Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This is a company that quite clearly covered up the negative information about its drug, that distorted its clinical trials, that worked in concert with the FDA to make sure that the public never learned the negative information about its drug so that it could keep on marketing and selling the drug to produce tremendous profits for its investors. Now all of that deception is falling like a house of cards and it's going to cost Merck and its investors potentially tens of billions of dollars in financial losses.
Some are now questioning whether Merck can even survive this scandal. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 Wall Street began to envision a new business model for medicine, one that would put money into investors' pockets. Remaking this sector offered what Investment Dealers' Digest called a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for creative investment bankers."
That opportunity took many forms. Nonprofit hospitals were snapped up by for-profit conglomerations that were underwritten by investors. New managed care companies emerged to compete with older insurers like Aetna and Blue Cross. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 More bombs = more profit for investors. Sad, but true.
But I say to those people and to everyone else who actually has a conscience that we must no longer support the industries of evil and destruction. Before we make an investment, we must ask ourselves, where is this money going? What is its intended purpose? If you were taking your life savings and handing it over to an individual or a group, you had better check with that group and find out where that money is going to be used. |
Bill Sardi
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 It turns out, however, that most of the targeted cancer therapies coming down the research pipeline likely won't be the silver bullets investors and researchers had hoped for." Notice patients are left out of Business Week's equation. All that counts is how much money investors have at risk, not patients' lives. [Business Week, March 5, 2003]
Herceptin (trastuzumab) combats breast cancer
The attention given to Herceptin (trastuzumab) is just one example of the hype behind many of the so-called cancer breakthroughs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| The SEC is wondering whether Merck misled investors by failing to disclose facts concerning the harmful nature of its drug Vioxx, which was taken by 20 million Americans, and may now be partly responsible for the heart attacks or deaths of tens of thousands of people.
The estimated liability from lawsuits that are now forming against Merck is anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion, and yet Merck has only $630 million in insurance coverage for product liability. This means if the Vioxx lawsuits proceed, Merck is likely to come up at least $9. |
Bill Sardi
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| Cancer care in the news
Most of the positive news stories surrounding new cancer drugs today are intended to impress investors in drug stocks, not to deliver promising news to patients. If an existing cancer drug is prescribed to 250,000 patients in a year, and a new drug will replace it or be used in combination, and the new drug costs $1,000 for a one-month course, investors gleefully can calculate a $250 million bonanza for every month the drug is used by cancer patients. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Merck investors.
It leads to the rather startling conclusion that Merck may be facing lawsuits not only from its customers, but also from its shareholders who have not only been financially harmed by an almost 40% drop in the stock price of the company, but also who were no doubt shocked to read in the Wall St. Journal that key Merck executives were aware of the heart attack dangers of Vioxx four years ago. |
| Now all of that deception is falling like a house of cards and it's going to cost Merck and its investors potentially tens of billions of dollars in financial losses.
Some are now questioning whether Merck can even survive this scandal. Certainly the reputation of the company has been permanently damaged, but the reputation of the FDA is also similarly scarred. The public is increasingly distrusting all pharmaceutical companies, because of the lies, distortions and criminal actions that are now being publicly revealed. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| If people lose money by being investors in drug companies, they've earned their financial loss. Investing shouldn't be about simply "making money," it should be about doing some good with it. |
| And many investors really are only interested in the bottom line: they want to know what produces the greatest return. And they don't concern themselves with the real-world impact of their investment decisions.
For example, if you invest in a fast food company like a popular hamburger chain, you are financially supporting the growth and expansion of a company whose products we now know strongly contribute to diabetes and obesity. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| As bad as this news is for Merck investors, it's fantastic news for public health, because the sooner companies like Merck are punished for their actions and put out of business, the sooner the population can get back to actually preventing disease, rather than being dosed with dangerous pharmaceuticals that only attempt to mask symptoms of disease. In a very real sense, the decline of Merck and other pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer may unleash a rise in public health and increases in quality of life for people everywhere. |
David Steinman
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 There's now a very large body of evidence that documents that investors do not pay a 'conscience penalty' when they invest in companies that are socially responsible," said Timothy Small, president of the Social Investment Forum and senior vice president at Boston-based Walden Asset Management, which manages $1.4 billion for institutional and individual investors. "In fact, they may very well do better over time, which is what I believe based on our firm's investment experience over 35 years."44
Besides visiting www.waldenassetmgmt.com, here are some other funds to look at. |
Anne Harrington
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 Economists know, for example, that when predictions of supply and demand become public knowledge, markets may falsify the predictions because investors and companies respond to the predictions—so-called Goodhart's law.8 A range of other terms have been used to variously describe the challenges that come from studying human beings who respond to the fact that expert claims are being made about them, or that they are being studied: Hawthorne effects, experimenter expectancy effects, Pygmalion effects, subject-expectancy effects, and most broadly of all, looping effects. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 Early investors in the postal coupon scam, which Ponzi ran out of Boston, were paid with money from later investors. Within six months, Ponzi was in the hands of federal prosecutors. He was sentenced to five years on a single plea-bargained count of mail fraud. He later engaged in Florida land swindles. He spent the 1930s in and out of state and federal penitentiaries. He was eventually deported back to Italy, moved to Brazil before World War II, and died in the charity ward of a Rio de Janeiro hospital in 1949, leaving an estate of $75 to cover funeral expenses. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 American investors love to think they're so darned smart right up until the collapse of the company they invested in, at which point they claim they had no idea what was really going on. It's amusing how investors can go from self-proclaimed brilliance to instant stupidity in the time it takes a corporation to file for bankruptcy.
It's always easier to blame someone else than to admit you were suckered in by pure, old fashioned greed. What Americans definitely do NOT want to hear is that virtually everyone involved in the Enron circus either tolerated or outright supported the fraud. |
Bill Sardi
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| Economic influence like this is probably what prompts political pressure on the FDA to eventually approve drugs so that investors can get their money back. The point of all this is, cancer treatment today is all about money, not patients.
False and misleading news reports
Samuel S. Epstein, MD, and Quentin D. Young, MD, write that while cancer is fast becoming the leading cause of death in the United States, the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society have issued a "steady stream of misleading press releases hailing major progress in the cancer war. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 None of this proves that corruption is taking place in these organizations, but it does create a structure of potential influence where investors with large purse strings are able to influence the direction of these organizations (usually by sitting on their Board of Directors).
In contrast, here at Truth Publishing, we do not accept investment funds from anyone: not from private investors, venture capital groups, nor corporations. As a result, we answer to no one, which means we can continue to bring our readers the blatant truth on topics that really matter. |
Bill Sardi
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| When the day of reckoning occurs, and the FDA rules, whoever is holding shares stands to lose or gain a bundle. Both investors and cancer patients are easily misled. Erbitux is not a stand-alone drug. It must be used with other cancer therapies and only adds a few months of life. Many executives involved in the $2 billion purchase of marketing rights for Erbitux by Bristol-Myers have resigned. [New York Times, Feb. 11, 2004]
What, no treatment for metastasis?
Again, Clifton Leaf of Fortune Magazine speaks out about the failings of cancer treatment. |
| All that counts is how much money investors have at risk, not patients' lives. [Business Week, March 5, 2003]
Herceptin (trastuzumab) combats breast cancer
The attention given to Herceptin (trastuzumab) is just one example of the hype behind many of the so-called cancer breakthroughs. After the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) delivered its first-ever report on clinical cancer at the annual meeting in 2005, Dr. Sandra J. Horning, president of ASCO, described many of the advancements being made. [Annual meeting, ASCO, Abstract 555t, 2005] Here is what Dr. |
| If an existing cancer drug is prescribed to 250,000 patients in a year, and a new drug will replace it or be used in combination, and the new drug costs $1,000 for a one-month course, investors gleefully can calculate a $250 million bonanza for every month the drug is used by cancer patients.
When it was announced that the new anti-cancer drug Avas-tin, when combined with chemotherapy, resulted in lung cancer patients living four months longer, Genentech's stock rose dramatically and nearly $17 billion was pumped into the company. |
John J. Ratey, MD
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 Now he runs several miles every morning and is a partner in a venture capital firm, matching entrepreneurs with big-money investors. In the parlance of this rarefied realm, Sam is what's known as a rainmaker—a high-energy personality with the social skills and business savvy to make deals happen. When there's a big one on the table, he has no trouble focusing. The intense pressure allows him to laser in and obsess over every angle, often to the point that the deal consumes all his waking hours. |
David R. Montgomery
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 Founded by a group of London investors, the company expected their New World franchise to return healthy profits. Undet the leadership of Captain John Smith, on May 14,1607, the fitst load of colonists landed along the banks of the James Rivet sixty miles up Chesapeake Bay. Hostile natives, disease, and famine killed two-thirds of the original settlets before Smith teturned to England in 1609.
Desperately searching for ways to survive, let alone earn a profit, the Jamestown colonists tried making silk, then glass; harvesting timbet; growing sassafras; and even making beer. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And since any real progress in health care legislation is nothing but a pipe dream (there are way too many jobs and investors tied up in the continued diseasification of the American people to expect any real reforms), I thought I'd offer my own version of that pipe dream for your general amusement.
So what follows is a list of health care legislation reforms that Congress should pass, but won't. And why won't they pass these? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Because we operate independently of investors and large corporate donors, nobody can censor us, no one can control our message, and nothing will stop NewsTarget from expanding its reach to empower consumers with the information they need to live healthier, happier and more abundant lives.
Watch for upcoming announcements about Better Life Goods and EcoLEDs, and thank you for helping NewsTarget grow to this point where we can begin to reach the masses with practical products that make a measurable, lasting difference in the future of our world. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Recently, more than 400 environmentalists, investors and celebrities gathered for the unveiling and induction of the only five-passenger, all-electric, freeway-speed sport utility trucks at Los Angeles' famed Peterson Automotive Museum, and there, they nabbed a sneak peak at the newest electric automobile soon to be launched: The Phoenix Motorcars "SUT" or sport-utility truck.
These new SUT vehicles will be made available by Phoenix Motorcars (www.phoenixmotorcars. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Foreign investors are paying for the party while gaining financial leverage over the United States
You might ask, "If we're currently spending more money on entitlements than we actually have in our federal government, who's actually paying for it?" The answer is foreign suckers. Did I say suckers? I mean foreign investors.
Right now, China owns an alarming percentage of U.S. treasury bills, and the governments of China, Japan and many other countries are supporting the United States' federal budget deficit by purchasing U.S. debt like a drunken sailor buying another round of shots. |
Melody Petersen
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 Warner-Lambert's investors were not stirred by the sales potential of the drug, which came in capsules colored white, yellow, or orange. Executives estimated Neurontin would bring in just $500 million over all the years it could be sold before its patent expired. When that happened, other companies would be able to sell a generic form of the drug at a fraction of the price charged by Warner-Lambert. The company would then watch as its sales of Neurontin plunged. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Ray Elliott, the chairman of Zimmer Holdings, the world's largest manufacturer of knee and hip replacements, told investors at a Bank of America conference in 200 c: "There's a lot of bell-and-whistle stuff in this industry over the last five or six years where you got pretty good money for stuff that was pretty fluffy."
We can't control costs or improve the quality of health care without better evidence for what works and what doesn't, and it is unreasonable to expect companies to produce the research that's necessary to give us that evidence. |
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