Big Pharma influnces doctors by funding medical schools
Big Pharma needs doctors to power the machine that generates their profit. Only one-third (85 billion profit comes from over-the-counter drugs that patients can buy without a prescription—and so Pharma has to keep doctors prescribing. The best way to do that? Control the medical school curriculum. And how to do that? Pay for stuff.
Individual datapoints for American medical schools are harder to come by, but we know what’s going on with our Canadian friends north of the border. Canadian pharmaceutical company Apotex gave the University of Toronto CAN4,566,930 over two decades, Janssen donated CAN272,696 over two years, and Bristol Myers Squibb sponsored the salaries of two physician-scientists. We can only assume that American medical schools are reading from the same script.
And it’s in the university’s best interest to maintain these industry relationships, for two reasons: 1) direct drug money as above; and also 2) potential drug money for in-house discoveries. Congressional passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gave universities the right to patent any discoveries stemming from federally funded research, to own that IP, and then to license those discoveries to Big Pharma in return for institutional royalties.
References
- Lustig, Robert. (2021). Metabolical Chapter 6. Because Big Pharma Was Their Teacher (p. 122). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.