Big Pharma is just too big for peons like us to have any influence on whether the drugs they're pushing at us are really safe. From fake journal articles pushing a questionable drug, to massaging the data from third-world clinical trials, to holding conferences in tropical climes for doctors, they do whatever has to be done to get a billion-dollar winner in the drug sweepstakes. And if you should drop dead or be maimed, no attorney will take your family's case because the Roberts court has pretty much eviscerated the conditions under which a class action suit can be filed.

But remember, we have the best healthcare system in the world! From the Times:

A research director for Pfizer was positively buoyant after reading that an important medical conference had just featured a study claiming that the new arthritis drug Celebrex was safer on the stomach than more established drugs.

The truth was that Celebrex was no better at protecting the stomach from serious complications than other drugs. It appeared that way only because Pfizer and its partner, Pharmacia, presented the results from the first six months of a yearlong study rather than the whole thing.

The companies had a lot riding on the outcome of the study, given that Celebrex’s effect on the stomach was its principal selling point. Earlier studies had shown it was no better at relieving pain than common drugs — like ibuprofen — already on the market.

The research chief’s e-mail, sent in 2000, is among thousands of pages of internal documents and depositions unsealed recently by a federal judge in a long-running securities fraud case against Pfizer. While the companies’ handling of the research was revealed a dozen years ago, the documents provide a vivid picture of the calculation made by Pfizer at the time and its efforts ever since to overcome doubts about the drug.

The documents suggest that officials made a strategic decision during the early trial to be less than forthcoming about the drug’s safety. They show that executives considered attacking the trial’s design before they even knew the results and disregarded the advice of an employee and an outside consultant who had argued the companies should disclose the fact that they were using incomplete data.

In one e-mail, an associate medical director at Pharmacia (which was later bought by Pfizer) disparaged the way the study was being presented as “data massage,” for “no other reason than it happens to look better.”

In another, a medical director at Pfizer described it as “cherry-picking the data” even as officials were publicly boasting of the study’s success. Dr. M. Michael Wolfe, a gastroenterologist who had cautiously praised the study in a medical journal at the outset, said after reviewing the new documents: “I always try to give investigators the benefit of the doubt, but these communications make it quite challenging for me.”

Seeing a connection between the so-called "Shoot First" laws passed with the support of the American Legislative Exchange Council and the National Rifle Association, a group of progressive organizations is calling upon ALEC's funders to dump the conservative group before more harmful laws are passed. Crooks and Liars previously reported on the connection between "Shoot First" laws and ALEC and the NRA.

The story of Trayvon Martin is, first and foremost, a tragedy for his family, and our hearts go out to them. It’s also about things that need to change, including how powerful interests use their superior resources to distort the processes of government — in this case a well-funded private group, fueled by donations from big corporations: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

We want to know why major U.S. corporations support ALEC, which, working with the National Rifle Association, helped write and promote around the country the law that might allow Trayvon Martin’s killer to go free. So Republic Report, along with Color of Change, the Center for Media and Democracy, and Van Jones’ organization, Rebuild the Dream, just sent those companies a letter asking them to stop supporting and financing ALEC.

The corporations the letter was sent to include:

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This is the third story I've seen this week about criminal activity by major pharmaceutical companies. (See here and here.) Aren't you glad that our new healthcare bill will permit them to stay profitable?

The world's biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable.

Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.

Last year, the company came to a tentative settlement with the Kano state government which was to cost it $75m.

But the cable suggests that the US drug giant did not want to pay out to settle the two cases – one civil and one criminal – brought by the Nigerian federal government.

The cable reports a meeting between Pfizer's country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and US officials at the Abuja embassy on 9 April 2009. It states: "According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to federal attorney general Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer's investigators were passing this information to local media."

The cable, classified confidential by economic counsellor Robert Tansey, continues: "A series of damaging articles detailing Aondoakaa's 'alleged' corruption ties were published in February and March. Liggeri contended that Pfizer had much more damaging information on Aondoakaa and that Aondoakaa's cronies were pressuring him to drop the suit for fear of further negative articles."