A conservative group called RightChange is running ads attacking Barack Obama, including a new one showing the World Trade Center attack and predicts a security crisis is on the way. And a good chunk of the group's comes from Fred Eshelman, who is ceo of PPD, the contract research organiztaion that is otherwise known as Pharmaceutical Product Development, according to The Carrboro Citizen.
Eshelman has donated large sums of money elsewhere. Earlier this year, he donated more than $30 million to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, which promptly named its school of pharmacy for him. And here's another PPD chairman Ernest Mario, who has a pharmacy school at Rutgers University named after him, donated $1 million to RightChange, according to SourceWatch.
Eshelman, you may recall, testified last February before the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, which was investigating FDA approval of the Sanofi-Aventis Ketek antibiotic, which caused liver problems, despite being based on fraudulent research. PPD supervised a doctor who worked on the Ketek clinical trial but was later sent to jail for submitting false data.
PPD, which was reportedly paid $20 million to run the trial, discovered the problem during an audit in 2002, but disavowed responsibility to directly alert the FDA, which approved the drug two years later (back story). Eshelman told the committee that a dispute over confidentiality with Sanofi prevented the FDA from being informed.
You can watch Eshelman's testimony here and the RightChange ad below...
Thanks to the WSJ Health blog