Read it on Salon
Join HULU, SEINFELD and SALON to celebrate Festivus!
Sponsored Post
Tuesday, Oct 30, 2012 11:45 AM UTC
Massachusetts Gov.-elect Mitt Romney at the Statehouse in Boston, Nov. 7, 2002. (Credit: AP/Steven Senne)
Romney’s lax regulation may have fueled meningitis outbreak
A meningitis epidemic that has killed 25 is linked to a Mass. company Romney's administration failed to regulate
Topics: Mitt Romney, Massachusetts, meningitis, Deregulation, News, Politics News
Massachusetts Gov.-elect Mitt Romney at the Statehouse in Boston, Nov. 7, 2002. (Credit: AP/Steven Senne)The fatal meningitis epidemic sweeping the United States can now be traced to the failure of then-Gov. Mitt Romney to adequately regulate the Massachusetts pharmaceutical company that is being blamed for the deaths.
At least 344 people in 18 states have been infected by the growing public health crisis and 25 have died so far.
But the epidemic may also play a role in the presidential campaign, now that state records reveal that a Massachusetts regulatory agency found that the New England Compounding Co., the pharmaceutical company tied to the epidemic, repeatedly failed to meet accepted standards in 2004 — but a reprimand was withdrawn by the Romney administration in apparent deference to the company’s business interests.
“It goes all the way up to Mitt Romney,” said Alyson Oliver, a Michigan attorney representing victims of the outbreak. According to Oliver, on at least six occasions, NECC was cited by authorities for failure to meet regulatory standards and almost subjected to a three-year probation. “It goes directly to the heart of what Romney says about regulation, ‘Hands off. Let the companies do their thing.’”
“When the person who is supposed to be in charge of oversight does not believe oversight is necessary, this is what happens,” Oliver added.
“The philosophy of the Romney administration was to have lax regulations across the board,” Philip Johnston, a former secretary of health and human services in Massachusetts before the Romney administration, told Salon. “It speaks volumes about the tragic outcome of Romney’s view on regulatory issues. There are two dozen people who died needlessly. It was clearly the responsibility of the company to protect them, but it was also the responsibility of the government at various levels, and, as far as I’m concerned, they failed.”
On Oct. 28, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., called for “a full investigation” into the regulatory issues that led to the epidemic. “There’s a regulatory black hole here,” he said, “but the full assessment of responsibility, state to federal, is ongoing. We need to know everything.”
The owners of NECC have made campaign donations both to Romney and to Massachusetts Republican senatorial candidate Scott Brown, Salon has learned.
The victims in the epidemic all received shots of methylprednisolone acetate, a steroid compound often used to alleviate back pain, but which was tainted with a fungus that caused meningitis, an inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord.
According to CBS News, federal authorities announced they had matched a fungus responsible for the epidemic with more than 50 unopened vials of the drug sent out by New England Compounding Center, a Framingham, Mass., pharmaceutical company that has been identified as the source of contaminated drugs. Over 17,000 vials of the tainted drugs linked to the epidemic have been shipped to 76 different facilities throughout the country.
On Tuesday, Oct. 23, state authorities said they would open a criminal investigation and move to revoke NECC’s license after finding that the pharmaceutical firm did not test lab equipment properly, failed to sterilize medications and repeatedly shipped orders for the drug without confirming that the lots had been sterilized.
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Department of Health released documents dating back more than a decade that revealed a series of regulatory citations involving NECC.
In 2002, the Food and Drug Administration filed a confidential report alleging that two patients had suffered “adverse effects” after injections of an NECC compounded betamethasone repository, a steroid that is different from the one under scrutiny in the current epidemic. A few months earlier, New York resident William Koch became ill with bacterial meningitis after receiving injections of the steroid. According to an AP report, NECC settled a lawsuit in the case after he died in 2004.
Most Read
Comments
0 Comments