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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19095

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Woodhead M
Health groups revealed as major political donors
6minutes.com 2011 Feb 9
http://www.6minutes.com.au/news/health-groups-revealed-as-major-political-donors


Full text:

Pharma companies, Big Tobacco and GP Super Clinic operators are some of the major donors to Australia’s political parties, figures from the Australian Electoral Commission show.

The figures just released for 2009-2010 show that the Australian Labor Party received major contributions from pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer ($28,600) Sanofi Aventis ($20,000) and vaccine manufacturer CSL ($4400) as well as donations from the pharma industry lobby group Medicines Australia. Labor also received generous financial support from health groups such as the Pharmacy Guild ($17,556), the Health Services Union ($29,556) and from health insurance companies such as Medibank Private and BUPA.

The AEC figures also show that Labor received donations from private companies that provide services to the Department of Health and Ageing, such as $12,500 from McKesson Asia Pacific, which operates the healthdirect nurse phone triage service and other health hotlines on behalf of the government. The rural medical centre operator Ochre Health, which was selected to develop the Grafton GP Super Clinic gave $15,000 to the ALP.

In contrast, the Liberals and Nationals are revealed as being recipients of substantial donations from the tobacco industry, with the Liberals accepting almost $20,000 from British American Tobacco and the Nationals accepting almost $17,000 from Philip Morris. However, these donations were dwarfed by the generosity of Primary Care’s boss Edmund Bateman, who proved to be one of the Liberal party’s most substantial private supporters with a donation of $200,000.

The Greens appeared to have no major health donors.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909