If Sanders Despises Big Pharma, Why Is He on Their Team?

Many leftists love to attack Big Pharma.

In the Senate, the loudest critic is often Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. He pledges to take on the industry and make it serve the American people, stating that “we have to pick on the incredible greed of the pharmaceutical industry, who make huge profits every year and pay their CEOs huge salaries and compensation packages.”

Although days ago, he held a hearing where he claimed to be looking out for the most vulnerable Americans’ healthcare interests, what Sanders says is very different from what he does.

The socialist senator is currently pushing a bill to secure Big Pharma’s interests in the marketplace. The bill, which Big Pharma is pushing with millions of dollars' worth of political juice, would restrict pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — the third-party groups that governments, insurance companies and employers hire to negotiate against Big Pharma.

Big Pharma doesn’t like PBMs because they force the industry to reduce prices at the bargaining table.

Sanders’s bill, called the “Pharmacy Benefit Manager Reform Act,” is a gift to the drug giants. If passed, it would ensure the drugmakers have the final say on prices — and the consumer would have no option but to fork over more cash to get the medications they need.

It may seem strange for Sanders to be on the same team with an industry he claims to despise, but his outrage is all smoke and mirrors. Big Pharma puts a lot of money into the far left, so it makes perfect sense that the Senate’s number one leftist would support the drugmakers’ interests.

When it comes to donations, Big Pharma prefers Democrats over Republicans. From 2016 to 2022, the top firms in the industry donated a whopping $29 million to Democratic candidates.

This preference is once again apparent in the 2023-2024 cycle, with Democrats once again raking in more cash from pharmaceutical giants than Republicans.

The industry has also donated four times the amount of money to Joe Biden in comparison to Donald Trump. Many of the Democrats who claim to be staunch foes of the drug giants eagerly accept the industry’s generosity.

But it’s not just Democrats who are benefitting from massive financial assistance. Several other left-wing groups receive Big Pharma’s munificence.

Since 2020, pharma giants such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson gave tens of millions of dollars to “racial justice” groups such as Black Lives Matter. Their execs also lined up to endorse noxious concepts like “systemic racism” in 2020.

Big Pharma proudly champions diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Several of the industry’s major players have proclaimed instituting this practice as one of their top goals.

DEI now impacts who drugmakers hire, how they train employees, and how they present themselves to the world. This has resulted in a disturbing level of discrimination against those who don’t meet the new criteria.

Pfizer, for example, instituted diversity quotas that discriminated against whites and men. The corporation also recommended employees read books by such far-left authors as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.

Drug companies finance efforts to push hospitals to adopt radical gender ideology. The industry’s lobby group, PhRMA, donated heavily to pro-amnesty groups such as UnidosUS and LULAC in recent years.

None of this has anything to do with healthcare and everything to do with advancing a woke agenda.

Bernie Sanders and Big Pharma aren’t strange bedfellows at all. They both support many of the same things. Big Pharma’s cash finances the Left’s mission to transform America.

Maybe that’s why Democrats want to secure the industry’s interests. More pharma profits means more donations to the Left.

Big Pharma’s left-wing bias should dissuade Republicans from blindly following its agenda. Why support an industry dedicated to spreading the woke mind virus?