Galveston injury lawyers mention that recent months have seen a series of fines levied against major pharmaceutical companies for practices that endangered your health and took multiple lives. The fines might seem large to an ordinary individual living on an ordinary budget. But the fines represent only a tiny, token fraction of the vast profits these major pharmaceutical companies reaped following their unethical marketing and testing of their drugs. Let’s look at a few examples.
An Argentinean judge just fined GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) some 400,000 pesos (that’s only about $93,000 in U.S. currency) for conducting illegal vaccine lab trials that took the lives of at least 14 Argentine babies between 2007 and 2008. That’s more than a dozen innocent children who won’t be celebrating their fourth and fifth birthdays this year. Reportedly, GSK recruited doctors who forced illiterate parents into signing over their children for the trials.
Johnson & Johnson (J&J), the world’s largest health products company, has been fined $1 billion by the U.S. government over the marketing of its ant psychotic drug, Risperdal, for uses unapproved by the FDA. This might sound like a huge fine, but it’s less than 1/3 of Risperdal’s peak sales just for the year 2007. For reference, Risperdal was the company’s best selling drug for some years. Risperdal brought in more than $24 billion in sales between 2003 and 2010. Once it lost patent protection, J&J began aggressively marketing the drug for unapproved uses in order to shore up its dropping profits. A criminal plea might still result from the government’s investigation in this case.
November 2011 saw a fine of $950,000,000 levied against Merck, another giant of the pharmaceuticals industry, for marketing its drug Vioxx using false advertising and deceptive marketing practices. Use of Vioxx was linked to about 27,000 heart attacks and cases of sudden cardiac death. Merck pulled the drug off the market in 2004 after marketing it for 5 years. Critics allege that Merck knowingly hid reports of these Vioxx-linked deaths from the public.
The unethical marketing practices and illegal lab vaccine trials of the big pharmaceutical companies present clear dangers to public health. Fines that represent miniscule amounts to these large companies do not serve to sufficiently motivate these companies to concern themselves with the health of those who might be affected by their products. Government needs to step up enforcement efforts with much larger fines and additional criminal penalties to keep these international behemoths from threatening your health in their quest for ever greater profits.
If a drug marketed for an unapproved use has injured you, contact our Galveston injury lawyers for a free legal consultation. You might be eligible for financial compensation from the manufacturer and marketer for the harm you suffered.