Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Rick Perry isn’t the only one getting pharmaceutical donations

pilldollars.jpgRepublican presidential candidate Rick Perry has not received his vaccination against controversy. At a debate earlier this week, the presidential-hopeful Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachman criticized the Texas governor’s 2007 mandate requiring all 12-year old girls to receive Merck’s Gardasil vaccine against the cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV). Among a list of reasons, she accused Perry of signing the mandate to please a campaign contributor — the vaccine’s maker, New Jersey-based Merck. Since 2000, Merck has donated nearly $30,000 to Perry, according to the Texas Tribune, and Perry’s former chief-of-staff used to lobby for the drugmaker.

But let’s be fair, here: Rick Perry isn’t the only one receiving political donations from pharmaceutical companies. Bachmann herself has received nearly $150,000 from pharma over the course of her career, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The pharmaceutical industry contributed more than $30 million to political causes during the 2010 election cycle alone, according to data compiled by Washington, DC’s Center for Responsive Politics. Pfizer, based in New York, tops the list of contributors, giving more than $1.6 million during the 2010 election cycle, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, and topping $475,000 for this year alone.

However, these figures are not necessarily complete. Corporations are only required to disclose those donations that go directly to campaigns or lobbyists; contributions to trade associations or interest groups can remain secret. To encourage greater transparency, New York City’s Baruch College released the Baruch Index of Corporate Political Disclosure yesterday, ranking S&P’s leading 100 public companies on a scale from ‘transparent’ to ‘opaque’. The report judged companies on how much and what type of information about political donations they disclose, their contribution policies and how easy it is to find the relevant information on their websites.

As a group, pharmaceutical firms were amongst the most transparent companies, and mega-contributor Pfizer was one of only seven companies rated ‘most transparent.’

“For pharmaceutical companies, reputation is important because they really are consumer companies: they have more interaction with the public,” says Bruce Freed, president and founder of the Center for Political Accountability in Washington, DC. “They recognize that keeping donations mysterious can create problems because it’s something that the public is very sensitive to.”

While the Baruch Report gave Pfizer, Amgen and Merck high transparency ratings, not all pharmaceutical companies fared so well. Notably, Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories was on the low end, in the bracket just above ‘opaque.’ Abbott donated over $1.1 million to campaigns for the 2010 cycle. Additionally, drug distributors CVS and Walgreens were both categorized as ‘opaque.’

The Center for Political Accountability will release its own disclosure report at the end of October, and Freed says the rankings will differ from the Baruch Index. He considers Merck a more transparent company than Pfizer, for example. But Baruch Index author Don Schepers, director of the college’s Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity, thinks that the more reports that come out, the better. “This will force companies to have a governance conversation, and gives shareholders the opportunity to ask companies much more directly [about donations],” he says. “When indexes start to pop up, companies really do start to alter their behaviors.”

Image: by Flickr user Ano Lobb under Creative Commons

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