UK Pharma raping the NHS
This is a recent article revealing the scale of big pharma’s ‘investments’ in the UK’s NHS.
Revealed: pharma giants pour millions of pounds into NHS to boost drug sales
This extract should give you the idea:
“In one case, the drugmaker Eli Lilly has partnered with a major London NHS trust to help “optimise” the multidisciplinary service that provides care for patients with diabetes, obesity and heart conditions. Corporate documents show the project with the Royal Free in London aimed to “implement a new model of care” and to “optimise treatment and/or triage patients” to the newly designed secondary care team, with outcomes including a reduction in waiting times.
“Lilly may benefit from an increase in patients prescribed Lilly medications,” the documents add. Eli Lilly makes drugs for diabetes and is seeking approval for its obesity drug Mounjaro, a rival to the recently approved Wegovy injections. Records show it spent £3.5m on payments to NHS organisations in 2022, up from £147,000 in 2018. The company said all payments were publicly declared in line with industry codes of practice, adding that it believed in “working closely” with UK partners to “ensure people can access the most effective new medicines”, and that its NHS work had helped cut waiting times and support post-pandemic recovery.”
If these aren’t conflicts of interest, what would be?
The article is full of conflicts—highly profitable for all involved. Even the US is not a flagrant as the UK in pushing pharma drugs. OK, it’s not TV advertising like the US, but it’s the thin end of what could become a UK-wide NHS wedge. The Lilly example would be replicated once this ‘pilot’ is up and running.
Don’t forget folks, the UK Government has been working on this for over 20 years, see below: