Archive for the 'Whistleblower' Category

Morality, Courage & SSI Membership

SSI recently received this email from someone who identified himself as a physician and wants to refer SPR victims to Semmelweis:

Please post this to everyone involved in this running feud. I used SSI when I was having my career ruined. Now I don’t know where to send fellow health care providers to when they are getting their lives ruined in a sham peer review. All the clinics and hospitals will use your fued (SIC) against you in court and discerdit (SIC) SSI. Shame on all of you for what you are doing. Both sides of this SSI fued (SIC).

Dear Doctor:

SSI believes that your question is important. As requested, we have posted your email and this response on our website.

If you are mugged and you defend yourself, the casual observer might conclude that you and your mugger are equally and shamefully immoral. Reasonable people know, however, that your morality is not based upon the pedestrian’s casual observations. By raising the specter of shame, you are either profoundly misinformed or are practicing the intellectually lazy doctrine of Relativism. If either is the case, I encourage you to join Dr. Murtagh’s cohorts.

If you read my preliminary investigation and my ongoing investigation you’ll see that “the dispute” began in May 2008 when ex-SSI members James Murtagh and Kevin Kuritzky issued outrageous allegations against UC Professor Peter Duesberg and investigative journalist Celia Farber, with the intent to compel the SSI Board to summarily rescind their 2008 awards without review.

Their complaint called for a competent independent investigation because, if false, their libelous allegations could have professionally harmed both (per se libel) and would have unnecessarily subjected Semmelweis and its Board to unnecessary liability.

As a retired member of the LAPD and licensed investigator who had not heard of the issues, disputants or SSI before 2008, no one was better suited to examine the charges. As soon as I began my investigation however, Murtagh’s camp tried to pressure me into stopping it – going as far as criminal attacks and witness intimidation.

My continuing investigation eventually developed sufficient evidence for this New York Supreme Court lawsuit against and Murtagh and Kuritzky, who are still hiding from process servers. Their co-defendant receives, directly and indirectly, millions of dollars in funding from pharmaceutical and mining companies (and their investors) that avoid billions of dollars in liability by blaming their impoverished black African miners’ silicosis, asbestosis and tuberculosis on “irresponsible sex” (e.g. AIDS). Murtagh, his co-defendants, hedge fund operators, pharmaceutical companies, international mining companies and the UN promote the scam as a “human rights” issue in order to sack Africa’s rich mineral wealth while attacking individuals like Farber and Duesberg who question the arrangement.  Without AIDS, thousands of international mining operations in Africa would close - as they almost did in 1995.

So outrageous were Murtagh’s charges that even his collaborators recently distanced themselves - calling him morally repugnant.

If Murtagh’s allegations against Farber and Duesberg were true, he would enthusiastically respond to the civil charges against him - just as SSI did after Ralph Bard filed his frivolous lawsuit against SSI last December. Because of our fact-based response, Bard’s own neighborhood court will soon dismiss his complaints.

So as you can see, the two sides consist of 1) the current board and membership, and 2) “Murtagh’s camp” which libelously tried to rescind the 2008 awards to Duesberg and Farber without evidence – in what anathematically resembles “sham peer review.”

If you read my bio and investigation you’ll see that I have better things to do than keep the peace between SSI and a tiny group of socially dysfunctional ex-doctors.  But as a victim of retaliation myself, I never targeted others for personal gain. Murtagh’s camp demonstrates that not all peer review are shams: Their behavior only serves to corroborate whatever allegations were once made against them.

My year-long examination concludes that SSI, its membership, mission and goals are too important to turn over to alleged men who attacked SSI on behalf of individuals like Murtagh and Kuritzky.

What also appears to animate Murtagh’s camp is SSI’s refusal to advertise legal services by ex-doctors. The SSI Board stopped this practice last year when they sensed that SSI’s former ex-doctor-lawyer board members were exploited SSI’s website, name and members for personal gain.

Since those lawyers were removed from Board influence last year, SSI has assisted more than a dozen physicians and nurses with free legal consultation and affirmative defense that has saved their careers at a minimum cost.

Because of the complications of HCQIA and peer review, SSI no longer promotes the use of career doctors who become lawyers for the same reason that we would not encourage surgery by a career lawyer who becomes a surgeon. When it comes to peer review cases, experience matters.

If you’re still confused about what you’ve called our shameful dispute, SSI probably isn’t for you. Our mission and goals are too important to waste time with Murtagh cohorts or those who are easily confused by them: Nor do we waste much time thinking about them. Like other benign pathologies, they will eventually slough off or find softer targets.

As a former US Marine and LA cop, I am proud that the SSI Board stood strong in the face of Murtagh and his enablers. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis knew that courage often exacts a terrible price.  Of courage, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression that the loss of courage extends to the entire society.

SSI membership is not for the morally confused or ambivalent. While it takes courage and endurance to fight corrupt multi-billion dollar healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, it would take comparatively little effort to accept the material benefits that would come by surrendering to them in the name of patient safety and Semmelweis.

As long as there are some healthcare professionals who take their Hippocratic Oath seriously, I am proud to remain in that fight.

Clark Baker
Secretary/Treasurer
Semmelweis Society International

Published
by
admin
on June 26, 2009
in Clark Baker, Corruption, Healthcare, Hospital, Opinion, Pharmaceutical, Political, Sham Peer Review and Whistleblower
. 1 Comment

SSI Award Recipient Files Defamation Suit

The New York Post reports that investigative reporter Celia Farber has filed suit this week against Atlanta physician James Murtagh MD, former medical student Kevin Kuritzky, and Richard Jefferys for libel and defamation:

Farber’s lawyers filed a 21-page libel complaint this week in Manhattan Supreme Court accusing Richard Jefferys, of the Treatment Action Group, of orchestrating a campaign against her last May when she was given the Semmelweis Clean Hands Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for an article she wrote in Harper’s in 2006, “AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science.”

The Harpers article gave credence to the work of Peter Duesberg, who believes HIV is a harmless “passenger” virus and not the cause of AIDS, and questioned the value of expensive antiretroviral drugs. Jefferys and his team blitzed the Semmelweis Society with e-mails claiming Farber had altered quotes and falsely misrepresented scientific papers.

The Semmelweis Society, in turn, launched its own investigation and concluded the AIDS industry itself has all the characteristics of a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise that desperately needed whistleblowers.

Filed in the New York Supreme Court, Farber’s lawsuit gives the pharmaceutical industry their first opportunity to prove 20 years of allegations by applying rules of evidence before a real jury – a significant departure from their preferred methods that have relied on rhetorical blogs and highly paid pharmaceutical activists.

When Farber began reporting on HIV and AIDs in 1989, she was attacked in much the same way that the tobacco industry attacked Jeffrey Wigand PhD for disclosing its own corporate secrets.

With annual sales estimated between $500 billion and $1 trillion annually the pharmaceutical industry funds, directly and indirectly, an army of salesmen and attackers who target individuals they view as threats. In this email, Cornell researcher John P. Moore PhD warned:

This IS a war, there ARE no rules, and we WILL crush you, one at a time, completely and utterly (at least the more influential ones; foot-soldiers like you aren’t worth bothering with).

In a recent email to House of Numbers filmmaker Brent Leung, Moore promised to destroy Leung’s career just as he had destroyed Celia Farber.

Corruption is rampant throughout the pharmaceutical industry. Recently, Texas psychiatrist Karen Wagner was accused of disclosing $600 of the $160,000 she received from GlaxoSmithKline while ghostwriting a pediatric study that “helped the company promote the myth that Paxil was ‘safe and effective’ for use in children…” At the same time, “internal Glaxo emails show the data from pediatric Paxil trials were negative.”

Of 93 adolescents taking Paxil in the study, six had a suicide event (five attempted suicide), whereas one of the 89 adolescents on placebo had a suicide event. The suicide risk ratio for adolescents exposed to Paxil in the study was six times greater than those on placebo.

In Gallo’s Egg and later reports, Clark Baker described how the alleged co-discoverer of HIV, Robert Gallo, had failed to blame retroviruses for human leukemia (1975) and T-cell leukemia (1980) before blaming the alleged leukemia virus HTLV-1 on AIDS (1983-1984). When his research assistant found no connection between the alleged retrovirus and AIDS, Dr. Gallo scribbled over the report and published these in Science, (1, 2, 3, 4), completely circumventing the scientific peer review process. By the time Gallo’s scientific misconduct was confirmed in 1993, billions of tax dollars had been redirected from legitimate diseases to fight Dr. Gallo’s unproven virus.

When in this 2005 report, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) identified 1) heart disease, 2) stroke, 3) cancer, 4) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 5) accidents, and 6) diabetes as the leading causes of death in the United States from 1970-2002, HIV and AIDS were not even mentioned.

According to the Fair Foundation, the NIH spends $206,906 per AIDS death in this country, while it spends only $13,365 per Diabetes death, $12,000 per prostate disease, $9,000 for Parkinson’s disease and $9,000 for Alzheimer’s disease.

If Miss Farber was the dangerous reporter the defendants made her out to be, one wonders why the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t brought their complaints to court before, and why operatives like Seth Kalichman are now recoiling like vampires at dawn. Kalichman’s employer relies on millions of dollars to study South Africa’s virtually non-existent HIV mortality. (The South African Government removed the original link shortly after the US Congress sent another $50 billion to Africa – more here).

To be fair, Kalichman’s attacks against Farber are completely understandable. Having arrested thousands of felons during my career in law enforcement I understand, as well as Bernie Madoff, the awkwardness of being caught promoting a fraud. Like the tobacco operatives who badgered, threatened, and ridiculed Jeffrey Wigand PhD, the pharmaceutical industry has never had a problem finding people like Seth Kalichman, Murtagh, Kuritzky, Moore, or Jefferys to attack corporate threats like Farber, Peter Duesberg, and anyone else who threatens their arrangement.

Like the HIV/AIDS scandal, Bernie Madoff succeeded not because he was a masterful fraudster, but because the SEC and FBI failed to respond to repeated credible allegations that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

For decades, the tobacco industry deliberately misled millions of people around the world because politicians won elections with tobacco money. Like tobacco, Washington politicians are reluctant to challenge the makers of HIV drugs because 1) many rely on pharmaceutical campaign contributions and 2) those who question HIV/AIDS are usually accused of being anti-gay.

The two most targeted groups for HIV testing and “treatment” (homosexuals and blacks) are also among the most silent. One cannot count the number of full-page glossy HIV testing and treatment ads in America’s leading gay publicans without appreciating how the gay movement is funded in America.

Despite the tragic death of Joyce Ann Hafford, the black community is still heavily targeted. Last year, Abbott Labs paid Magic Johnson $60 million to push HIV testing in that community. Apparently no one has noticed that AIDS only kills people who are subjected to HIV testing and treatment. Because of the toxic nature of “black box” HIV drugs, one wonders if Magic Johnson even takes them.

As for Murtagh, Kuritzky, and Jefferys, their only defense is to prove that Celia Farber is the monster they say she is. After two decades of allegations, one would think that they could come up with some verifiable evidence.

Shortly after issuing his report, the SSI Board unanimously appointed Baker to its Board where he still serves. 

Earlier this week, Baker traveled to Visalia CA where he assisted attorneys Jeff Grass, Alan Ullberg, and SSI Vice President Saundra Counce RN, in their successful defense of SSI member Lyle Grittith, MD.

Courthouse News also weighs in.  Developing…

Published
by
admin
on May 9, 2009
in Corruption, HIV/AIDS, Pharmaceutical and Whistleblower
. 0 Comments

Mileikowsky Named as Healthcare Leader

The founder and president of the Alliance for Patient Safety and dedicated SSI member was showcased this week for his work in healthcare reform.  Healthcare Leaders Media is “dedicated to meeting the business information needs of healthcare executives and professionals.” 
Whistleblowers often pay a high price for exposing flaws in the healthcare system. Like a lot of physicians who have been in his situation, Gil Mileikowsky, MD, essentially lost his livelihood. It started in 2000 when he was approached by a lawyer representing a patient whose Fallopian tubes were removed without consent. He hadn’t heard of the case, even though it happened in his own department, and he began to suspect that other patient safety incidents weren’t being reviewed through the proper channels. He agreed to serve as an expert witness against Tarzana Regional Medical Center, a joint venture of HCA and Tenet HealthSystem, and four days later the hospital CEO informed him that he would be escorted by security while on hospital grounds. A few months later he was suspended.
That was just the beginning of a long legal battle that is still ongoing. The American Medical Association, the California Medical Association, and other physician and consumer organizations—including a partnership between doctors and trial lawyers spearheaded by attorney Alan Dershowitz—filed amicus briefs on Mileikowsky’s behalf. For many of his supporters, the central issue is peer review and whether hospitals should have authority to remove a physician without due process. His case recently led to a new California law that extends whistleblower protection to all physicians, and he has campaigned for similar protections on the federal level.
But in Mileikowsky’s eyes, he is locked in a much grander struggle to improve the quality of the healthcare system. He founded the Alliance for Patient Safety to document his case and push for safety reforms, and he has developed what he believes is a solution to poor quality control—a “black box” for physicians. Hospital errors should be reviewed in double-blind studies by randomly selected specialists to remove bias or potential conflict of interest, he argues. Although he never intended to become a whistleblower, he says his goal is now to expose flaws in the entire system, not just one hospital.
Whistleblowers like Mileikowsky play an important role in an industry that is often unsuccessful at policing itself; they now initiate nine out of 10 fraud cases for the Department of Justice. Although in some situations they stand to receive up to 25% of any amount recovered, that wasn’t the case for Mileikowsky. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I want to become a whistleblower,’” he says. “A whistleblower is just someone who tries to sound the alarm about a wrong situation.

(more here)

Published
by
admin
on March 23, 2009
in Reform, Retaliation, Sham Peer Review and Whistleblower
. 0 Comments

GAP Hosts National Whistleblower Events

(Washington) – As part of the National Whistleblower Assembly conference currently underway, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) will host a panel discussion on Capitol Hill examining the past, current, and future state of the controversy surrounding the warrantless wiretapping scandal.   

Further information about the panel and Whistleblower events can be found in this press release and the GAP website.

Published
by
admin
on March 10, 2009
in Administrative, Washington DC and Whistleblower
. 0 Comments

Stimulus Agreement Fails to Protect Federal Workers

(Washington, D.C) – The Government Accountability Project (GAP) today praised congressional negotiators for passing 2009’s first major whistleblower rights law as part of the $790 billion stimulus spending bill. The final stimulus package includes “best practices” anti-retaliation rights for any workers at recipients of the new federal spending. This includes contractors, grantees, and state and local government employees who work in programs that receive stimulus funding.
 
However, GAP expressed deep frustration at the conferees’ failure to extend whistleblower rights to federal government workers, who are best positioned to keep the spending honest. Senate conferees rejected a key, bi-partisan accountability provision, sponsored by Representatives Chris Van Hollen (D-Md) and Todd Platts (R-Pa), which the House had adopted without dissent.  The Platts/Van Hollen amendment is a much needed overhaul of the federal employee Whistleblower Protection Act. That whistleblower legislation had been approved overwhelmingly by the House in 2007 as well.
 
GAP Legal Director Tom Devine emphasized, “It is not too late for accountability. After nearly ten years of hearings and votes, there is no excuse to spend nearly a trillion dollars without safe passage for federal employees who risk their careers to keep it honest. Congress has more than enough time, though, to finish locking in best practice rights for federal whistleblowers before the money starts getting spent in 120 days. The politicians owe it to the taxpayers.”
 
By contrast, the final stimulus package includes state-of-the-art whistleblower rights for any recipients of the unprecedented spending. GAP Legislative Representative Adam Miles explained, “The stimulus law is a ‘best practices’ blueprint for modern contractor whistleblower rights. This accountability breakthrough for the taxpayers is the result of tireless efforts by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo) and her staff. The Senator wisely recognized that the best means of protecting the taxpayers is to ensure that employees can speak out about waste, fraud and abuse in stimulus spending without fear of retaliation.”
 
The new law offers protection enforced by jury trials for contractor and state or local employees who challenge fraud, waste and abuse. The conferees did not address, however, the issue of state sovereign immunity, which means that the right to a jury trial in federal court by a state employee is uncertain at best.
 
The Government Accountability Project is the nation’s leading whistleblower protection organization. Through litigating whistleblower cases, publicizing concerns and developing legal reforms, GAP’s mission is to protect the public interest by promoting government and corporate accountability. Founded in 1977, GAP is a non-profit, non-partisan advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. 
 
Dylan Blaylock
Communications Director, Government Accountability Project
202.408.0034 ext. 137; 202.236.3733 (cell)
1612 K. St, #1100   Washington , D.C. 20006
 
Interested in signing up for a daily GAP and whistleblower-focused news roundup? Email
Dylan Blaylock with the subject line “Subscribe” today!

Published
by
admin
on February 13, 2009
in Corruption, Washington DC and Whistleblower
. 0 Comments