MB Comment: This is a revealing article by the NY Times that goes into great detail about how the FDA used electronic surveillance on its own employees who were struggling to disclose to Congress how corrupt their employer was with regard to dangerous medical device approvals.
The FDA has the cart before the horse. It reports to Congress, not the other way around. Senator Charles E. Grassley, who has done a great job disclosing government health scandals says: “the F.D.A. is discouraging whistle-blowers.” and they “have absolutely no business reading the private e-mails of their employees. They think they can be the Gestapo and do anything they want.”
The NY Times found out about this because some FDA subcontractor nitwit posted all the files to the internet. The FDA isn’t only like the Gestapo, it’s also incompetent, heavy handed and clumsy. If they blew their own top secret, illegal investigation – what do you think they are doing with vaccine safety decisions?
Read this article carefully and get the point about General Electric (medical device maker) instigating this whole travesty of justice. GE is controlling its regulator – the FDA? We live in a society where the corporations control the government. It’s called crony capitalism and the medical system is polluted by it.
The FDA is at the center of the US vaccine scandal. They license vaccines for pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Glaxo, which do their own safety and efficacy studies using other vaccines or toxic adjuvants. Merck and Glaxo are both in the news for criminal fraud and falsified product data.
Wake up people, government agencies are pawns for corporations that couldn’t care less if you are injured or killed by their defective products, including vaccines.
***************************************************************************************
F.D.A. Surveillance of Scientists Spread to Outside Critics – NYTimes.com
July 14, 2012
‘Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency …
the F.D.A. program may have crossed legal lines by grabbing and analyzing confidential information that is specifically protected under the law, including attorney-client communications, whistle-blower complaints to Congress and workplace grievances filed with the government.
Other administration officials were so concerned to learn of the F.D.A. operation that the White House Office of Management and Budget sent a governmentwide memo last month emphasizing that while the internal monitoring of employee communications was allowed, it could not be used under the law to intimidate whistle-blowers. Any monitoring must be done in ways that “do not interfere with or chill employees’ use of appropriate channels to disclose wrongdoing,” the memo said …
Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican whose former staff member’s e-mails were cataloged in the surveillance database, said that “the F.D.A. is discouraging whistle-blowers.” He added that agency officials “have absolutely no business reading the private e-mails of their employees. They think they can be the Gestapo and do anything they want.” …
Lawyers for GE Healthcare charged that the 2010 article in The Times — written by Gardiner Harris, who would be placed first on the surveillance program’s list of “media outlet actors” — included proprietary information about their imaging devices that may have been improperly leaked by F.D.A. employees …
While the surveillance was intended to protect trade secrets for companies like G.E., it may have done just the opposite. The data posted publicly by the F.D.A. contractor — and taken down late Friday after inquiries by The Times — includes hundreds of confidential documents on the design of imaging devices and other detailed, proprietary information.’