After September 11

1. 2007May 10, 2007Health, Food & Regulators

   Purdue pleads guilty to misbranding OxyContin

   $634.5 million; no prison; sales continue.

   Source: The Purdue Frederick Company, Inc. and Top Executives Plead Guilty to Misbranding OxyContin; Will Pay Over $600 MillionRead the full story →
2. 2009February 6, 2009Health, Food & Regulators

   Gates: our foundation first started up focused on reproductive health; population growth the biggest problem

   And that the way to slow it is to keep children alive.

   Source: Bill Gates' Q&A with Chris Anderson: Video unveiled (transcript)Read the full story →
3. September 2, 2009Health, Food & Regulators

   Pfizer pays $2.3 billion; a subsidiary pleads guilty; the largest criminal fine in U.S. history

   For selling Bextra for uses the FDA had refused.

   Source: Justice Department Announces Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its HistoryRead the full story →
4. 2010February 18, 2010Health, Food & Regulators

   Gates at TED: 6.8 billion people, lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent

   The next sentence: but there, we see an increase of about 1.3.

   Source: Innovating to zero! (transcript)Read the full story →
5. 2010Health, Food & Regulators

   Heart disease and Parkinson's added to the Agent Orange list

   Nearly forty years after the last flight.

   Source: Veterans Exposed to Agent Orange: Legislative History, Litigation, and Current Issues (R43790)Read the full story →
6. October 1, 2010Health, Food & Regulators

   Two cabinet secretaries apologize for the Guatemala experiments; Obama calls Guatemala's president

   We are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health.

   Source: Joint Statement by Secretaries Clinton and Sebelius on a 1946-1948 StudyRead the full story →
7. December 2, 2010Health, Food & Regulators

   Decade of Vaccines council: Chan, Fauci, Lake, Phumaphi, Yamada

   A federal official and a private foundation set the agenda together.

   Source: Global Health Leaders Launch Decade of Vaccines CollaborationRead the full story →
8. 2011September 13, 2011Health, Food & Regulators

   Presidential commission: gross violations of ethics, known to the researchers at the time

   The men thought that they were above the rules.

   Source: Ethically Impossible: STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948Read the full story →
9. 2012June 13, 2012Health, Food & Regulators

   Court dismisses the victims' suit: the United States is immune

   This Court is powerless to provide any redress to the plaintiffs.

   Source: Garcia v. Sebelius, Memorandum Opinion (Walton, J.)Read the full story →
10. August 7, 2012Health, Food & Regulators

    Pfizer settles bribery charges in eight countries for about $60 million

    Points and bonus programs for foreign officials.

    Source: SEC Charges Pfizer with FCPA ViolationsRead the full story →

Stories (3)

• 1995 to 2026Purdue Pharma, the FDA's OxyContin Label, DEA Production Quotas, and 806,000 Opioid DeathsIn 1995 the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin with a label saying its slow release was believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug, a claim the agency later admitted it had no data for. The company pleaded guilty in 2007 to marketing it as less addictive than it was, and again in 2020 to defrauding the government and paying kickbacks. Between 2002 and 2013 the Drug Enforcement Administration raised the amount of oxycodone that could legally be made in the country by more than 400 percent while the deaths rose, and did not cut it until 2017. About 806,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2023. In April 2026 a federal judge, sentencing the company, told the victims that their government had failed them.Health, Food & Regulators
• 1999 to 2026Bill Gates on Population, Vaccine Funding, BioNTech Stock, and the World Health OrganizationFive widely circulated clips of Bill and Melinda Gates speaking about population growth, set beside the full recordings they were cut from. The 6.8 billion sentence is from a 2010 talk on carbon dioxide, and the next sentence in the recording is that population still goes up. The institute the narrator calls the Institute for Population Control is the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins, founded in 1999 with $20 million, and its founding director was Laurie Zabin, not Dr. Zaven. What is true is that Gates did say his foundation began with reproductive health because he thought population growth was the biggest problem poor countries face, that he did say the death panel line, and that his foundation has put $4.1 billion into Gavi, more into the World Health Organization in 2024 and 2025 than the United States government, $560 million into contraception, $55 million into BioNTech the year before the pandemic, and a $1 per dose deal with Pfizer.Health, Food & Regulators
• 1946 to 2024The 1946–1948 US Public Health Service Experiments That Deliberately Infected 1,308 Guatemalans with SyphilisFrom 1946 to 1948 the United States Public Health Service, paid for in part by a grant from the National Institute of Health and run under the Surgeon General, deliberately infected people in Guatemala with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid to study the diseases. A 2011 presidential commission, working from the lead doctor's own records, found that 1,308 prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients were intentionally exposed, that only 678 were documented as receiving any treatment, and that at least 83 subjects died, though the records do not settle whether the experiments killed them. The government kept the work quiet at the time and it stayed hidden until a historian found the papers in a university archive. In 2010 the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Health and Human Services apologized and the President telephoned Guatemala's president to do the same. The courts held the government immune and the private defendants not liable. No compensation ever reached the subjects or their families.Health, Food & Regulators