Lawsuit points finger at big drug companies
Did big pharmaceutical companies play any role in the B.C. government’s decision to fire eight provincial drug researchers?
That’s the possibility suggested in a lawsuit filed by one of the fired workers, Bill Warburton, who sued the government for defamation and breach of contract.
“Dr. Warburton’s research included investigation of harmful sideeffects, including mortality, and risk assessment of drugs purchased by the province through its programs,” the lawsuit states.
Warburton’s research “had the potential of disrupting financially significant payments to large pharmaceutical companies, many of whom were major contributors to the Liberal party,” the lawsuit continues.
“The province’s acts against Dr. Warburton are part of a bad-faith program by the defendants to end the investigation of harmful effects of drugs, which risk leading to diminishing payments to their political contributors.”
Warburton holds two masters degrees and a PhD. He was trained at the London School of Economics and worked under contract for the Ministry of Health to conduct complex drug data analysis.
He’s one of eight researchers shockingly fired in 2012 over what the government called at the time a breach of private health-care information.
The government repeatedly said the RCMP was investigating, even though a full-blown investigation never got off the ground because the government never supplied evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
After a flurry of wrongful dismissal suits, the government apologized and said it had over-reacted with the firings.
Most of the workers got their jobs back or received financial settlements, or both. But not before one of the workers — University of Victoria PhD student Roderick MacIsaac — committed suicide amid his public humiliation.
The suggestion that big pharmaceutical companies played some sort of role in the scandal is extremely disturbing. Think about it: Having any drug covered by the government’s PharmaCare program means big money for the company that makes the drug.
“That’s a lot of money for them — to have their drugs listed on the PharmaCare program,” Colleen Fuller, president of the watchdog group PharmaWatch Canada, told me Monday.
“The industry has a lot more influence over public policy than it used to,” Fuller said. “They spend a lot of time lobbying to make sure their drugs are listed.”
You can bet these companies would also be concerned by anything that would derail their money trains — such as pesky government researchers who could recommend against listing their drugs over concerns about safety or effectiveness.
Instead, these drug researchers were railroaded by the government, driving one of them to suicide.
There has been no accountability in this case. No one has taken responsibility. There has been no rational explanation why it happened.
The potential influence of big pharmaceutical companies is one more reason this case cries out for a public inquiry, an inquiry the Christy Clark government has so far resisted. It makes you wonder why.