Plagiarism & Big Pharma Payoffs - Just Another Day At Harvard University

Harvard University appears to already be having problems with their latest interim president after it was revealed that he has made millions of dollars while serving on the boards of several drug companies. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Harvard University appears to be already having problems with their latest interim president after it was revealed that he was paid millions of dollars while serving on the boards of several drug companies. Wow. What a deal this guy has, right? So he's making a salary as a professor at Harvard in a department where he's overseeing research, right? So Eli Lilly or whatever company calls him and says, hey, I hear you're working on some patents, right? I hear you're working on some things at Harvard that maybe we can get in and buy. Well, he has his Vertex and Exelixis. Those are the two companies he's looking out for. But he's on the board and he's paid $2.7 million to sit on the board. You know the problems. We've talked about the problems, what it means in a typical lawsuit. Go ahead and pick it up.

Yeah. What people have to understand why this is so bad is because these universities, especially Harvard, the most prestigious college in the country, that title of being a Harvard graduate carries a ton of weight across the planet. So what these drug companies do, or chemical companies, whoever it is, they go to these prestigious universities, they look at what they're doing, and they do one of two things. One, as you pointed out, they say, hey, you've got a lot of really good cancer research here. You're developing things that might fight off cancer. Uh, we wanna buy this. So could you sell this to us? So they use it as their R and D department without having to pay for it. And the second, well, the second thing is the most important. They then, when problems arise with that cancer drug or whatever it is, they say, hey, listen, we've got this paper we wrote that actually says, if you do it this way, everything's fine. No problems with the drug. It's your drug. Could you, I mean, just sign your name right here on the paper. We're good to go. We gotta send it to the FDA.

I don't want people to miss what you just said. The company writes the clinical data. Okay. They have these folks signing off on the clinical data. They didn't even write the article, but it appears in all these big journals with their name on it, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. And I'm always across the table from 'em. This is what I kinda specialize in, is cross-examining these cats. And if you look at their history, they're making so much money, they will say anything for a million dollars, anything. I don't think I've ever seen a situation where the conduct and causation is so overwhelming, the corporate type has caused clear harm to the consumer. And the clinical data shows it. The memos, the data, all the papers, all the transactions in the company show that that's the case.

But these cats, they show up at a deposition and say, oh, no, no, no, no. We can't know that Yaz is really killing women through, you know, through a whole host of problems. Or we can't be sure that Johnson & Johnson's baby powder is causing cervical cancer and we need more information. That's all they want 'em to do is come to trial, go to deposition, and say, we need more information. That is exactly what they're paid to do. And they're nothing but whores. They are whores for the pharmaceutical industry. And this guy opened that. But, I think the bigger story, Harvard's right now, I think in a bad way, I really do believe. This thing with Professor Gay, I just have not gotten my arms around it. I mean, here's the history that at least is being reported.

10 documents, clear plagiarism that the board took no action on. Now, that's before it really started heating up.