I’ve been accused, occasionally, of being a pharma shill. Pharmaceutical companies make obscene profits! They’re paying off people to hide the dangers of their drugs! And there is a tiny grain of truth: those companies do reap great profits. Be the first to patent a Viagra or Zoloft, and the money will come rolling in.
But there’s so much investment required! You need to test thousands of drugs to find one that does anything; then there’s all the animal testing, the clinical trials, the regulatory oversight, the lawsuits that follow from side-effects (and if the drug is actually potent, there will be side-effects). No, that’s not for me. If I wanted to be really rich, and had no conscience at all, I’d go straight to Big Alt Med.
No testing! Cheap products! In the case of homeopathy, you can market tiny bottles of water! Supplements are almost entirely unregulated, nobody cares if you’re selling pills stuffed with sawdust. It’s miraculous sums of money for entirely non-miraculous garbage, plus a lot of promises.
Except that bit about conscience and a sense of shame. That’s a sticking point. And I wonder if a tiny vestige of shame is what killed James Jeffrey Bradstreet.
James Jeffrey Bradstreet committed suicide. His fans tried to deny it — they thought Big Pharma had had him executed — but the thorough story in the Washington Post shows otherwise.
Bradstreet was convinced that he had a cure for autism. His wonder cure was something called GcMAF, which, when injected into autistic people, marvelously and rapidly and with a phenomenal success rate, ‘cured’ them. A company called Immuno Tech was producing this drug.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work, has no reason to work, and hasn’t even been tested.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is clear: GcMAF is not a recognized treatment for autism.
“GcMAF treatments are considered investigational, and none are approved or licensed for use by the FDA in the U.S.,” the agency said in a statement sent to The Washington Post.
Nearly all doctors agree.
“Given there is no evidence that modulating the immune system would have any benefit for children with autism spectrum disorder – especially given ASD’s genetic or epigenetic basis – I am not sure why Dr. Bradstreet would want to use this for ASD,” Peter Jay Hotez, dean of Baylor’s National School of Tropical Medicine, told The Post in an e-mail.
It’s not even clear if GcMAF injections are safe. An initial “safety study” — the first of its kind — is still trying to recruit participants.
And surprise, surprise, surprise: Bradstreet was connected to Immuno Biotech, and was profiting off this snake oil. I thought only Big Pharma Shills did that!
What he did not disclose, however, was that much of the research he cited had already been discredited and retracted; the journal considering Bradstreet’s paper was the scientific equivalent of self-publishing, and Bradstreet had close ties to Noakes and Immuno Biotech.
Then it all came tumbling down. His clinic was raided.
Four months after First Immune was shut down, the feds came knocking on Bradstreet’s Buford, Ga., clinic.
A search warrant dated June 16 and obtained by The Washington Post shows that authorities were explicitly looking for GcMAF, as well as other “misbranded drugs.”
The raid took place on June 18, the day before Bradstreet died, Noakes told The Post in a phone interview. Agents from the FDA and the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency confiscated vials of GcMAF, medical records, lists of clients and associated companies, computers and financial records, according to the search warrant.
Had he been indicted, Bradstreet would have faced up to 20 years in prison, according to Forbes, which first obtained the search warrant.
Then people started dying after their treatments with GcMAF.
In Switzerland, three newspapers reported that very morning that a First Immune clinic run by Noakes had been shut down. Five patients being treated with GcMAF had died, the papers reported. Some had been spending up to 6,000 euros (about $6,500) a week for their treatment.
“Private clinic under criminal investigation after five deaths,” ran the headline in newspaper 24 Heures.
And after that, Bradstreet killed himself. I suppose it could have been a response to bankruptcy, imprisonment, and public repudiation, but I’ll do him the favor of thinking it was a small fragment of honor buried deep in his brain that rose up in the face of disgrace and killed him.
I’ve got a little bit of that self-respect, too, so I guess I won’t go into the alt med business, even though I’ve got this great idea for a medicine to cure gullibility. There’s a huge market! A market full of people who don’t think they need a cure, unfortunately.
As Orac points out, the five patients who died were apparently considered terminal cases before they entered GcMAF treatment, so that may not have had much or anything to do with their deaths.
Pierce – I’ve never heard of anyone dying of terminal autism before. There is no suggestion the patients were terminal – the link merely offered the possibility they might have been – and at $6500 a month for treatment I doubt they were.
PZ: your first few paragraphs use an argument very similar to “Dear Muslima”, and I wish you would change that. In effect, you are saying “I have been accused of shilling for a bad industry, but this other, notionally-related industry does worse stuff, so my critics should just shut up”.
Most critics of Big Pharma do not make the (silly) argument that developing drugs can be done without lots of expensive research and testing, they claim instead that Big Pharma, particularly in the U.S., drives up the price of medical research through excessive executive pay and stock dividends, using the cost of research (which is actually a minority of their expenses) as an excuse for the rest. Pharmaceutical research occurs in other countries and tends to be much cheaper there, because the spending on non-R&D costs tends to be less flagrantly out-of-control. (There’s also the facts that U.S. drug companies rush drugs to market with insufficient testing, often know in advance about serious side effects which later force recalls*, and engage in misleading advertising campaigns, but those are separate issues.)
*Why would they do this, you ask? It’s like this: if New Drug X makes the company fifty million dollars in profits, and later the court system forces a recall and fines the company, the costs will not only be likely to be less than the fifth million dollars the company already made — corporate fines tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than profits, leading to the idea that fines from the legal system are simply “the cost of doing business” — but between the introduction of the drug and the payment of costs the people running the company will have had time to enjoy whatever benefits fifty million dollars may do for the company, even if it’s “only” several million dollars of interest from the bank — to say nothing of the fact that the management which made the profits may well be gone by the time the punishment is declared. This is also why oil companies fight oil spill cases in court for ridiculously long periods. The incremental cost of having their lawyers — who are being paid anyway, in most cases — delay for years is much smaller than the amount of interest they can earn by having the amount of the fine in the bank during that period. Exxon had the amount of the fine for the Valdez oil spill freed up from the business and earning interest all the way until the fine was finally paid a few years ago, and made millions from that alone.
Of course, the five deaths don’t really need to have anything to do with either them being terminal going in or the GcMAF itself. It could be that the place was cheaping out on handling and refrigeration, and what was actually being injected was contaminated with something else. GcMAF is a protein-sugar compound, after all. Lots of biological possibilities.
Of course, given that GcMAF does act to regulate the immune system, it could interfere with all sorts of other things. As noted above, it hasn’t been really studied for safety yet.
madtom1999 #2 the patients were not being treated for autism, but cancer.
Via the wonders of Google translate:
#3 I think you’re missing the point. The point is not that big pharma is not as bad as alt med, therefore we should ignore its wrongdoing. The point is that the people who make this kind of accusation are usually alt-med people who benefit from lax regulation, minimal costs, and the gullibility of the desperate, i.e. they are extremely hypocritical.
I also think it’s simplistic to ascribe consciously malicious intentions to people in the pharma industry. Read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma for a more balanced view. (I don’t work in the industry, but know many who do. They don’t all have horns).
@4 bryanfier
So is a Snickers bar. Doesn’t make it a useful treatment for anything.
Kevin, I think bryanfier was commenting how improper storage or handling can lead to bacterial contamination of the product, as bacteria love such compounds.
I don’t believe for a moment that Bradstreet’s death was anything other than suicide. But if it did turn out to involve foul play… wouldn’t the families he cheated with his bogus treatments be more logical suspects than “big pharma”? Not that logic ever sways anyone in the anti-vax movement.
That’s basically what I was saying, yes.
I have absolutely no trust that places selling magical cure-alls will bother spend enough time ensuring that their cure-alls are actually safe and uncontaminated. Especially given how many of such cure-alls are based on naturalistic fallacies (i.e., that the raw natural ingredients, unknown dose and unknown other compounds and all, is somehow magically better than the precisely controlled and purified dose) or explicit usage of known poisons, or even just complete denial of physics (homeopathy).
Reminded me of this (paraphrasing):
“Buy Stephen Colbert’s Powerful Bullshit Detector today and forever be free of succumbing to scams and quacks. For just $39,99, this miracle cure will empower you to make rational decisions.
Stephen Colbert’s Powerful Bullshit Detector. If you bought one, it means that you needed one.“
Ah yes, I quite agree. Carry on.
I’ve seen that.
An alt med place was treating cancer patients with something from a Mexican clinic.
It turned out to be physiological saline with traces of organic matter. The traces were…live bacteria.
This could have been fatal. Cancer patients tend to be immunosuppressed for many reasons, and infections are common and can be fatal. No one died in this case but no one showed any benefit either.
Gc MAF cues autism and cancer?
This is a panacea.
An ancient Greek word for something that cures everything.
Unfortunately, panaceas are as real as the Nine Headed Hydra, the Chimera, or Medusa.
How apropos. I was just subjected to the miracle cure for AIDS on the tumblrwebs today.
Embarrasssing how gullible people are. The “They’re going to try and kill him.” and “He’s probably already dead” are almost adorable.
Aside from the fact the ‘study’ already has been torn apart in that same den of ignorance putting “Maduike Ezeibe ” into just Google Scholar shows him to be using his nano-particle aluminium magnesium silicate as a panacea. And to top it off, the ‘study’ itself (or one version of it) reads like a bad parody:
I won’t spoil the surprise of how those enormous standard errors arise.
Oh. And he’s the silicate is an adjuvant for a penicillin-like thing. Antibacterials – not just for colds anymore!
madtom1999 @ # 2: … I’ve never heard of anyone dying of terminal autism before.
Bradstreet and his accomplice, David Noakes, the head of a GcMAF-manufacturing company called Immuno Biotech, evidently promoted GcMAF as a treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome, cancer, and “a fairly broad number of disorders”, in classic quack style.
As Anisopteran reports @ # 5, the private clinic where the five died apparently specialized in “treating” the desperate.
Madtom1999 @2
You know, I am pretty sure you don’t mean it this way, (and I am aware the statement from the link at Orac’s likely relates to the use of GcMAF in HIV patients as the possibly-terminal patients) but the suicide/attempted suicide rate for people on the spectrum is high. True, it’s not exactly caused by autism, but it is definitely related to being autistic in a neurotypical world. Even those of us who don’t feel it’s us who need curing may suffer from “terminal autism”. Maybe I’m just being too sensitive here, and possibly derailing, but something about this just bothers me, this dismissal that no one dies from terminal autism.
Apologies for the source, but here’s this — http://www.aacc.net/2013/07/18/the-growing-concern-of-suicide-and-high-functioning-autism/
If christians can see this… /anti-theist cynic
This is anecdotal, but I can say absolutely that almost every single day since I was 9 years old, I have considered it at least once a day. Nine years old. So that’s almost 40 years now. And in the relatively few years since I have had a diagnosis, I can look back at all the other years (and the ones since), and see that nearly every. single. time. what triggered it was solidly related to an incident, an event, a conversation, something that was part of how autism made me different. From everyone around me. No matter what sort of similarities could have been drawn from any given moment if they’d had even two fucks to give.
With the day I’m having, I’d volunteer for his cure.
@16
Or that. I only just found the option to translate the page at the French link about the deaths.
Reminds me of the conspiracies that sprung up around the time Andrew Breitbart died. But in the game of conspiracy Olympics, whose conspiracy theory is more likely?
I think the accusations of being in the pockets of big pharma are too lightly made, and you have been a victim of that. But it is possible to oppose both Big Pharma and Big Snake Oil. Big Pharma makes huge profits, even considering the drugs that don’t pan out. One of the highest *net* rates of return. It lobbies, to give one example, against laws to restrict use of antibiotics in animals which contributes to antibiotic resistance. There have been many scandals about unethical drug tests in poor nations and in prisons. (And that is just recent scandals.) Also we are seeing more and more priorities shift from need to profits – for example less research on antibiotics, more on things like viagra. I don’t think it is terrible that viagra was developed, but that antibiotic research was cut is pretty damn awful. That is not to defend Big Snake Oil for a minute. Where Big Pharma is scandal ridden and has poor priorities in developing useful products, Big Snake Oil develops mostly useless and harmful products. (And the only reason for the term “mostly” is to allow for coincidnece. It is possible that someday they will accidentally develop something trivially useful.) ONe of the problems is that development of real Pharma is too privatized. NOt enough public funding. Even University research has to mostly be funded by private grants. So your argument against Big Snake Oil, is a good one, but Big Pharma deserves its own critique, though as I say the main problem (as is true in our economy at large) is too much privatitization of things that should be either fully public or public to a much greater degree.
Not at all, I would say rather that the first paragraphs were setting out and then refuting a common strawman used by the alt-med crowd, followed by moving on to the actual racketeers and shills.
@Gar Lipow: I don’t think anyone here has very much love with Big Pharma.
Very much like Monsanto, there is plenty of legitimate criticism to be levied against these companies, criticism which is regularly drowned in the insane claims of the conspiracy nuts.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s not the conspiracy nuts who are in the pockets of Big Pharma, since the effect of their efforts is to distract people from the actual and worrisome wrongdoing of these companies.
Autism is not much of a cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry, so it doesn’t make sense for them to be murdering people who have already been disgraced for promoting untested products. The real pharmaceutical money is in lipid management, anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, asthma preventers, and immune modulators.
Oh, forgot proton pump inhibitors and anticoagulants.
14, raven
I’m pretty certain that with the right combination of herbs, salt, sugar and perhaps a little smoke you could cure pretty much anything, humans included.
#3:
Uh, this is kind of the whole problem with multinational/multibillion dollar, corporations in general. Why the F are they only complaining about Big Pharma exactly? Why not Walmart, or Microsoft, or ***everyone else***? 100% of them, if seems, run up the cost, when possible, and/or cut corners on the product, to sell the crappiest thing they can, for the most money they can, purely to pay massive divdends to executives. Its sort of is, and has been, the major issue with such companies, for a while now.
Only.. here is the funny thing – its kind of hard to cut corners on a medicine, unless you just fake the research, and sell fake medicine, which the Big Pharma gets caught trying, **sometimes**, and nailed to the wall for, but Big Altie does pretty much **by definition**, and has to kill people to be called out on. Its like complaining that the guy giving you free water is “less of a problem”, when they are pumping it out of arsenic laced wells, than the guy a block away selling people bottled water, and trying to “convince you” that its better for you.. Gosh… could there actually be a real reason for that? Nah…
roachiesmom @ # 17: Illegimati non carborundum!
(Please forgive the dog-Latin – Don’t let the bastards grind you down!)