filings last week.

Next to health insurance corporations drug corporations are the other villains it would seem.

This is why they’re evil:

This settlement also follows a recent trial in Philadelphia, where a jury awarded a family $2.5 million for their child’s heart birth defect caused by Paxil. That lawsuit revealed internal “Glaxo documents showing executives talked about burying negative studies about Paxil’s links to birth defects and that its own scientists were alarmed by the rising number of children who had been affected by the drug in the womb.”

I don’t know how those executives can look their own children in the face knowing what they’ve done to other parents. My only explanation is that these people must be sociopaths.

Profiteering off of pneumonia drugs in Africa?

The UK pharmaceutical group is reviewing its price after attacks from Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) that it is promoting its Synflorix pneumococcal vaccine to Ugandans willing to pay $50 per dose from their own pockets.

It is rightfully deserved. She blew the whistle on the negligent and corrupt practices that GlaxoSmithKline were engaged in.

Cheryl Eckard, the former global quality assurance manager of GlaxoSmithKline, will receive $96m of a settlement to be paid by the pharmaceutical company to settle allegations that it knowingly manufactured and sold adulterated drugs, federal prosecutors in Massachusetts say.

Carmen Ortiz, the US lawyer involved in the case, announced on Tuesday that the London-based company will pay $150m in criminal fines and $600m in civil penalties related to faulty manufacturing processes at its plant in Cidra, Puerto Rico.

This is what happens when there is lax regulation as was the case with the FDA for the past eight years now. Furthermore, I feel that whistle blowers need to be fully protected.

Here’s another story of a corrupt pharmaceutical corporation who will release drugs to the public regardless of whether it is safe or not. The NY Times obtained an internal FDA report which brought these issues to light.

Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.

I’ve seen these ads for realage.com plastered all over websites for at least a year if not more now. In some ads they’ve featured the “real age” of people like Barack Obama and John McCain even. I was surprised to learn from Stepahine Clifford writing in the NY Times and reposted on CorpWatch that Real Age is a lucrative avenue for Big Phrma.

According to RealAge, more than 27 million people have taken the test, which asks 150 or so questions about lifestyle and family history to assign a “biological age,” how young or old your habits make you. Then, RealAge makes recommendations on how to get “younger,” like taking multivitamins, eating breakfast and flossing your teeth. Nine million of those people have signed up to become RealAge members.

But while RealAge promotes better living through nonmedical solutions, the site makes its money by selling better living through drugs.

How does it do this I wonder?

Pharmaceutical companies pay RealAge to compile test results of RealAge members and send them marketing messages by e-mail. The drug companies can even use RealAge answers to find people who show symptoms of a disease — and begin sending them messages about it even before the people have received a diagnosis from their doctors.

Wow. Join Pointdexter and his dreams that temporarily resulted in the Information Awareness Office, where most of the programs are now continued in the DOD somewhere I’d imagine, would be proud of Real Age and Big Phrma. It also turns out that this site even has a doctor promoting it on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

And it has become something of a sensation in the marketing world. Many marketers, online and off, segment potential consumers within broad categories. But RealAge gathers very specific information and, unlike some sites, it gives its consumers an incentive to tell the truth, namely, a chance to live longer.

So is this going to be the new marketing trend? Are we going to see similar websites springing up to engage us and convince us to give up all of our information so that we can be better marketed to? For example I can totally see some “green lifestyle” website being created where it gathers information from environmentally concerned netizens and then sells that information to corporations.

RealAge allows drug companies to send e-mail messages based on those test results. It acts as a clearinghouse for drug companies, including Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline, allowing them to use almost any combination of answers from the test to find people to market to, including whether someone is taking antidepressants, how sexually active they are and even if their marriage is happy.

This is rather depressing to read. However I do have to say that this is a great article by Ms. Clifford. This is the kind of reporting I’d like to see more of in the New York Times.

The Justice Department is investigating Glaxo and it’s marketing techniques in regards to Paxil.

Technorati : glaxosmithkline, paxil

I’m telling you people should get the pitch forks and torches and start driving Big Pharma out of the United States. First Vioxx and now Avandia.

May 21 (Bloomberg) — GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s drug Avandia, the world’s top-selling oral diabetes treatment, may raise a patient’s chance of having a heart attack, researchers said. Glaxo shares fell the most in five years.

Patients getting Avandia were 43 percent more likely to have a heart attack, according to an analysis released today of previous studies. Researchers also found a trend toward high death rates. Glaxo executives said more rigorous research showed no increase in danger, and U.S. regulators said they don’t yet have enough information to determine any risks.

GlaxoSmithKline: An Un-American, unethical, and anti-human pharmaceutical corporation. But then again most of the corporations that make up Big Pharma are the same things. Absolutely sickening and disgusting.

Update – 11/3/2011

This post was my first post written in 2007 about Avandia. Over the years I wrote more about that drug  here. Now after all this time there has finally been a muli-billion dollar settlement.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc agreed to pay $3 billion to resolve U.S. criminal and civil investigations into whether the U.K. company marketed drugs for unapproved uses and other matters, its biggest legal settlement.

Back then in 2007 a study that Bloomberg News had cited said that the findings weren’t definitive. Well, I guess we’re pretty sure about them now in the year 2011.