Former President Bill Clinton, current Secretary of State John Kerry and other top Democrats pressured a pharmaceutical company to give a major donor an experimental drug, according to emails released by WikiLeaks on Saturday.
WikiLeaks disclosed an email exchange between John Podesta, campaign chairman for Democratic Nominee Hillary Clinton, and Mary Pat Bonner, a donor adviser for Clinton’s super PAC.
The emails from October 2008 centered on efforts to get the drug to Dallas Democratic donor Fred Baron, who was suffering from multiple myeloma. In response, Clinton, Kerry and former Democratic senators Tom Harkin and Max Baucus heavily lobbied Biogen, which was the maker of the drug Tysabri.
Tysabri was in clinical trials at the time to treat multiple myeloma, and was previously approved to treat multiple sclerosis.
Bonner said in an email to Podesta that Biogen wouldn’t let Baron into the trial because he was too sick, and if the drug failed him then it could skew the outcome of the trials.
Kerry, a senator at the time, called then-Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Andrew Von Eschenbach. He said that Baron needed Biogen to grant a compassionate use waiver to get access to the drug.
Biogen pushed back against granting the waiver, but Bonner told Podesta that she was going to look into the FDA’s authorities to grant the waiver.
Bonner wondered if the Mayo Clinic, which is where Baron was being treated and was conducting the clinical trial, could just administer the therapy without Biogen’s consent, the email said.
Bonner also suggested that Baron could go to Canada to get the drug, but would need approval from executives in a Canadian hospital. She suggested that a well-timed donation might help.
“Hospitals in Canada are chronically underfunded, and a donation may grease the wheels,” according to the email. “I would consider this and be up front with a proposal in conversations you have with senior members of the hospital executives.”
Baron eventually got the drug, but he died a week before the presidential election in 2008. The Dallas Morning News reported back in 2010 that Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had “cajoled the FDA to find a legal justification that let Mayo administer the drug, even without Biogen’s consent.”
The Clinton campaign did not immediately return a Washington Examiner request for comment.
The revelation comes at a time when Congress continues to debate “right to try” laws governing compassionate use of experimental drugs.
