What health effects accrue to—and cost or penalize—healthcare consumers as consequences from the allegations made in the above statements by Marcia Angell, MD [4], who, by the way, is very qualified to offer those remarks. No one in Congress, which has oversight, or other federal agencies, seems inclined to investigate and/or divest Big Pharma of its bear-trap-like stranglehold on the U.S. healthcare system and its ‘lackeys’, the medical profession. And humans are harmed, plus pay the ultimate price—mental, physical and financial suffering.
The stakes get higher and direr while consumers obligingly bow at the altar of medical monopolies. However, there are some men of medicine, who understand what’s going on, and expose it in their work and books. One such prominent medical doctor is Peter C Gotzsche, co-founder of both the prestigious Cochrane Collaboration and The Nordic Cochrane Center. His 2013 book Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime, How big pharma has corrupted healthcare contains a chapter about Merck & Company, the premiere vaccine maker in the USA, titled “Merck, where the patients die first” [Pp. 155-163] that distills some of the unknowns about pharmaceutical science shenanigans.