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. Plus, more and more states are joining a major lawsuit to hold the makers of Insulin liable for price gouging American consumers for decades. These lawsuits could force the companies to pay up big time for scamming the public. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
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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.
Mike Papantonio: More and more states are joining a major lawsuit to hold the makers of insulin liable for price gouging. American consumers for decades have been putting up with that price gouging. These lawsuits could force the companies to pay up big time. Full disclosure, this is my lawsuit. This is our lawsuit. We originated this, but talk about it. Why don’t you talk about it, PBMs and that type of thing.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Well, what we have right now is we have state attorneys general that are joining into this lawsuit. So entire states, Oklahoma just announced a couple days ago, they’re the most recent state joining in on this. Because what’s been found is that, again, for decades and decades, the drug companies, along with the PBMs, the pharmaceutical benefit managers at the health insurance companies.
Mike Papantonio: Explain, take a minute and explain that just a tad. Just gimme a little 10,000 foot because people don’t know what a PBM is.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We did a big segment on it about couple weeks ago. The PBM is the person that works at the health insurance company that says what drugs we will cover, how much of each drug we cover. And usually they’re tied at the hip, not just with the company they work for, but with the drug companies themselves.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: They negotiate these prices like, hey, we’ll cover 50% of it. You get the rest, I get some, the insurance company gets a little bit.
Mike Papantonio: It’s all kickbacks.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, it is.
Mike Papantonio: They wanna call it rebates. It’s kickbacks. It’s pure kickbacks. You do this for me and we’re gonna pay you money that’s kickback money. And so what they do is, the competitors out there, if you’re a drug company, you want the PBM to endorse, have a formulary to endorse your product. Right. And so the PBMs make money by scaring the hell out of all the competitors. If you don’t give us these kickbacks, then you may not be on the list. And if you’re too cheap, if your price is not high enough, you might not be on the list because the PBM makes kickback money based on a percentage of what they’re able to put forward. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And what we found out, again, that this has been taking place with insulin for a very long time. Because obviously insulin is one of the most widely used drugs in the United States. Millions of people every day are taking insulin. So yeah, the pharmaceutical, or excuse me, the health insurance companies pretty much have to cover it. So these PBMs and the drug companies have all the power to set the price. And over the last 20 years, we have seen over a 1000% increase in spite of the fact nothing’s changed with the drug. The cost to produce it has gotten lower. But we are getting screwed hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars a month.
Mike Papantonio: And so what Eli Lilly says, oh, well this is R and D. There hasn’t been R and D. This drug’s been around a hundred years. As a matter of fact, the interesting part about the guy who developed the drug gave it away. He said, I shouldn’t have this. This can save people’s lives. He gave it away. But then all the bottom feeders, they came in and said, well, you can’t give something away. We need to make millions. So Eli Lilly made $22 billion on it last year. $22 billion where people weren’t even getting enough insulin to be able to keep themselves healthy because they couldn’t afford it.
Farron Cousins: Right. They had to ration it.
Mike Papantonio: They had to ration it. 5,000, almost $6,000 is what the, for insulin, what some of these folks are paying. These companies are making 20, 30, $40 billion selling these products, and they still want more. And when you say, well, you need to pay more. They say, oh, no, no, no. We can’t do that. We have R and D, our research and development. Hell, there is no research and development. But why is it that we don’t have any body in Congress with big enough kahunas to say, look, you gotta stop it. This is one that should have been stopped by this administration.
Farron Cousins: Absolutely. And look, they’ve done studies, they found that the cost of insulin to still give a big profit to the drug companies should be anywhere between $48 and $71 a year. And drug companies would still pull in massive profits off of it.
Mike Papantonio: Can you imagine having somebody in your family, or somebody you know, that says, I can only take half of what I’m supposed to take to keep myself alive because I can’t afford it. Now there’s special programs. But when you look at, and I remember them coming out, like a week after we filed this lawsuit, they came out with this big PR deal. And that’s, well, we’re gonna be lowering prices. It’s smoke and mirrors. They’re not lowering anything. They’re still making a killing. PBMs are killing this country. And the companies like Eli Lilly, they’re right in there with them and nothing seems to be able to change that, is it?
Farron Cousins: Nope. Not as far as we’ve seen. These lawsuits are probably the best hope to do that.
Mike Papantonio: Well, I’m hoping it is. We’ve done a lot of good things with cases like this. Farron, thanks for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week, but all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week. So make sure you’ve subscribed. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where every week we tell you stories that corporate media simply won’t tell you. It’s not tough. Advertisers don’t let ’em tell the story. They threaten the company of pulling advertising dollars if they tell stories about companies like, pharmaceutical companies or weapons industry. The other part is that their attachment to their party, Republican or Democrat, is so deep that they can’t be objective anymore. They can’t tell other parts of the story. But you know what? We don’t have that problem here. We’re gonna tell it just as we see it. Hopefully we’ll see you next time.
