With the strict regulation on pharmaceuticals that the Food and Drug Administration enforces, an observer would assume that one of the biggest companies in the business, GlaxoSmithKline, would never be under scrutiny for unethical practices. Unfortunately, this producer of everyday drugs and products does not have such a squeaky clean record. GlaxoSmithKline has come under fire since the mid-nineties for their unethical medical trials and questionable human experimentation practices. GlaxoSmithKline’s troubles began in 1994, when news emerged that the pharmaceutical giant had sponsored at least four experiments on the children from a New York care home that specialized in treating HIV/AIDS sufferers. The children in this home were born to
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This is worrisome because fees, if paid to the patient for risk or time, would go straight to the care home, creating a possible conflict of interest. The documents seized by the city health department showed that the experiments run by GlaxoSmithKline were set up to test the safety, tolerance, and toxicity of HIV/AIDS medications, including those with dangerous side effects like AZT. In 1997, GlaxoSmithKline co-sponsored a Herpes drug trial at the very same care facility, and a third experiment with Pfizer to investigate ‘long term safety’ of multiple antibiotics on three month olds. In 2007, the Argentinian laboratories of Glaxo were fined almost $28,000 for irregularities found in lab vaccine trials which resulted in the deaths of fourteen infants. The charges …show more content…
Health campaigners and the Alliance for Human Research protection have urged the Food and Drug Administration and New York Child Services to investigate and fully disclose the information of the trial with no avail. An observer has no choice but to wonder if the benefits outweigh the potential harmful side effects in these cases. However, in the Argentinian studies, both the company and the doctors involved were fined heavily. These doctors broke all protocol by taking advantage of underprivileged families. Families involve claim that those who wanted to leave the study were forced to stay; they threatened the families with refusing to administer any other vaccines to the children. GlaxoSmithKline also claims that the infant deaths resulting from the study were not the responsibility of the company as they had allegedly received placebos. After all of this, none of the doctors lost their licenses and the laboratory still exists in Argentina
This is worrisome because fees, if paid to the patient for risk or time, would go straight to the care home, creating a possible conflict of interest. The documents seized by the city health department showed that the experiments run by GlaxoSmithKline were set up to test the safety, tolerance, and toxicity of HIV/AIDS medications, including those with dangerous side effects like AZT. In 1997, GlaxoSmithKline co-sponsored a Herpes drug trial at the very same care facility, and a third experiment with Pfizer to investigate ‘long term safety’ of multiple antibiotics on three month olds. In 2007, the Argentinian laboratories of Glaxo were fined almost $28,000 for irregularities found in lab vaccine trials which resulted in the deaths of fourteen infants. The charges …show more content…
Health campaigners and the Alliance for Human Research protection have urged the Food and Drug Administration and New York Child Services to investigate and fully disclose the information of the trial with no avail. An observer has no choice but to wonder if the benefits outweigh the potential harmful side effects in these cases. However, in the Argentinian studies, both the company and the doctors involved were fined heavily. These doctors broke all protocol by taking advantage of underprivileged families. Families involve claim that those who wanted to leave the study were forced to stay; they threatened the families with refusing to administer any other vaccines to the children. GlaxoSmithKline also claims that the infant deaths resulting from the study were not the responsibility of the company as they had allegedly received placebos. After all of this, none of the doctors lost their licenses and the laboratory still exists in Argentina