Government officials’ Selling Public Good for Private Gain
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hilling for Big Cola
She favored a company that reportedly spreads disinformation through “scientists”
the company hires “to produce results that obscure the product’s harm.”
- Before her departure, she reportedly promoted “Coca-Cola’s physical fitness programs” and considered reconnecting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [public-private profiteering partnering] with Coca-Cola, a company, which has been exposed (2015) “for funding scientists … (to claim that) America’s obesity crisis was all about exercise; not the excess empty calories from sugary drinks.”
Multinational publicly traded manufacturer, retailer, marketer of
nonalcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups (Georgia headquartered) The
Coca-Cola Company (2018 est.) revenue $31.85 billion; total assets $83.21
billion
- She invested in “drug, insurance, and health diagnostic firms that posed conflicts in dealing with cancer, opioids, and dissemination of health information.”
- She invested in “tobacco stocks” while in her position at the CDC; and before her appointment to the CDC, she reportedly invested in “cigarette companies whose products kill 480,000 Americans a year and 6 million worldwide.”
Before her resignation, Brenda Fitzgerald had been Director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (July 2017-January 2018); Commissioner
of the Georgia Department of Public Health (2011 to 2017); and a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist.
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hilling for Big Pharma
He was the major pharmaceutical drug company Eli Lilly’s “top lobbyist
and spokesman as its Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and
Communications” (2007).
- He was Vice President of Lilly’s U.S. Managed Healthcare Services organization and its Puerto Rico affiliate” (2009), and during his tenure “the company paid $1.415 billion to settle criminal charges regarding its (1999-2005) promotion of antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (olanzapine) for off-label uses.”
- He was President of the largest division of Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly USA, LLC) and had responsibility for the company’s entire U.S. operations; the position carried with it a seat on the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a pharmaceutical lobby’s, board of directors (2012-2017).
The CDC reported that in 2015 diabetes was listed as the cause of death on a
quarter million U.S. death certificates and the annual direct and indirect
national cost of diabetes was a quarter of a billion dollars.
- In the years 2010-2015, during this man’s tenure, his company, Eli Lilly, hiked the cost for its Humulin injection “up 325 percent.” A class action lawsuit against the company has charged that “the price of Lilly’s insulin drugs ‘Humalog’ and ‘Humulin’ skyrocketed by 1,157 percent, and nearly 800 percent, respectively.”
- In 1996, a vial of Humalog “cost $21.” In 2017, that same vial cost “$274.70.”
As Eli Lilly was undergoing company reorganization in early 2017, he physically
(technically, on their books) left Eli Lilly; and later that year he was picked up
by U.S. President Trump.
In early 2018, the U.S. Senate rubber stamped the appointment
of Big Phrama boss Alex Michael Azar II (net worth $8.7 million) as top
executive of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Multinational publicly traded pharmaceutical company (Indiana-headquartered)
Eli Lilly and Company (2018 est.) revenue $24.556 billion; total assets $43.908
billion
In early 2020, in the midst of an infectious disease scare, when asked
about affordability of a now nonexistent vaccine for the country (and the
world), Mr. oblivious-to-anything-but-self-multi-millionaire Azar The 2nd showed
his colors —
“We can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” he said. “… Price controls won’t get us there.”
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he government of the United States in the person of corrupt and
corruptible politicians of all stripes bent on selfish means and selfish ends have
sold government service to private interests, resulting sickness — a nation
exposed, individuals’ only recourse being (if they can afford the fare) lawsuits. But
lawsuits do not solve societal problems, domestic or global.
What did the preamble to the U.S. Constitution say?
“…In order to form a
more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for
the common defense (for example,
research, discovery, innovation and prevention against epidemic disease—not going around
the world killing people and claiming “defense” of the homeland or “humanitarianism”
for convenient “others”), promote and general welfare (the founders were not talking “communism,” “socialism,” “capitalism,”
or even “Americanism”), and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves (not to one or some of us but to all of us)
and our posterity….”
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mericans for a long
time have suffered successive executive administrations’ and congresses’ and high
courts’ weakening of the body (the body politic, the people as a whole). Toward
their own ends, they have distracted and driven gulfs, winding and multiplying like
snakes or snaking mazes, among us.
Masters of mayhem, propagandists and false informers
(public-private) partnered in an intricate web of shadowy and overt entities— these are the traitors
engaged in unending treachery (abroad in unending military-industrial hostilities)
on the domestic front against the public good.
Sources
The Coca-Cola Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coca-Cola_Company
Brenda Fitzgerald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Fitzgerald
Union of Concerned Scientists “Conflicts of Interest in the Trump
Administration: The Cases of
Alex Azar and Brenda Fitzgerald” Derrick Z. Jackson, February 5, 2018 https://blog.ucsusa.org/derrick-jackson/conflicts-of-interest-in-the-trump-administration-the-cases-of-alex-azar-and-brenda-fitzgerald
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a national nonprofit organization
founded more than 50 years ago by scientists and students at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Alex Azar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Azar
Elli Lilly and Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Lilly_and_Company
Forbes “Health Secretary Alex Azar Refuses to Guarantee Coronavirus
Vaccine Would Be Affordable for All” Isabel Togoh February 27, 2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/02/27/health-secretary-alex-azar-refuses-to-guarantee-coronavirus-vaccine-would-be-affordable-for-all/#9abd99b490c3
The Verge “Health secretary Alex Azar won’t promise that a coronavirus
vaccine would be affordable” by Nicole Wetsman February 27, 2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155879/alex-azar-coronavirus-vaccine-affordable-insurance
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