“On a visit to Mumbai in April 2013, Bill Clinton praised Indian generic drug companies Ranbaxy and Cipla for their “stellar contribution in the fight against the HIV/AIDS scourge.” Their cheap drugs saved millions of lives, the former president said.
The antiretroviral (ARV) drugs Ranbaxy sold were
so cheap because they were frauds. The Clinton Foundation facilitated distribution of watered down drugs by “creating the necessary logistics,” according to a report by now-Sen. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and her staff.
These drugs “subjected patients to increased risks of morbidity and mortality,” the Justice Department said in its lawsuit against Ranbaxy.
Clinton aide Ira Magaziner approached Ranbaxy in 2002 with a proposition:
“They could put the developing countries together to form a sort of ‘buying club’ that could “ramp up economies of scale and lower cost,” said Ethan Kapstein and Joshua Busby in their 2013 book, “AIDS Drugs for All.”
Ranbaxy was owned then by brothers Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, who had what Australian journalist Michael Smith calls a “
dodgy” reputation. The Singh brothers sold their interest in Ranbaxy to a Japanese firm in 2008. Daiichi Sankyo sued them for concealing information about their many lapses in quality control. An Indian court ordered the brothers to pay
Daiichi $385 million in damages.
Initially, Ranbaxy’s defective ARV drugs were distributed in four
African and about a dozen
Caribbean countries. Distribution of low cost generics manufactured in India was expanded to other developing countries after what became known as the Clinton Health Aids Initiative negotiated a deal with the UNITAID consortium. Established in 2006 by Britain, Brazil, Chile, France and Norway, UNITAID is financed chiefly by levies on airline tickets.
The World Health Organization had suspicions about Ranbaxy in 2004. A
whistleblower told the Food and Drug Administration in 2007 how the company fabricated data to win FDA approvals. The fraud was made public in a Justice Department filing in 2008.
In 2012, the Justice Department banned Ranbaxy from selling in the U.S. drugs manufactured at several Indian plants. A month after Mr. Clinton’s lavish praise for the firm, Ranbaxy pled guilty to criminal counts of selling adulterated drugs with intent to defraud.
“Who cares? It’s just blacks dying.” That’s how a senior Ranbaxy executive dismissed concerns expressed by other executives the company was manufacturing defective medicines, Fortune magazine reported in a lengthy expose that month (May 2013).
The whistleblower, Dinesh Thakur, said he tried to meet with Clinton Foundation officials, but they blew him off.
The Clinton Foundation’s “India success story” was an exercise in “
self-serving philanthropy,” concluded the Blackburn report. The Indian firms involved soared in value. Executives of these firms made donations to the Clinton Foundation, and there were “possible kickbacks in the form of million-dollar consulting contracts to President Clinton from the friend of convicted felon and Ranbaxy advocate Rajat Gupta,” the report said.
The Clinton Foundation may have skimmed tens of millions of dollars from UNITAID levies on airline tickets, Clinton Foundation financial reports suggest, said Charles Ortel, a financial analyst who discovered major discrepancies in General Electric’s financial reports. Between November 2006 and December 2008, UNITAID reported giving about $100 million more than CHAI reported receiving, he said.
When Australia agreed to donate to CHAI in 2006, the Clinton Foundation had just one staffer in the entire Asia-Pacific region, noted Australian journalist Michael Smith. Ruby Shang also was in charge of the Clinton Foundation’s climate change initiative in the region.
Clinton Foundation public disclosures are so bad no outsider can know for sure how much money it may have made from its AIDS initiative, Mr. Ortel caveated. But “
Bill and Hillary and their partners appear to have helped themselves to tens of millions of dollars donated to help the desperately poor,” he estimated.”
Re: The Qanon posts, and associated US political analysis
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks