Avandia Drug and History Lesson?

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Greenberg & Bederman

 

GlaxoSmithKline Diabetes Drug Avandia Linked to Heart Attacks

The Conservative Political Action Conference was recently held here in Washington, D.C. The Conference was a who’s who or rising stars in the Conservative movement. Only in Washington, D.C. can you find pundits, Congressmen and columnists receiving welcomes that would normally be reserved for the likes of rock musicians and Hollywood movie stars.

While the Conservative Movement itself has various subsets and fractions, the one element that unites them in word, deed and purpose is the idea of a small, non-intrusive government. For the most part, they espouse the theory that the best sort of government is a government that does not insert itself into the free market. Good government is that which is able to function and defend its interests without a burdensome level of taxation. They would argue that the United States is not a nation of regulations and statutes, but rather a nation of people hard at work.

This is a perfectly acceptable way of looking at things. There have certainly been times when we have found ourselves wishing for smaller government. Waiting in line at the DMV, for instance, or when we have filled out our tax forms only to find out that we owe more than we thought.

 

But Glenn Beck, the keynote speaker at CPAC, seemed to take those beliefs to some quite radical extremes. Mr. Beck seems to believe that government had no other business but to provide a police force and a military, and that government involvement in anything else, be it business, healthcare, communications, manufacturing, labor rights or the economy, was encroachment.

It is here that we differ significantly.

Believe it or not, there was a time that The United States of America was quite similar to the sort of place that Mr. Beck seems to wish for. Historians called it “The Gilded Age,” and it was basically the four decade period between the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Mr. McKinley’s assassination led to Vice President Teddy Roosevelt’s appointment to the presidency.

To give you an idea as to how small and non-intrusive the government was during this era, we would ask you to name one President that served between the Lincoln and McKinley presidencies without looking it up on the internet. The odds are that you can’t, and the reason this is the case is because for about thirty five years, the President of the United States was practically a figurehead position. The real power was in the hands of men named Mellon and Rockefeller and Morgan and Hearst, who had practical or very real monopolies in banks, railroads, oil and mining.

To be sure, it was certainly a golden age if your name was Mellon, Rockefeller, Morgan or Hearst, but if you happened to be anyone else, then your lot in life was certainly less than ideal. There were no labor unions, so people often worked not for money, but rather company credit, which was spent at a company owned store. There was no corporate regulation, so if you happened to own a small bank or oil company there was nothing preventing one of the giants from forcing you out of business, sometimes with means involving actual physical violence. There were no standards for products sold on the market, so people ate rancid meat and goods packaged in lead soldered cans, and took “medicines” that were often nothing more than sugar water in fancy packaging. There were no child protection laws, so the coal mines of West Virginia were teeming with workers who should have been at an elementary school. In short, money was the only thing that mattered, and human dignity was worthless as currency.

With the simple marker of history as an example, we find it hard to fathom how on earth Mr. Beck could view this nightmarish period of existence as “the Good Old Days.” But if Glenn Beck believes that the Gilded Age was the pinnacle of the American age, then the recent behavior of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline should fill him with all manner of patriotic pride.

Please consider the GlaxoSmithKline diabetes drug Avandia, which is meant for people with Type 2 Diabetes. Avandia works by making the cells more sensitive and responsive to insulin, which reduces the bodies need for the stringent blood sugar monitoring that diabetic patients have to do.

But just as with Vioxx, Yaz and Phen Fen before it, the trade off for the benefits of this drug appears to be an increased risk of heart attack. In a May, 2007 article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steven E. Nissen suggested that Avandia might increase the risk of heart attacks in its users. Dr. Nissen has impeccable credentials, does not accept fees from commercial entities, and is the least likely person in the world to throw around unfounded accusations. During Dr. Nissen’s studies, he noticed that 65% of the deaths that occurred during the clinical trials of the drug occurred due to heart disease.

It should be mentioned that Avandia has been on the market since 1999, and nets about $3 billion a year in profits for GlaxoSmithKline.

A recent report by the Senate Finance Committee (which spent four years going over documentation from the FDA and GSK) has determined the following:

  • That GSK attacked Dr. Nissen’s study in the press even though they themselves found it to be statistically accurate.
  • That GSK knew for years prior to the study that there were cardiac risks involved with Avandia.
  • That GSK ghostwrote papers for so-called “independent researchers.”
  • That GSK intimidated and attempted to professionally discredit researchers who were arriving at the same conclusion as Dr. Nissen.

If you or a loved one suffered an injury from the use of Avandia, contact Andy Bederman, from Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. area injury law firm that is currently offering legal help to people in the District, Maryland and Virginia who have been injured and hospitalized due to the use of Avandia. We are also helping those who have lost loved ones due to heart attacks or strokes brought on by this drug.

If you or a loved one has suffered due to GlaxoSmithKline’s type 2 diabetic drug Avandia, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

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