Testimony in MA that NECC was an accident waiting to happen and the compounding industry is rife with potential conflicts of interest

Montigny misses mark

January 28, 2013

Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford), who often targets Big Pharma and its lobbying efforts in his perpetual search for bad guys, may have actually found a better target in Little Pharma — those compounding pharmacies that have grown and grown and yet remained under the radar screen.

That is until 44 people died and 678 were sickened by fungal meningitis traced to the New England Compounding Center, which went virtually unregulated and uninspected until it was too late.

So last week Montigny chaired a meeting of the Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee at which Dr. Sarah Sellers, a former compounding pharmacist and former Food and Drug Administration official testified that the NECC case was “an accident waiting to happen” and that the compounding industry is rife with potential conflicts of interest.

Montigny, of course, chose not to focus on the obvious — that the state Board of Registration in Pharmacy was itself rife with such conflicts and failed in its responsibility to regulate compounding pharmacies here. No, he chose to zero in on his favorite bete noir:

“When we allow special interests to ply their trade so successfully in Washington and in state capitols, the outcome is inevitable, and in this case deadly,” he insisted.

Yes it’s all about the lobbyists — really!

How about public officials who weren’t doing their jobs? How about greedy owners who even as people were dying and NECC was in bankruptcy proceedings were looting its treasury, according to their bankruptcy court filings?

It’s all shameful, but as usual the senator misses the point.

Source found here