Extract: Heart drug pulled, Pfizer tumbles

On Saturday, Pfizer and the Food and Drug Administration announced that the drug company would halt a clinical trial of torcetrapib due to an increased rate of death and heart problems in patients who took it.

Just two days earlier, Pfizer's new CEO Jeffrey Kindler had told hundreds of investors and analysts at a research meeting that the drugmaker could seek approval for the medicine as early as next year if clinical data supported it.

Pfizer had planned to pair torcetrapib with Lipitor, the world's best-selling drug that cuts bad cholesterol, to maintain sales once Lipitor loses U.S. patent protection in 2011.

The patients were taking torcetrapib to boost so-called "good" cholesterol, along with Lipitor. Lipitor alone was not associated with an increased rate of death in the clinical trial.

The news was a setback for the millions of people looking to control their cholesterol to battle heart disease, which kills more than 650,000 Americans a year, making it the leading cause of death in the United States.

Dr. Daniel Fisher, cardiologist at NYU Medical Center and clinical assistant professor at NYU School of Medicine, said the failure of the torcetrapib trial was a "big blow" to heart disease treatment.

"This throws a big wrench in the system," said Dr. Fisher. "[Torcetrapib] would have been a very big thing. We're sort of stuck with what we've got, for now."

The abrupt halt to the trial ends Pfizer's biggest drug study, one on which it spent about $800 million on research involving 25,000 patients at hundreds of locations around the world.

The sudden end to the trial was a major setback for Pfizer, which is already cutting jobs as it struggles with replacing a valuable stable of drugs that are going off patent in the next few years...

References:

The Nature of the Pharmaceutical Industry

1. The purpose and driving force of the pharmaceutical industry is to increase sales of pharmaceutical drugs for ongoing diseases and to find new diseases to market existing drugs.
2. By this very nature, the pharmaceutical industry has no interest in curing diseases. The eradication of any disease inevitably destroys a multi-billion dollar market of prescription drugs. Therefore, pharmaceutical drugs are primarily developed to relieve symptoms, but not to cure.
3. If eradication therapies for diseases are discovered and developed, the industry has a basic interest to suppress, discredit and obstruct these medical breakthroughs in order to make sure that diseases continue as the very basis for a lucrative prescription drug market.
4. The economic interest of the pharmaceutical industry is the main reason why no medical breakthrough has been made for the control of the most common diseases such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, heart failure, diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis, and why these diseases continue like epidemics on a worldwide scale.
5. For the same economic reasons, the pharmaceutical industry has now formed an international cartel by the code name "Codex Alimentarius" with the aim to outlaw any health information in connection with vitamins and to limit free access to natural therapies on a worldwide scale.
6. At the same time, the pharmaceutical companies withhold public information about the effects and risks of prescription drugs and life-threatening side effects are omitted or openly denied.
7. In order to assure the status quo of this deceptive scheme, a legion of pharmaceutical lobbyists is employed to influence legislation, control regulatory agencies (e.g., FDA), and manipulate medical research and education. Expensive advertising campaigns and PR agencies are used to deceive the public.
8. Millions of people and patients around the world are defrauded twice: A major portion of their income is used to finance the exploding profits of the pharmaceutical industry. In return, they are offered a medicine that does not even cure...
   

Drugs and Their Dangerous Effects

For people over the age of 60, in one year there will be…(from the Public Citizen Health Research).

…1 million adverse reactions to prescriptions

…243,000 hospitalized due to drug reactions

…163,000 suffering from memory loss due to prescriptions drugs

61,000 Americans will suffer drug induced Parkinson’s disease this year.

32,000 suffer hip fractures annually including 1500 deaths from drug-induced falls (USA Today, July 29, 1994)

7,600 deaths and 76,000 annual hospitalizations are due to internal bleeding by non-steroidal inflammatory drugs, most used for arthritis. Forty-one percent of these prescriptions are unnecessary (Ann Intern Med, 1997; 127:429-438).

23% of the elderly receive repeat prescriptions for more than a year without seeing a physician.

In U.S. hospitals, a serious drug error occurs in one out of every 14 patients. (Harvard Scholl Of Public Health, Sept. 22, 1994).

Medical malpractice is responsible for 80,000 deaths per year, one every seven minutes (Public Citizen. May/June 1994).

Between 106,000 and 196,000 people die each year in U.S. hospitals from properly prescribed drugs. Over 2 million suffer serious side effects. (JAMA, 1998)

A 13-year study showed that 66% of all non-prescription drugs don’t work. (U.S. Public Health Service, 1986)...

More important data will be published at poison.bioenergeticspectrum.com.