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Many in Congress parroting Roche's policy guidelines
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share thisDoing their best Charlie McCarthy imitations, about 35 members of Congress dutifully have submitted to the will of their own Edgar Bergen - the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche.
The New York Times this week detailed statements entered in the Congressional Record by the legislators and noted similarities among them. The paper also traced them to Genentech, a Roche subsidiary engaged in gene-based drug development.
Many of the lawmakers later acknowledged that the statements had been written for them by Genentech's lobbying apparatus. And Genentech itself later gushed that 22 House Republicans and 20 Democrats had repeated the company's lobbying themes in their statements for the Congressional Record. Let that record reflect that it took the clout of a big Swiss pharmaceutical company to produce an unprecedented level of bipartisan agreement in Congress.
Beneath it all was an important issue - federal regulation of "biosimilar" generic drugs derived from living organisms, which are far more complex than drugs made of chemical compounds. Apparently, the issue is so complex that members of Congress can't speak for themselves about it.
The other great driver of bipartisan cooperation is, of course, campaign money. Genentech's political action committee and lobbyists had spread campaign cash liberally to members of both parties, including to many of those who entered the company's policy statements into the Congressional Record.
There were the standard denials from the company and the lawmakers, of course, that the contributions had no influence over the lawmakers acting like parrots.
Another comment by a Genentech official rang truer, illustrating that Congress is something of a subsidiary for narrow interests: "This happens all the time."
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