Pharmaceutical Industry Quotes

• It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.

  Paul Farmer

  Organization, Imagination, Adequate

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• The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.

  Marcia Angell

  Drug, Likes, Nerves

  55 Copy quote

• From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Views, Alcohol, Drug

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• Recently, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry wrote a prescription drug bill that increased their profits and did nothing to help seniors. The result: seniors are stuck with a confusing prescription drug plan that does little to help them with their costs.

  Marty Meehan

  Senior, Drug, Confusing

  54 Copy quote

• We try to remember that medicine is for the patient. We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.

  George W. Merck

  Medicine, People, Trying

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• I think the entire pharmaceutical industry has a lot of work to do to restore public trust.

  Kenneth C. Frazier

  Thinking, Pharmaceutical, Industry

  "Big Pharma's Delicate Dance on Drug Prices". Interview with Peter Loftus, www.wsj.com. February 21, 2016.

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• The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It's science that people want to work on.

  Bill Gates

  People, Progress, Foundation

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• Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.

  Marcia Angell

  Past, Fda, Two

  "The Truth About the Drug Companies". www.nybooks.com. July 15, 2004.

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• For the first 50 years of your life the food industry is trying to make you fat. Then, the second 50 years, the pharmaceutical industry is treating you for everything.

  Pierre Dukan

  Years, Trying, Firsts

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• It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

  Marcia Angell

  Believe, Editors, Two

  "Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption". www.nybooks.com. January 15, 2009.

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• Smiling babies should actually be categorized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful antidepressant.

  Jim Gaffigan

  Baby, Powerful, Should

  Jim Gaffigan (2013). “Dad Is Fat”, p.54, Crown Archetype

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• Every American has got to recognize, we are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people. We pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because the pharmacy, the pharmaceutical industry is out of control ripping us off.

  John Lewis

  Country, People, Drug

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• In the last century the practice of medicine has become no more than an adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry and the other aspects of the huge, powerful and immensely profitable health care industry. Medicine is no longer an independent profession. Doctors have become nothing more than a link connecting the pharmaceutical industry to the consumer.

  Vernon Coleman

  Powerful, Independent, Medicine

  7 Copy quote

• It [the pharmaceutical industry] is the most profitable industry in the world, and partially funds the US government. It surpasses oil in terms of profits and my country recently went to war due to oil pricing. What does that say they will do to keep this other industry in tact? It is up to patients and their families to question what they are being given, and to consumers to demand better, more natural alternatives.

  Margot Kidder

  Country, War, Government

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• The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health.

  Robert Jarvik

  Understanding, Important, United States

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• The United States is the only advanced country that permits the pharmaceutical industry to charge exactly what the market will bear, whatever it wants.

  Marcia Angell

  Country, Bears, United States

  8 Copy quote

• Research is subordinated (not to a long-term social benefit) but to an immediate commercial profit. Currently, disease (not health) is one of the major sources of profit for the pharmaceutical industry, and the doctors are willing agents of those profits.

  Pierre Bosquet

  Health, Doctors, Medicine

  6 Copy quote

• The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

  Marcia Angell

  Care, Waste, Inefficiency

  5 Copy quote

• You cannot be a party which takes money from Wall Street, which is not strong on the pharmaceutical industry, which is ripping us off every day, which is not strong on health care in taking on the insurance companies, which has not shown a desire to stand up and fight the economic establishment, and then tell working families that you are on their side. People see through that.

  Bernie Sanders

  Strong, Wall, Party

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The implication was that if you had any skepticism whatsoever, you were anti-science. I think there's a difference between having skepticism about science and having skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry.

  Marianne Williamson

  Thinking, Differences, Skepticism

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• The quality of the medical care delivered, including the pharmaceutical industry, has improved a lot. I don't think it's crazy for a rich country like the USto spend 15% of GDP on healthcare, and if it rose to 16-17%, it's not a big worry.

  Charlie Munger

  Country, Crazy, Thinking

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• [There is no shortage of scientific talent.] But [I am] much less optimistic about the managerial vision [of the pharmaceutical industry] to catalyse these talents to deliver the results we all want.

  James Black

  Optimistic, Science, Vision

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• People treat having a kid as somehow retiring from success. Quitting. Have you seen a baby? They’re pretty cute. Loving them is pretty easy. Smiling babies should actually be categorized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful antidepressant. Being happy is really the definition of success, isn’t it?

  Jim Gaffigan

  Cute, Baby, Powerful

  Jim Gaffigan (2013). “Dad Is Fat”, p.54, Crown Archetype

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• There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Use, Antibiotics, Health Professionals

  "Eating animals is making us sick" by Jonathan Safran Foer, www.cnn.com. October 28, 2009.

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• I do not accept the belief that the United States of America and our government can't stand up to the ripoffs of the pharmaceutical industry which charge us by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

  Bernie Sanders

  America, Government, Drug

  Bernie Sanders during Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire, www.nytimes.com. February 5, 2016.

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