Ed.’s note: Welcome to Coronaville. We’re not going to mince words here. This Tadataka Yamada of Takeda Pharmaceuticals is a criminal syndicate fixer. Takeda pharmaceuticals and their subsidiary in the US Abbott Laboratories are pushing hard for a coronavirus vaccine worth billions. Yamada is also president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Starting to make sense why Japan has jumped on the coronascam? We have a “fixer” here as president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Source: CBS News
Meet Glaxo’s Fixer — The Man Who Scuttles Drug Critics With One Phone Call
BY JIM EDWARDS | FEBRUARY 22, 2010
It’s worth a look inside the Senate Finance Committee’s 342-page report on GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)’s Avandia diabetes medicine if only for the allegations of cloak-and-dagger intimidation the company aimed at scientists who had bad things to report about the drug. In there you will meet Dr. Tachi Yamada (pictured below), GSK’s fixer on Avandia, who with just a few phone calls to your superiors can derail your drug research.
FDA reviewers believe Avandia caused 500 extra heart attacks per month, and Senators Charles Grassley and Max Baucus are asking the agency to remove the drug from the market. GSK has mounted a feisty defense, saying that the Senate report “cherry picks” information and that “the scientific evidence simply does not establish that Avandia increases cardiovascular ischemic risk or causes myocardial ischemic events.” Seven trials have not shown a statistical link between Avandia and heart attacks, GSK insists.
GSK’s combative stance is paralleled in the report. That document suggests that if you were an independent scientist doing a study of Avandia’s side effects, then Yamada, GSK’s top R&D man, would make some calls and your study would either be spiked, leaked pre-publication, or rubbished in the press by GSK’s pr machine. Said one University of Pennsylvania scientist, whose case study of a single patient with liver failure ended up not being published:
I have never encountered anything like this in my career. I don’t even know how [GSK] knew that we were publishing. It’s the kind of thing you imagine happening on TV.
Here’s a sample from Yamada’s email, in which former GSK president David Stout asks Yamada to “place another call to your contacts” about some research that is “not [in] anyone’s best interest”:
The report gives the best details regarding Dr. John Buse, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina. Buse appeared at conferences and had written to the FDA to say that he suspected heart problems in Avandia in 1999:
According to GSK emails made available to the Committee, GSK executives labeled Dr. Buse a “renegade” and silenced his concerns about Avandia by complaining to his superiors at UNC and threatening a lawsuit. The call to Dr. Buse’s superiors was made by Dr. Tachi Yamada, then GSK’s head of research.
Please go to CBS News to read the entire article.
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Tokyo Streets From a bd-1 