Thank you.
About a month after Vanessa died, I had a call from a pharmacist at an Ontario hospital. She told me she did a report on the cancer ward in her own hospital and that seven out of nine patients who had been given Prepulsid had died. They were very sick patients. They were cancer patients. Many of them, if not most, were going to die anyway. But they died after taking Prepulsid, when it was contraindicated.
She sent that report to Health Canada. Health Canada covered it up for a year and a half. This is a result of the partnering direction they had with the industry.
We did an FOI for a CBC film. We discovered a memo from a senior Janssen-Ortho executive, directing Health Canada officials how to answer questions on this drug, Prepulsid. It was telling them what to say after a CBC Marketplace show--coaching, working together.
At the inquest into Vanessa's death, the vice-president of regulatory affairs and linguistics was giving testimony. She said, “We view Health Canada as a key customer.” In another quote, she said, “Health Canada doesn't warn Canadians about drugs; it helps them take them.” This is a vice-president of Janssen-Ortho, which is a Johnson & Johnson company.
I believe it's not what the drug companies tell us that harms patients; it's what they don't. They also withhold a great deal of information they classify as “commercial” in the summary basis of decision. It's humorous, because they get the same drugs approved in the States, and the FDA will publish the same information on the Internet. So Health Canada is hiding it, saying they can't talk about it, they can't tell us.
I'm optimistic this new act will provide all that transparency, including the clinical trials, as I mentioned to you as well. In researching my book, I found probably 40 or 50 different ways clinical trials are biased. The most obvious is publication bias. They bury the bad ones and get the good ones published. They omit washouts, people who start the drug trial and then stop because the drugs affected them badly. They pretend they were never in the trial. Another is what they call non-responders, people who say they didn't feel any difference with the drug. So they take them out of the trial as well.
When trials are going badly, they shut them down and pretend they never existed. They test drugs on homeless people who have a range of illnesses like liver damage, etc. And they test drugs, in some cases, in uncontrolled conditions. In some cases, to get better results, they test a drug and compare it with another drug in a higher dosage than they're going to be selling.
I haven't lost my sense of humour in all this. You have to see them to believe them.