Conflicts of Interest Category Archives — Page 2 of 32 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

June 10, 2020

Pillars of medical establishment wobbling under pandemic’s big stresses

asclepliusrodof-70x300 As the Covid-19 pandemic has put huge stresses on medical systems around the globe, the strains have taken their toll: The credibility and authority — of federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and elite professional journals like the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine — have taken big hits in recent weeks.

In times of huge uncertainty and high anxiety, the public should be able to turn to these respected pillars of the health care establishment for steady, trustworthy, and independent information and execution of crucial policies that benefit the public.

The agencies are not just a pile of letters. Their work, based in rigorous medical science and the best available evidence, is supposed to reject damaging and dangerous rumor, hunch, myth, mis- and dis-information. They help to set standards for care, especially in crises, and they are charged with safeguarding us from disease, dangerous drugs and vaccines, and in protecting the old, sick, and injured in institutional care.

June 7, 2020

Saying a big ‘No!’ to racism, excessive police force, and health disparities

by Patrick A. Malone

Like a patient already struggling with serious illness or injury, the nation saw its underlying conditions flare up in distressing fashion in recent days:

The country first found itself grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic that has infected almost 2 million and killed more than 100,000. It gasped as the economy plunged and joblessness hit rates unseen in decades. Now, from coast to coast, people are confronting racism, injustice, inequity, and authorities’ excessive use of force.

The ugliness almost has become too much to bear.

June 2, 2020

With U.S. virus response, taxpayers may need to keep demanding: Who benefits?

by Patrick A. Malone

Cui bono? That query in Latin — Who benefits? — affirms for linguists that sketchy practices date to Ancient Rome and earlier. But who knew the phrase would be so applicable for U.S. taxpayers considering dubious aspects of many of the nation’s pricey Covid-19 pandemic responses. Herewith a sizable list of conflicts and coziness in the public funding of pandemic responses.

VP’s chief of staff dealing with health care issues but without giving up stocks

While Vice President Pence has headed the White House pandemic task force Marc Short, his chief of staff has served at his side. This has given him full access to the highest-level discussions about strategies and approaches that not only will affect Americans’ health care but also the fortunes of numerous Big Pharma, medical supply, and other major enterprises in the field dealing with the novel coronavirus.

May 20, 2020

Virus may upend hospitals’ finances, but not dubious Big Pharma behavior

by Patrick A. Malone

When it comes to aggravating parties in the U.S. health care system, a certain French phrase captures an uncomfortable reality: “Plus ça change” — as in plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose or “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

We can see that here:

Big Pharma, even in the midst of a pandemic, knows how to play politics, maximize its profits, and challenge regulators to the max while doing so.

May 4, 2020

When the fringe drives pandemic response, it’s not funny. It’s dangerous.

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as the nation battles the Covid-19 pandemic, leaders at all levels need to protect our democracy by both allowing appropriate expression of different points of view while also ensuring that extremists do not shove themselves into the center of public policy-making about crucial health concerns.

Americans — to their great distaste — have gotten a dose of the serious consequences that can occur when fringe, counter-factual thinking infects leaders thinking (or what passes for thought). Private companies and medical experts had to rise up to push back against President Trump’s “musing” or “sarcasm” about somehow “getting into the body” bleach, disinfectant products, and powerful light sources to attack the novel coronavirus.

As the New York Times reported:

May 3, 2020

Politicians seek a 100% immunity in coronavirus — from lawsuits seeking justice

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s a little hard to fathom but actions speak louder than words: For political partisans, what seems to be scarier than a novel coronavirus that has infected more than 1 million Americans and claimed more lives in a few weeks than years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam?

Trial lawyers. Like me. Really?

Politico, the news web site, reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have grown adamant that “any” legislation Congress considers in the days ahead involving Covid-19 must shield an array of business interests from liability from “frivolous” lawsuits. Politico quoted him, thusly:

April 24, 2020

Celebrity doctors are shoveling loads of unfounded Covid-19 nonsense

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as countless health care workers put themselves at risk and display courage, professionalism, and compassion in caring for Covid-19 patients, a growing collection of colleagues are showering themselves in shame, showing that the credential M.D. may stand for master of dubiousness or Ph.D. is someone whose nonsense is piled high and deep.

As the folks at the HealthNewsReview.org warned a “desperate public,” too ready to embrace self-promoting doctors and others because they are hungry for purported expertise as a pandemic sweeps the globe:

“Beware these red flags: partisan and hyperbolic language and hawking of unproven treatments that seem too good to be true. Seek solid advice from longtime public health institutions: the [federal Centers of Disease Control and Prevention] and the World Health Organization. Understand that because this disease is novel, information is rapidly changing and often tenuous – uncertainties that can be exploited for fame and fortune.”

April 22, 2020

Haste to find disease remedies can lay waste to patient safety, history warns

by Patrick A. Malone

Whoa, Nelly. For Americans stuffing their heads with vague data about potential drugs to treat Covid-19 — including chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, remdesivir, ritonavir, lopinavair, Actemra, Oseltamivir, Ribavirin, Umifenovir, interferon, baricitinib, imatinib, dasatinib, nitazoxanide, camostat mesylate, tocilizumab, sarilumab, bevacizumab, fingolimod, and eculizumab — let’s get a little perspective, please.

Let’s put things simply, especially for most ordinary folks who have no desire to play at being pharmaceutical experts: As of this writing, as noted online in a meta-review by the respected Journal of the American Medical Association, this is the reality about drugs for the novel coronavirus:

“No proven effective therapies for this virus currently exist.”

April 17, 2020

Corporations love forced arbitration. Innovators hope to make them fear it.

by Patrick A. Malone

Although big businesses in recent years have developed their legal equivalent of a great white shark — a big system churning along to savage disputes involving potentially many small claimants — innovators may have found a new way to start to tame beastly aspects of the process known as forced arbitration: Scoop up lots of small fish and jam them into the menace’s maw so it cries mercy.

Metaphors aside, the New York Times reported that legal startups have already “scared to death” corporations that swear by this dubious legal practice.

Forced arbitration is a booming part of the legal system that rips important constitutional protections away from ordinary individuals who have disputes with big businesses, compelling them to have their cases considered in private systems with huge ties to the very corporate interests that appear in them as parties in legal controversies.

April 14, 2020

What we know about Covid-19’s harms may help point out our next steps

by Patrick A. Malone

With President Trump, members of his administration, and other politicians shoving back against public health officials’ recommendations on when to get Americans out of their homes and returning to work, the ultimate decision may be up to individuals: Do we give up the existing physical-distancing guidance? Or not?

The data on Covid-19 infections and deaths is still building, but it may be worth reviewing what is known about the disease, whom it afflicts, and how.

Based on the deaths of those diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, it has been deadlier for men than women. It is taking a terrible and disproportionate toll among African Americans, with Latinos afflicted at high rates, too.