Many years of research and a wish for the truth to come out are what drove this author to work so tirelessly on this project. By her own admission, Jennifer Vanderbes started the book to highlight the life and career of Frances Kelsey, who worked at the FDA, and was the American hero which stopped the widespread Thalidomide crisis from happening here in America. She never allowed this drug to gain FDA approval. Many thanks are due to Frances Kelsey and her work.
The rest of the world was not so lucky. Upwards of 150,000 people throughout the rest of the world suffered the adverse effects of this drug. Phocomelia was the most dramatic and obvious sign of thalidomide, as it left newly born babies often without ears, arms, and/or legs, along with internal damage to the heart. Most of these babies died soon after they were born. And many did not make it to birth due to the staggering number of miscarriages. There was also a host of other problems related to this drug, namely peripheral neuritis (polyneuritis) being one of the most prevalent, which caused extreme pain, numbness, and muscle cramps in the fingers and toes of patients.
As the author Jennifer Vanderbes got into her research on this topic, she found that drug trials with thalidomide in America left many families struggling to deal with health issues relating to the adverse effects of this drug. This also does not take into account most of the mothers who took this drug gave birth to children which died shortly after birth. None of these trial participants were made aware that this drug was experimental and had not passed the FDA. The pain, the trauma, and the disability which this drug created in America was never addressed by our government, which is culpable for allowing drug makers to freely experiment on the American people without their knowledge.
This violates the Nuremberg Code, which explicitly states that patients being used as trial subjects should be fully apprised as to the risks of taking a new experimental drug. This evidence is even more incriminating when it is considered that Thalidomide never passed FDA approval.
The American government can easily pass $200 billion to fund blowing up other countries and their infrastructures, but it refuses to compensate the odd few dozen people still alive and suffering due to the debilitating effects of this drug. Shame on our government! We can do better than this. Thanks to Jennifer Vanderbes who crafted this book carefully and methodically to offer a plea to help these victims. This book is a masterful work and a must read for anyone who cares about injustice in America.
Her book is a valuable addition to anyone who cares about the truth and the wrongdoing by the pharmaceutical companies, and can be found here if you are interested:
Amazon.com : wonder drug the secret history of thalidomide
Further thoughts about this book.
This book clearly demonstrates the lack of transparency our pharmaceutical companies had at that time, and currently still have due to the nature of the rules as set forth by the FDA. The FDA clears drugs for use by trials which are bought and paid for by the pharma companies themselves. The FDA looks at the information which was put together by these companies and then renders a decision based upon the material. There is no drug trial transparency involved which includes the public or regulatory agencies.
There are to many loopholes involved in this process. Any adverse effects on the animal testing part of the experiments in the trial process should have been mentioned by the pharmaceutical companies testing the drug. But all of these, about a dozen instances of animal testing which turned out badly would have stopped all consideration for approval of this drug were thrown out, hidden, and/or destroyed by the companies.
The profit model in place for drug making is too lenient on these companies. If they make a billion dollars on the drug, and it ends up injuring or killing 1000 or 100,000 people due to the false and doctored information the drug companies provided to the FDA, then the result is that no one will be held responsible, no one will go to prison, and the company will be able to keep the vast majority of the money it has made, and pay only a small fine and be forced to remove the drug from the market. This was the end result of 150,000 injured or killed worldwide from this drug – no one went to prison, no one lost their job, and the companies involved in this crime against humanity had to pay back a small portion of their profits. Shameful.
This system incentivizes lying and cheating, because the penalty for corruption is basically nothing. If proper incentives were in place, along with proper disincentives for corruption (prison/death penalty), then the drug companies would be more careful of attempting to deceive the FDA and the American people.
What if you could walk into a store and steal whatever you wanted? If you didn’t get caught, then the stolen item would be yours. But if you did get caught, then you would not go to prison, and you were allowed to keep the majority of the value of the item you stole. Let’s put an example out here. You went into Tiffany’s in New York, stole an item worth $1 Million dollars and got caught. You get a slap on the wrist, you are allowed to keep the stolen item, and you have to pay back a small percentage of the value of the item, like $20,000. If this was the case wouldn’t many more people be stealing?
That is the current case with drug approval and the punishment process if the company is found to be negligent or guilty of fraud. There is no real deterrent for lying, cheating, falsifying drug trials, and submitting false documents to the FDA. Even if people take these drugs and are killed due to negligence, intentional deceit, and other criminal behaviors, the drug companies will be able to keep most of the money if they get caught, and no one will lose their job or go to prison. It is time to change this awful system.
Please see my book Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma to see more information on how the pharmaceutical companies are still lying, cheating, and deceiving their way to profits to this very day:
Louis Pasteur Condemns Big Pharma by Stephen Heartland
My book and Jennifer Vanderbe’s book, Wonder Drug, clearly shows many other problems that I will delve into in future blogs, namely Drug Trial Transparency, Drug Advertising, Big Pharma influence, and Government corruption.