It turns out, that old adage is true – money does not buy everything. For some, money does not buy a clear conscience. Despite earning high incomes, these former pharmaceutical employees left their jobs and are now sharing the truth of what goes on behind the curtain. Many of them have written books, participated in documentaries, and shared their stories through online videos. Here are a few.
Dr. Peter Rost, Former Vice President of Pfizer
Dr. Rost, a former anesthesiologist and pharmaceutical VP, is the author of The Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman. Dr. Rost is an expert witness on Big Pharma in the areas of patent infringement, pharmaceutical marketing, drug product liability, drug marketing and promotion, and drug sales.
Universities, health organizations, everybody that I’ve encountered in my former career as a pharmaceutical executive, are out there with their hands out. You know everybody’s begging for money, nobody has any money. The government doesn’t have any money. The universities don’t have money. Nobody has money. The only ones that have money are these big multinational corporations, and they have lots of money. And they use that money to basically buy influence. And the way it’s done is – number one, you give these organizations and institutions grants, grants for various kinds of research. You develop research together with them. You establish friends. You make sure that they become beholden to you. And you also pay individual professors and doctors – researchers – directly. You may pay them as speakers to travel around the country, a thousand, two thousand dollars per day, sometimes more.
You give them money for programs, the educational programs, where they can make a profit and then they put on these programs, as they’re supposed to be third-party independent from the company. Which is all fine, but as you and I can both imagine, if you have a promotional budget, at a corporation you’re probably going to give that money to the universities that do the programs that most support your drug, and the ones that don’t, or are critical in any shape, way, or form, they are not going to get anything. And everybody obviously knows that this is how things work.
And that means even if you can officially claim “… this is arms-length we didn’t have anything to do with it. We just gave them a grant. They can do whatever they want with it.” Reality is they’re not going to continue to get money unless they’re saying what you want them to say. They know it. You know it. It’s only maybe the public that doesn’t know it. And that’s how you influence the medical establishment – simply with money.
Dr. John Rengen Virapen
(The following has been edited for clarity)
Dr. John Virapen is plagued by a guilty conscience. After completing his medical training, Dr. Virapen started in the pharmaceutical industry as a salesman. Eventually, he rose to the top ranks and became the general manager of Eli Lilly and Company in Sweden. He admits he participated in bribery, giving false information and deception to launch and market several popular drugs. After becoming a father at age 62, he grew a conscience. He has vowed to dedicate his remaining years to speaking out against the very industry that made him a wealthy man. Here are some quotes from his videos.
I have spent 35 years of my life working in an industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and they do nothing but annihilate the population of this world. Why do they do that? Because they want to make money, money, money, money, money…They don’t care about your lives. They only care about their wallets.
Now, whatever I tell you here today, is not something that I dreamed about, or observed somewhere. It’s something that I have done myself. I have been just as criminal as they are. My hands are just as dirty as these people.
Now all of you sitting here, answer me a question. When you go to the doctor, he looks at you, stethoscope, laboratory tests, machine tests. Those tests by the way, are to make money. Then he tells you you’re sick here is a prescription. “Go to the pharmacy and take this medicine, one tablet three times a day.” What do you do?…You go to the pharmacy and you get your medicine, and you take it like a good citizen.
But when you go to the car company to buy a car, you ask the salesman questions. If you don’t get what you want, you don’t buy the car. So tell me, why don’t you ask that doctor? What is it that he is giving you? The reason I’m telling you this is because only all of you have the power to stop these criminals with what they’re doing in the pharma industry. Because you are not sick people. You are consumers. You are consumers and the pharma industry makes money because they tell everybody that you are sick.
…The almighty power blessed me and my wife with a child. I was 62 years old. This child is now 4 ½. When this child was born he went to the pediatrician after six months for a checkup. That doctor checked the boy and said, yeah he’s healthy, he’s fine. Now we need to give him his mandatory vaccine cocktail. Now, I have told my wife, nobody, not a doctor, not a professor, nobody gives my child any kind of medication unless they discuss it with me and I approve it. Now this this doctor well apart from being lucky that I wasn’t there, she threw my wife and child out at the clinic and said, “We only treat vaccinated children.”
…How dare she refuse, to have my child come to this clinic, and she’s practicing as a doctor. What happened to Hippocrates, the oath of Hippocrates when you become a doctor you swear the oath! “Primum Non Nocere”-Above All Do no Harm. The patient comes first.
…So I researched this lady and I found that she was sitting in a committee, or on a committee with a politician and members of the pharmaceutical company that made the IMP, the vaccine. And they’re advocating to the government in Germany to introduce mandatory vaccination. So I started to do some research on what’s going on in Germany.
…I found out also that general practitioners, just like this woman and other doctors, were prescribing psychotropic drugs to children. Shortly after that, I read in an article that was posted from the European Medical Association that they were going to approve the drug Prozac to give to children.
Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, Pharmaceutical Sales Rep for 10 Years
Kathleen is the writer and director of the film Side Effects starring Katherine Heigl. She helps to explain the difference between cutting edge marketing, and scientific progress.
(The following has been edited for clarity)
The psychiatric market is huge and every company out there wants a little piece of that pie because it is so lucrative. We did a lot of lunches and dinners and we brought in speakers and those speakers were obviously paid by us and we would we wave, you know, renowned studies at them from renowned journals but of course we would never say that these studies were paid for by our company and that it was written by a ghost writer who is paid by our company or that our company tends to do a ton of advertising within that particular medical journal.
We would never say that it’s the psychiatric meds that are so easy to expand into all of the problems of our life. So right now we see the industry… over the past several years we’ve seen the industry medicalizing, you know, so many different things throughout our life. If you’re shy, here, take a pill. If you’re a little anxious, you know, take a pill. If you have road rage, we’ve got a pill for that, too!
… through direct to consumer advertising and the beautiful drug ads that are on television they have been able to play off of our deepest insecurities as human beings, and it’s so effective. It’s marketing. This is marketing. This is not science. This is incredibly effective marketing. It has nothing to do with science.
We’re being bombarded left and right with these beautiful ads on the screen, painting this lovely Norman Rockwell life on the screen of beautiful, smiling, happy, sexy people and we all want a little piece of that.
…to produce the ad would be somewhere probably in the million dollar range. And then to air these ads, to buy the air time slots, again depending on what time of day they’re airing or what type of show their airing on, can cost anywhere from tens of thousands per 30-second ad up to close to a million dollars. In the most recent campaigns, over last year or so, you’re hearing so much “Ask your doctor, or talk to your doctor about…” and when you hear that on the screen it sounds so nice.
It sounds like they really care and want you to discuss this with your doctor. But what the studies have shown is that if you actually bring up a brand-name drug with your doctor by name, you’re significantly more likely to walk out the door with that drug. So they do that for a reason. The industry is responsible to Wall Street, and Wall Street first. They have to please Wall Street because they are private industry. And so when you have that scenario, you have to make profits your number one goal.
We have billions of dollars being spent right now in terms of marketing, in terms of PR.
Gwen Olson, a 15-Year Sales Rep Who Worked For Johnson & Johnson, Syntex Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Abbott Laboratories and Forest Laboratories
Over time, Gwen had what she describes as a spiritual awakening as she observed the harm that pharmaceuticals caused people. This led her to come forward and to speak out against the pharmaceutical companies. She explains what their priorities really are.
What the pharmaceutical industry is in the business of doing is disease maintenance and symptoms management. They are not in the business to cure cancer, to cure Alzheimer’s, to cure heart disease, because if they were, they would be in the business of putting themselves out of business. And that in fact doesn’t make sense.
…It’s really important to understand the motivation behind all the current maintenance drugs that are on the market. Even, for example, drugs such as cholesterol-lowering drugs. And what we are in fact finding now is that cholesterol drugs are lowering cholesterol excessively and causing other disease states as a consequence.
…what was found was the information that activists and other researchers have known for decades was that antidepressants are no more effective than a placebo. No more effective than sugar pills but yet, they’re over 44 million people that have been taking these anti-depressants.
…Another recent study that was released showed that exercise was in fact more effective than either placebo or the anti-depressant drug.
…The clinical data has been contrived or that their patient populations have been cherry-picked or that the side effects have been minimized and reported in such a manner that it doesn’t present the information correctly.
…I’m here to tell you that the industry has run amok. That we are at a severe crossroads in this nation and that we have got to take our power back and we have got to start making the pharmaceutical industry accountable for their actions and for the defective products that they’re putting on the market. It won’t be long before every American is affected by this disaster.
…You need to get yourself educated and understand that there are options, and those options are much more effective than drugs. You need to look into the nutritional aspects of your diet and your lifestyle.
Scott Cooper, Award Winning Salesman For Merck
Like so many other well-informed parents, Scott didn’t struggle with whether or not to vaccinate his child. His experience in the pharmaceutical industry convinced him not to vaccinate. His challenge was convincing his wife and doctor that vaccines are not safe or effective.
My child was born in ’91. He’s now going to be 24 this year. He was never vaccinated. He grew up very, very healthy. Rarely if ever sick and always much healthier than his peers. When they were all running around all the kids had runny noses, drank a lot of milk, were all vaccinated. My child was always healthy, runny nose free, always very, very healthy and smart.
If I can digress a little bit this was 1990 so the Internet wasn’t really available. I had read numerous books on vaccines, and like most people I grew up believing in vaccines from what I was told in school. And it became a real shock to me when I started reading and learning that vaccines were not only ineffective, but also there are major risks involved with vaccination.
When I found out my wife was pregnant, I had a discussion with her about not vaccinating and, of course, she was pro-vaccine, and so I made her a deal. At the time, I worked for a very large pharmaceutical company as a sales rep, and so I made her a promise. I said I’ll go to the library I’ll bring home everything I can find pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine. You can read for yourself, and then you can make a decision. That’s what I did. I went and scoured the periodicals in the libraries.
…I just gave them to her and let her make up her own mind. I would come home from work and she would be reading the stuff and crying from what she was reading. By the time our child was born we were both on the same page about vaccination.
And it was interesting because I had my OBGYN or my wife’s OBGYN sit me down in his office and say, “Look, you work for a large pharmaceutical company, what do you mean you’re not vaccinating?”
My company actually made a lot of the vaccines and we had a vaccine division and everything else, and I told them, I told them flat out, why we went, had a huge discussion about it. He didn’t agree. We still went to the course that I wanted.
… do your own research, all right? If you’re on the fence about vaccines or wondering at all, whether to vaccinate your child. Please, please do your own research. There are a ton of resources available out there. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, she has a site that is full of resources.
Thousands of pages are published, medical studies showing the inherent risks that are involved with vaccines. There are a ton of books out there showing this over and over again – the vaccine damage that has been done by these vaccinations. If you believe what you’re told by the AMA and the CDC and your doctor, you’re not doing enough research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YVPkCQxqz4
Brandy Vaughan, Former Sales Rep for Merck & Co.
Now a mother, Brandy refuses to vaccinate her own child. She explains how the pharmaceutical companies prioritize profit over public health, in a big way.
My first involvement with the pharmaceutical industry was as a pharmaceutical sales rep for Merck back when Vioxx was on the market. I used to rep Vioxx for Merck. When it came out that Merck had falsified safety data and Vioxx actually had twice the increase in heart attacks and strokes… it really made me realize that that there was a lot of corruption behind the scenes and that just because something is on the market, a drug is on the market, doesn’t mean it’s safe.
After working for Merck, I was pretty disillusioned over the whole scandal. I lived in Europe for 8 years and I had my son over there. I brought him back vaccine-free at 6 months to San Francisco. When I went to a well visit, they pushed for vaccines. At that point I hadn’t done a lot of research in it, but I knew enough not to trust pharmaceutical drugs.
I asked to see a vaccine insert and the doctor got very upset at me and claimed I didn’t trust him. He stormed out of the room and the nurse let me know that I wasn’t really welcome back in that clinic anymore. That was a huge red flag for me, knowing what I knew from being a pharmaceutical sales rep before. I started to do my research into vaccines and the ingredients, and the flawed safety data.
What came to light was many things, but one of them was that aluminum is the main adjuvant in vaccines, in childhood vaccines. I had experience with that, with researching that, and the toxicity of aluminum, because my grandmother had breast cancer.
The doctor biopsied her tissues and there were high levels of aluminum. He told us that she needed to get off traditional deodorant and that the aluminum in there was linked to breast cancer. It was carcinogenic. That was a big red flag for me when I realized those were in childhood vaccines. I couldn’t believe it, actually. Then I started to do more and more research and I realized that the U.S. gives twice as many vaccines on the childhood schedule than most developed countries, and the real health crisis is the fact that our kids are sicker than any other country in the developed world. This is despite spending more per capita on healthcare. We have highest rates of SIDS, asthma, food allergies, ADHD, childhood leukemia, diabetes type one. This to me was the true health crisis.
The more I dug into this, what I realized was vaccines are not for public health. It’s really about profit, pharmaceutical company profit.
The thing about vaccines is that you don’t have to do the same rigorous safety studies as you do for other pharmaceutical drugs because they’re classified as a public health measure vs. a pharma drug. For vaccines, they have a totally different type of safety study. It’s very short in duration. It’s not double-blind placebo-based, which is the gold standard for pharmaceutical drugs, and vaccines aren’t held to the same rigorous safety studies.
If you look into them, it’s very easy to manipulate the data and present that as something that’s safe. If you really look into the studies and look into the toxicity of the adjuvants and the additives, you realize that the safety studies are not proving safety at all. In fact, there are a lot of studies on the other side showing that a lot of the additives in vaccines are very toxic, especially to children who have very immature immune systems.
As I dug more into the safety studies and saw how flawed they were, it really raised a red flag for me. My son is now four and a half and he’s vaccine-free. I really got motivated to get more into this fight when I realized the mandatory vaccination bills that were sweeping the country, over 100 in 38 states.
…pharmaceutical companies don’t have any liability for vaccines, in fact [one of] the only products in the U.S. that has no liability so you cannot sue them if there’s injury or death. So you put those two things together and what you have is vaccines as a pharmaceutical drug with the highest profit margin available. If you make those mandatory and you keep increasing the schedule, it’s basically using our children to profit off of.
The pharmaceutical company is using vaccines as a new driver for profit. This is really what’s behind the mandatory vaccination bills. One of the things that I’m often asked is why do we not hear about this if this is true? One of the things that I’ve found out in my research is that the U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers.
I’m sure we’ve all seen the media and advertisements for the pharmaceutical drugs. That happens there is that it allows pharmaceutical companies to basically dictate what is shown to the media. Because when you give the media 30 to 40% [Author’s note: presently the number is closer to 70%] of their advertising dollars, you basically control what they say.
There have been a lot of journalists and stories that have been censored, including the CDC whistleblower that came out in the end of 2014 basically saying that the CDC has covered up data showing that the MMR vaccine does in fact cause neurological damage, AKA autism.
Recently there have been a lot of stories of different countries suing vaccine makers for injury and death, and even pulling vaccines off of the schedule like Gardasil in Japan and Prevnar in China, rotovirus vaccine in France, and Spain has a lawsuit against Merck for Gardasil as well.
…We have a very broken system. Our vaccine system in the U.S. is broken. We cannot mandate something when there are so many unanswered questions and so many things that are going on behind the scenes that people aren’t aware of, including vaccines ingredients, like when the pediatrician didn’t want to show me the vaccine insert. There’s good reason for that.
There’s aluminum, formaldehyde, fetal cells, animal cells. There are a lot of things in there that other countries A, ban from being ingested and therefore have vaccines that don’t include these ingredients, and B, have unknown consequences that we have no data on right now. It’s basically playing Russian roulette with our children.
Pharma is saying it’s all about public help and public safety, and I’m saying why don’t we have more data on what this really will do, long-term studies on what this is doing inside of our bodies and to our children. Because right now we have the sickest children in the developed world. Something is going on here.
It’s probably not just vaccines. It’s a chemical cocktail of pesticides and pollutants in our water and air, but vaccines are often a trigger because genetically we need a trigger to express these kind of diseases and issues that we have. Vaccines are often what does that because the chemicals are injected into our bloodstream, so they don’t go through a lot of the bodies natural detox process. They go straight to the brain past the blood-brain barrier.
We need to ask these difficult questions. Until that, until we have more information, we absolutely cannot mandate vaccines. There has to be a choice. If there’s a risk, there has to be a choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUduiwgHMQs&sns=fb
Further Reading:
Sources:
