You’ve gotta have principles. And when your principle is death, you gotta stand by it. Just ask Eli Lilly.
Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is looking to expand its Indiana-based headquarters outside the state in response to Indiana’s ban on most abortions.
“As a global company headquartered in Indianapolis for more than 145 years, we work hard to retain and attract thousands of people who are important drivers of our state’s economy. Given this new law, we will be forced to plan for more employment growth outside our home state,” the company said in a statement obtained by Fox News Digital on Sunday.
You can’t ask a company that is supposedly in the business of saving lives to stomach a bill banning murder.
But Eli Lilly has always been about life. Or death.
The top executive of Eli Lilly and Co. says he personally decided to launch Oraflex into the huge U.S. market in May 1982 despite seeing a new report relating the unexpected deaths of five elderly women in Northern Ireland to the new prescription arthritis medicine.
Chairman and chief executive officer Richard D. Wood said in a sworn statement that it was “entirely appropriate” to start sales two weeks later, as had been planned, because the “incomplete” report neither proved nor disproved that Oraflex had caused the deaths in Belfast.
The Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM), the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the FDA, banned the drug on Aug. 4, 1982, after a reported 61 benoxaprofen users had died, many from liver and kidney diseases (the U.K. toll is now 96). Hours later, Wood halted sales in the United States–where the reported deaths totaled 11 in August 1982 and 43 as of last month–and in the eight other nations where the drug was sold.
Wood said he stopped global sales not “from a scientific point of view” but only because adverse reactions to Oraflex had become a media event and “very politicized” by a House Government Operations subcommittee here and the British House of Commons. Oraflex is “still a very useful drug when used properly,” he said.
Stuff happens.
Eli Lilly & Co. pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal charges that it failed to tell the government about deaths and toxic reactions associated with its arthritis drug Oraflex, subsequently linked to dozens of fatalities in the United States.
The company, which also was charged with failure to label the drug with information describing its potential side effects, was fined $25,000.
Dr. William Ian Shedden, former vice president and chief medical officer of Lilly Research Laboratories, pleaded no contest to separate criminal charges and was fined $15,000.
But as long as the right to kill babies remain sacred.
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