Big Pharma Front Group Touts Carper’s Loyal Service to the Industry

The beleaguered US Postal Service brought me a mailer yesterday from something billing itself the American Life Sciences Innovation Council announcing that Sen. Tom Carper has received “the 2020 Champion of Health Care Innovation Award.”

I found this puzzling, given that Carper just won re-election in 2018, and wondered what this outfit was and why it would bother. I still can’t answer the second question, but the mailer itself answered part of the first — it’s an obvious Big Pharma political front. This 2018 article about the organization lays out the damning details.

The mailer never explains what Carper has done to earn this award, other than claiming he has “led the fight for new vaccines and cures,” without offering any evidence or explanation of how he has led that fight. He’s also “fighting to protect innovation and make drugs more affordable,” a claim that’s an obvious lie considering what the group says about drug prices in Europe: “Some in Washington are playing politics by importing Europe’s failed Socialist [note the use of a scare-capital letter] policies to set prescription drug prices for seniors.” These “failed policies,” it should be noted, have produced prescription drug prices that are lower in every European country than they are in the United States.

So what could this phony organization be talking about? Carper “is leading the fight against radical policy changes,” a claim again made without supporting evidence. But the message isn’t hard to figure out: He’s doing Big Pharma’s bidding. This might have made sense 20 years ago, when DuPont was still trying to get its foot in the pharmaceutical door and AstraZeneca was still a major player. Now it’s clearly not about protecting jobs in Delaware, because there are practically no pharmaceutical jobs left in the state. Now it’s just about sucking up campaign contributions from the industry, which runs behind only the insurance and banking industries in subsidizing Carper’s campaigns. Carper, in turn, has served the industry well.

Again, this would make more sense if Carper were actually running for office, but I would like to thank this bogus organization for reminding me that all Tom Carper’s “fighting” has been to protect Delaware’s special interests at the expense of its citizens.