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Bernard Prigent, Pfizer’s inside man

PM Harper's appointment of drug company's VP to Canadian Institutes of Health Research is also a registered lobbyist… to CIHR.



Last October, the Harper government appointed Bernard Prigent to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the federal agency that distributes about a billion dollars annually for health research. That appointment was met with near-universal condemnation from medical ethicists, because Prigent is a vice-president of Pfizer Canada, a firm that stands to profit from the decisions made at CIHR.

"There's a structural conflict of interest," explains Jocelyn Downie, the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at Dalhousie University. "On the one hand, it's [Prigent's] statutory duty to represent the best health interests of Canadians, and on the other hand, as an executive with Pfizer, he's legally bound to promote the profit interests of his company. Those competing interests will not always align, and will sometimes be in conflict."

http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/bernard- ... id=1503474

With this kind of money on the line, how can there not be a conflict of interest.