Harvard University appears to already be having problems with their latest interim president after it was revealed that he has made millions of dollars while serving on the boards of several drug companies. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Harvard University appears to be already having problems with their latest interim president after it was revealed that he was paid millions of dollars while serving on the boards of several drug companies. Wow. What a deal this guy has, right? So he’s making a salary as a professor at Harvard in a department where he’s overseeing research, right? So Eli Lilly or whatever company calls him and says, hey, I hear you’re working on some patents, right? I hear you’re working on some things at Harvard that maybe we can get in and buy. Well, he has his Vertex and Exelixis. Those are the two companies he’s looking out for. But he’s on the board and he’s paid $2.7 million to sit on the board. You know the problems. We’ve talked about the problems, what it means in a typical lawsuit. Go ahead and pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. What people have to understand why this is so bad is because these universities, especially Harvard, the most prestigious college in the country, that title of being a Harvard graduate carries a ton of weight across the planet. So what these drug companies do, or chemical companies, whoever it is, they go to these prestigious universities, they look at what they’re doing, and they do one of two things. One, as you pointed out, they say, hey, you’ve got a lot of really good cancer research here. You’re developing things that might fight off cancer. Uh, we wanna buy this. So could you sell this to us? So they use it as their R and D department without having to pay for it. And the second, well, the second thing is the most important. They then, when problems arise with that cancer drug or whatever it is, they say, hey, listen, we’ve got this paper we wrote that actually says, if you do it this way, everything’s fine. No problems with the drug. It’s your drug. Could you, I mean, just sign your name right here on the paper. We’re good to go. We gotta send it to the FDA.
Mike Papantonio: I don’t want people to miss what you just said. The company writes the clinical data. Okay. They have these folks signing off on the clinical data. They didn’t even write the article, but it appears in all these big journals with their name on it, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. And I’m always across the table from ’em. This is what I kinda specialize in, is cross-examining these cats. And if you look at their history, they’re making so much money, they will say anything for a million dollars, anything. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where the conduct and causation is so overwhelming, the corporate type has caused clear harm to the consumer. And the clinical data shows it. The memos, the data, all the papers, all the transactions in the company show that that’s the case.
But these cats, they show up at a deposition and say, oh, no, no, no, no. We can’t know that Yaz is really killing women through, you know, through a whole host of problems. Or we can’t be sure that Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder is causing cervical cancer and we need more information. That’s all they want ’em to do is come to trial, go to deposition, and say, we need more information. That is exactly what they’re paid to do. And they’re nothing but whores. They are whores for the pharmaceutical industry. And this guy opened that. But, I think the bigger story, Harvard’s right now, I think in a bad way, I really do believe. This thing with Professor Gay, I just have not gotten my arms around it. I mean, here’s the history that at least is being reported.
10 documents, clear plagiarism that the board took no action on. Now, that’s before it really started heating up. This board of out of touch millionaire screwballs living in their own elite bubble. They’re so totally out of touch with realities of every day. They say, okay, that’s okay. That’s okay, Ms. President, we’re gonna support you in that. Any other student would’ve been kicked outta the university immediately. Their career would’ve been over. Here it gets worse than that, 50 documents after the 10, another 50 documents show up. And it’s the silliest thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s entire pages, Farron. She is taking entire pages out of somebody else’s work. Some other scientist who’s done the research and she’s putting it to her use. And now this is called, racial animus, really? This is racial animus?
Farron Cousins: I’ve seen so many articles from websites that I respect that have talked about this, like, oh, well, the right started a culture war here. And that’s, it’s like, okay, listen, if that’s even what the cause of it was, does it matter when they find horrible things? Guess what folks? People on the left can also be horrible, and we can call ’em out and that doesn’t make us any less of a leftist to say, listen, what this person did was bad. As you pointed out, any student at that university is gonna be expelled on the spot and they’re not ever gonna get in another college.
Mike Papantonio: Their career could be over.
Farron Cousins: Their life could be over.
Mike Papantonio: Their life could be over. But here we’ve got a professor who her entire, it started early on, man. Her entire career, she’s plagiarizing. And this idiot bunch of board members said, you really need to look at this, because what you’ve done is you’ve created this open season to plagiarize. What’s gonna happen when the next student comes up and says, you know, yeah, this is a paragraph, I plagiar? They’re gone, man. They’re gone. There’s no way that you can bring legitimacy to the process anymore. I think this kills, there’s so many things about that. And then they keep her on. They’re paying her $900,000 to continue being a professor. What the hell? And to call this racial animus is absurd. Had it been a Hispanic, had it been an Asian, had it been anybody else, oh my God, you know, you would have been gone. But this is not racial animus. This is just common sense. We shouldn’t have the president of a university at Harvard saying it’s okay to plagiarize. And I’ve done it 50 times and I’ve built my career around it. How have we gotten there? That’s what I wonder.
