by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Feb 22, 2019 | Big Pharma
This week, Wendell Potter, healthcare
advocate and publisher of non-profit media outlet Tarbell, called out a slew of
drug industry experts for undermining efforts to lower drug prices. This
includes the likes of Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute, the
Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, and the Partnership for Safe Medicines.
All use the specter of counterfeit drugs and the opioid crisis to scare the
American public away from safe personal importation via online pharmacies.
Recipients of Drug Company Donations
Who is called out?
- Sally
Pipes, from the Pacific Research
Institute, because in an op-ed opposing drug importation, Ms. Pipes
obtusely connects Americans ordering drugs from Canada with the many tragic deaths
in low-income countries from
counterfeit drugs.
- The Alliance
for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP) for peddling false information about
World Health Organization studies and counterfeit drugs.
- The Partnership
for Safe Medicines (PSM) for using the opioid crisis as a tool to oppose
importation of regular, less expensive prescription medicine.
(more…)Tagged with: Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, Partnership for Safe Medicines, Sally Pipes
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Feb 15, 2019 | Drug Importation
In my blog post about the Senate
Finance Committee hearing on drug prices, I noted my surprise at
Senator Mike Enzi’s (R-WY) comment that he knew about a foundation that helps
people import lower-cost insulin from Canada. Sen. Enzi stated that a person
referred to as his diabetes advisor had
“found a way to work through a foundation to import insulin for a number of
people at lower-cost. And I think he worked for a foundation so that it would
be legal.” I had endeavored to look into it, but fortunately Jay Hancock from
Kaiser Health News beat me to it and found, sadly, no
such insulin import program exists. I think we can all agree that it
should!
In researching the story, Jay asked me if I knew of such a
program.
Nope.
(more…)Tagged with: Insulin, politics, Senator Mike Enzi
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Feb 6, 2019 | Internet Censorship
According to a new study published by the American Enterprise Institute, the search engine Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, has added pop-up warnings to search results that increase the chances that web searchers will click to rogue online pharmacies. As the reports shows, Bing’s action appears to purposefully thwart safe personal importation of more affordable medicines. It is one of the clearest examples of censorship resulting from “voluntary agreements” among Internet companies, “encouraged” by regulators, that will threaten the health of patients buying medicine online under the guise of protecting them. Bing has placed warnings on its organic search results of Canadian-based and other international online pharmacies, yet the search engine fails to do so for many rogue websites, ones proven to sell counterfeit drugs. Here’s how that happened.
The problem is Bing’s use of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy’s (NABP) Not Recommended List (NRL). Many of the NABP’s programs involving online sales of medicines and educating the public about online pharmacies are funded by drug companies, and therefore supportive of the industry’s profit-protecting goals against importation.
Bing’s Backwards Partnership with the NABP
(more…)Tagged with: AEI, Bing, Carmen Catizone, Google, NABP
