Examination of Witnesses (Questions 316
- 319)
THURSDAY 25 NOVEMBER 2004
MS MELINDA
LETTS, PAUL
FLYNN MP, MR
PHIL WOOLAS
MP AND MR
CLIFF PRIOR
Q316 Chairman: Can I welcome our
witnesses to this morning's first session and thank you all for
your helpful written evidence; we are most grateful to you. Could
I ask each of the witnesses briefly to introduce themselves to
the committee, starting with Ms Letts?
Ms Letts: My name is Melinda Letts.
I am an independent consultant working with charities and other
health organisations. Until May of this year I chaired the Long-Term
Medical Conditions Alliance and among a number of other things
I am now a Director of Ask About Medicines Week and Chair of the
Committee on Safety of Medicines Patient Information Working Group.
Mr Woolas: I am Mr Phil Woolas.
I am Member of Parliament for the Oldham East and Saddleworth
constituency and a representative as a trustee of the Beat the
Benzos Campaign, which is a support group for involuntary addicts
on benzodiazepine drugs.
Paul Flynn: I am Paul Flynn, Member
of Parliament for Newport West, a long term critic of the pharmaceutical
industry, especially their disease-mongering and over-prescription
and the medicalisation of society.
Mr Prior: I am Cliff Prior. I
am Chief Executive of Rethink, which is a charity for people affected
by severe mental illness. I am also Vice Chair of the Long-Term
Medical Conditions Alliance and a member of the Medicines Commission.
Chairman: Thank you. We have one declaration
of interest from Mr Austin.
John Austin: I just wish to declare that
I chair the All-Party Parliamentary Osteoporosis Group which receives
administrative and secretarial support from the National Osteoporosis
Society, which is mentioned in Mr Flynn's evidence as receiving
some financial assistance from the pharmaceutical industry.
Q317 Chairman: We are splitting this
morning's session into two, as you well know, and it will be roughly
an hour for each group, so could I ask for the questions and answers
to be brief and sharp. Mr Flynn, could I start with you? How did
you get into this whole area? Am I right in thinking that it was
through constituency concerns?
Paul Flynn: Yes, it was; it was
entirely through constituency concerns. The first one was when
a constituent committed suicide using the drug Roaccutane and
I was shocked to discover that there was no organisation for the
defence of people in this circumstance and the patient organisation
that one would have thought would have represented people was
one that had a very large donation from the manufacturers of Roaccutane
because there was a widespread belief that those on this drug
were more prone to commit suicide. Over the years I have come
across in my constituency work a whole range of instances where
those that one would have thought would have been the first line
of defence in the interests of patients, the charities and the
patient organisations, were being influenced and certainly being
financed by the pharmaceutical industry. I have learned over the
years that it is impossible to over-estimate the greed, the guile
and the resourcefulness of the pharmaceutical industry. While
the science is wonderful the marketing of their products, I am
afraid, is very much out of self-interest in order to maximise
their profits and I believe that these organisations that we look
towards to defend the patients are ones that have been influenced—not
corrupted; many of them are magnificent organisations—and
we do notice that those that have the largest donations are often
the ones that have the quietest voices when it comes to exposing
the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs.
Q318 Chairman: You specifically say
in your submission that some patient organisations may refrain
from criticism of pharmaceutical companies because those companies
fund the organisations. You give an example of a concern on page
4 of your evidence where you talk about a particular product,
where you suggest that information from clinical trials is being
suppressed and, "A courageous leading campaign has been pursued
by MIND who receives no contributions from any pharmaceutical
company. There has been silence from SANE and Depression Alliance
who accept donations". This is fairly strong criticism. Can
you expand on this?
Paul Flynn: I was present at the
formation of an All-Party Group on Depression of which the Depression
Alliance were the main sponsors. Again, they are an organisation
that certainly do very good work but it has been significant during
the past year, and I have had two debates on Seroxat in that period,
where this international scandal on the damage that is done by
Seroxat, involving the suppression of files, an immense scandal
involving millions of people, was not exposed by the Depression
Alliance or the other patient organisations. Depression Alliance
did confess to taking, in meetings we had with them, 80% of their
funding from the pharmaceutical industry. They were silent when
this matter was being exposed by organisations like MIND who take
not a penny and a very courageous stand was made by Richard Brook
of MIND. The heroes of the exposure of this scandal were not the
MHRA or those bodies that should be defending the patients. It
was very much the campaigning patient organisations and I think
very recently, when Viox was exposed as being a very dangerous
drug, I went on to the Arthritis Care website, again, an organisation
that is doing a magnificent job, and it was significant that they
were advising people to continue taking Viox even though it has
been exposed as a drug that has probably killed by a minimum estimate
7,000 people and caused 25,000 heart attacks. Arthritis Care was
suggesting that people continue to take the drug and then see
their doctors and probably go on to another drug. It is not insignificant
that the website is financed by Merck Sharp and Dohme, manufacturers
of Viox itself. The charities and the patient organisations will
say they are not influenced unduly by this but why on earth then
are they taking the drawings because we certainly know that the
ABPI have said that they regard the patients' associations as
the ground troops. They had a battle plan in which they wanted
to employ ground troops in the form of patient support groups
in order to weaken the political, ideological and professional
defences. That is a declared policy of the pharmaceutical industry,
to use patient organisations to subvert us. I will make one final
point. In Paris last week the WHO were challenged on their view
that depression will become the third greatest cause of illness
in the world by 2020 and they were challenged on whether they
were being unusually influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.
The defence of the World Health Organisation was, "Yes, we
are suspicious of the pharmaceutical industry but we do listen
to charities and patient organisations". I believe that for
all of us, politicians, the public, our defences go up when we
have advertisements and persuasion from the drug companies but
we are open to persuasion by organisations like the patient organisations
we trust. I believe we see it within this House when some of our
All-Party Groups have been used as Trojan horses to bring the
voice of the pharmaceutical industry into this House and to use
it generally throughout the whole of the medical establishment.
Q319 Chairman: One of the questions
I asked at the start of this inquiry internal to our committee
was to look at the number of All-Party Groups that do have a connection
with the industry. Do you have any specific examples of policies
being influenced by All-Party Groups in the interests of the industry?
Paul Flynn: I sit on many of these
All-Party Groups in order to watch the activities that go on.
I was rather alarmed to receive a document from an organisation
called Phase IV recently which tried to recruit me in order to
subvert, in my view, the All-Party Group on Rheumatoid Arthritis
in order to find what they described as success stories and tragedy
stories in order to promote the use of the anti-TNF drugs. These
are drugs that have been approved by NICE but have certain side
effects that NICE warned of. This was an attempt by a body, which
is a PR agency, to use the group in that way. I believe that every
time we have invitations to All-Party Groups the invitations are
littered, rather like the clothes that are worn by racing drivers,
with advertisements for the companies. They are not doing this
out of some charitable reason or for the benefit of the patients.
They are doing it to advance their position in this way. The damaging
effect is not that we can say in this case or that case that they
have actually worked in a way that was obviously promoting the
drug, but their main effect is to silence the organisations when
they should be critical. I believe the evidence is that the regulatory
authorities are ones of self-regulation that are not working,
that are weak and we are seeing, in the case of many of these
organisations that exist, a lack of the alertness and the desire
to defend the patient interest against a whole host of examples
we have had of drugs over the years from Thalidomide, Destobel,
Araldine, now to Viox and a whole stream of others. My lifetime
experience of the pharmaceutical industry is that about 50% of
all medicinal drugs have harmful side effects and the other 50%
have side effects that we have yet to discover. It has been a
history of experimentation on a large scale between patients and
drugs and, sadly, the results on the harm of the drugs were only
revealed in many cases when they had been used by millions of
people. We do not have bodies that defend patients' interests
in the way that they should.
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