Veterans Affairs Nominee Connected To Corporate Fraud

Instead of appointing someone with actual medical care experience, the president has gone to the world of big business, trying to find someone who can properly, and ethically, run the VA. Given P&G’s history of scandals and class-action lawsuits, McDonald’s appointment might be a lateral move...

Possibly the most troubling of all of P&G’s unethical behavior involved their osteoporosis drug, Actonel. In early 2006, senior medical faculty member at Sheffield University in England, Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn, told Congressional officials and journalists about how the company had engaged in data concealment and manipulation in order to skew the results of a study of the drug. While under contract to collect Actonel data, Blumsohn was repeatedly denied access to specific data for 18 months by P&G, despite the fact it was publishing ghost-written abstracts “falsely implying the therapeutic equivalence of Actonel to Merck’s Fosamax.”

Once he was finally given access to that data, Blumsohn realized that graphs depicting the drug’s effectiveness had omitted 40 percent of one data set. P&G officials told him that if the additional data were included the study would have favored Fosamax. Blumsohn was offered a substantial sum of money to leave his position, upon the condition he remain silent about the data manipulation. He refused, and was then suspended by the University for speaking out to the BBC.

In order to fix a problem with the VA’s doctored documents and falsified data, President Obama has nominated the former CEO of a company which doctored documents and falsified data. If Obama wants to do right by the veterans who depend on the VA for their health care, gambling on leaders from corrupt corporate America could cause more problems than the VA is currently dealing with...