Medical Monopoly – Interlocking Directorates

Medical Monopoly Musings #50
Interlocking Directorates – Media and Pharma

An “Interlocking Directorate” is when directors from one company also sit on the boards of other companies. As most companies are public, this means such officers have a fiduciary responsibility to do what is in the best interest of each company. If one such company is a media company, this translates into being a conflict of interest.

A 2009 report from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting found the following. Of the nine major media corporations such as Disney, Time Warner, NY Times, and others, six had directors that were also part of pharmaceutical boards. In addition, five out of the nine shared directors with insurance companies.

That was 2009. There are now just five major media companies. While it’ll take more digging to vet out current data, do you think this problem has gotten better or worse since then? As we see consolidation of the media companies themselves, we’ll see further examples of consolidation of power among the interlocking directorates.

“Let me put it in perspective for you, these board members wake up, they go to a meeting at Merck or Pfizer, and then they have their driver take them over to a meeting with NBC to decide what kind of programming that network is going to air. For those board members who aren’t pulling double duty with a media conglomerate and a big drug company, they still understand that they can’t be honest and objective about big pharma because big pharma pays their bills,” says lawyer Mike Papantonio. “Drug companies spend about $5 billion a year on advertising with these corporate media outlets, so when Pfizer or Merck or Eli Lilly, or any of the drug companies, kill or cripple Americans with defective drugs, do you really think these board members are going to allow their story to be told on the air? It can take anywhere from three days to a full week before the media reports on a drug or a medical device recall, if they report at all. In the case of Invokana it took 32 days before television outlets reported a single story involving an FDA warning about the potential problems with the product.”

From the FAIR website (undated) you can see examples of this. CBS/Viacom shares directorate with Pfizer and Cardinal Health, a large distributor of pharmaceuticals and medical products. Remember in the previous post where CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson ran into problems from executives over her critical pharma coverage?

New York Times Co. shares directorate with Bristol-Meyers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson. On and on it goes.

Does this cause problems? Back in 2009, some people looked at this in relation to healthcare reform. Kate Murphy from FAIR, wrote, “In all, though healthcare reform has been mentioned thousands of times in the output of these media corporations’ major outlets, single-payer was mentioned in only 164 articles or news segments from January 1 through June 30, 2009; over 70 percent of these mentions did not include the voice of a single-payer advocate.”

So yeah, it is absolutely is affecting journalistic coverage. Even if only some stories get squashed or altered, this leads to compounding problems over time.

And of course, it’s not just the media. Martin J. Murray published a paper titled, “The Pharmaceutical Industry: A Story in Corporate Power” in which he stated, “The thesis of this paper is that small-scale drug manufacturing firms have been gradually replaced by large-scale multinational conglomerates. Production and sales are no longer dependent on pharmaceutical products. In the typical case, large-scale pharmaceutical-producing firms have been increasingly linked to financial institutions through interlocking directorates.” This was written in 1974!

Think there are some interlocking directorates between Big Pharma and Big Tech, these days? In the future, we’ll go even deeper.

References:
https://fair.org/home/single-payer-and-interlocking-directorates/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giVY-Qnqd5Q
https://fair.org/interlocking-directorates/2870/
https://pnhp.org/news/single-payer-interlocking-directorates/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/730410/

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Medical Monopoly Musings #51
Interlocking Directorate of Alphabet (Google)

Last post covered how “interlocking directorates” can be problematic between media companies and other companies which the news should be digging into. These conflicts of interest may stop or hinder balanced coverage from happening such as about pharmaceutical drugs. While we will be returning to traditional media later on, it’s important to look at Big Tech’s role in all this too.

Are any of the board of directors from Alphabet (Google’s parent company) also on boards of Big Pharma? Yes!

One of Alphabet’s more recent additions is Robin L. Washington, former CFO of Gilead Sciences for 10 years.

While she is now on Alphabet’s board, she is still on the board of Gilead Connecticut, Gilead Sciences International, Gilead Sciences Europe, Kite Pharma UK Ltd., and others.

There’s the names you may know (Page, Brin, Pichai)...then there are the names you’ve probably never heard of. Robin is the only one with current direct pharma ties…but there are various high tech biology companies involved.

Here are some of the other Alphabet board members:

Frances Hamilton Arnold is on the board of Illumina, Inc. which is a bioinformation company and Donna & Benjamin M Rosen Bioengineering Center.

John LeRoy Hennessy is on the board of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which is a research partnership for diagnostics, drugs and vaccines.

Louis John Doerr is on Cardinal Analytx, Inc., now called Prealize Health for machine learning in healthcare, and Life Technologies Clinical Services Lab, Inc. which develops molecular assays for clinical and pharma customers.

Alan R. Mulally is on Mayo Foundation and Mayo Clinic boards.

Ram Kavitarak Shriram is at Stanford Health Care.

Roger Walton Ferguson is at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (see posts #30 and #31 for big and hidden conflicts of interest going on there) and Rally Health, Inc., a health data company.

And it’s not always an interlocking directorate. For example, Mary Ellen Coe is not on Alphabets board, but she is President of Global Customer Solutions for Google. Meanwhile, she is also on the Merck Board of Directors. (See post #37 to learn how Merck is the second biggest serial criminal in Big Pharma paying almost $9 billion in fines thus far.)

Is this cause for alarm? You would expect powerful people to be involved with many things, right? And lots of people are justifiably interested in health. By itself, interlocking directorates are only potential conflicts.

So we must look beyond them for actions and patterns that occur.

The name Gilead may be familiar to you. They’re the ones behind Remdesivir, the expensive antiviral drug hot in the news today…and one we saw significant conflicts of interest behind its approval in issue #44…while seeing the concerted push against cheaper hydroxychloroquine in #45.

Is Google manipulating search results in order to push one thing and denigrate the other?

Have we seen online censorship of information, such as on Youtube especially, for doctors speaking out about how hydroxychloroquine works?

You be the judge. Next time, more about Alphabet’s big steps into the healthcare space and increased censorship.

References:
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/GOOGL/company-people
https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press-releases/2019/4/gilead-sciences-chief-financial-officer-robin-washington-to-step-down-in-early-2020
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-ellen-coe-0371025/

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Extra references discussed regarding Twitter and Facebook:

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/TWTR/company-people
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/FB/company-people