David Amess was, in 2004, the member of the House of Commons Health Committee which investigated and reported on The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry. [5]
This criticised “disease mongering… with the interest of the pharmaceutical industry in seeing an increase of the abnormal population who need drugs for one reason or another.” It criticised inadequate testing which makes the report still relevant today:
Patient information leaflets (PIL) are often written to minimize legal liability for the pharma companies.
Research-into-prevention diverts money from treatment, which in turn diverts money away from the sick, poor or old.
A public inquiry should be conducted every time a drug is withdrawn on health grounds to determine whether sufficient testing of the drug took place.
Phama funds much of the post-graduate education of GPs.
Where pharma funds more than 20% of an organization’s budget, it becomes dependent on the industry. Patients’ organizations are increasingly influenced by big pharma.
Codes of conduct between the pharmaceutical industry and the health service are needed, and standards of behaviour for pharma industry representatives.
The following year he supported an Early Day Motion entitled The British Pharmaceutical Industry that called for “the highest ethical standards in the research and promotion of medicines… to ensure that the appropriate use of medicines both improves patient care and helps the NHS budget to go further.” [6]
In 2010 David Amess proposed a Bill on the Safety of Medicines. Adverse drug reactions resulting in hospital admissions cost the NHS £2 billion a year. He asked what constitutes adequate testing, pointing to the painkiller Vioxx, withdrawn in 2004, which killed more than 100,000 people worldwide in its five years on the market — the biggest drug disaster in history… up to that time. [7]
In the speech proposing the Bill he pointed out:
Nine out of 10 new drugs that pass animal tests go on to fail in human clinical trials.
The testing regime has not kept up with technology, citing human DNA “chips” and computer modelling.
Many drugs for the elderly are never tested on the elderly, and women are massively under-represented in clinical trials.
More recent comments are not immediately apparent from computer searches. I would never suggest that Google or Twitter would censor a politician! Whatever — David Amess made his position perfecly clear.
Dr Aseem Malhotra FRCP Tweeted: “Very sad news about David Amess. I met him in parliament in 2016 when he took an interest in BMJ Too Much Medicine campaign. He understood our request for a parliamentary inquiry into the misdemeanors of the pharmaceutical industry.” [8]
Deaths as a result of the Covid vaccines already vastly exceed those of Vioxx. The silence of regulatory authorities, government officials and the state-corporatist media suggest that, just as in Indonesia 60 years ago, the calculation has been made: hundreds of thousands of lives equate to $/£ millions.