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The Ethical Health Lawyer: Watch Out for Whistleblowers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Leslie Griffin
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Extract

“There's a new whistleblower in Washington,” according to CNN News. He is Food and Drug Administration scientist David Graham, who claims that the FDA failed to warn the public about certain drugs' dangerous side effects and pressured him to change his research's conclusion that the arthritis drug Vioxx caused heart attacks. Another Washington whistleblower, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein of the National Institutes of Health, alleged that he was fired because “he had raised concerns about sloppy practices that might endanger patient safety” in a study of the AIDS drug nevirapine.

Graham and Fishbein thus joined the ranks of whistleblowers who have gained some prominence in recent years for their reporting of corporate or institutional misconduct. The best-known whistleblowers—the FBI's Coleen Rowley, Enron's Sherron Watkins, and WorldCom's Cynthia Cooper, who together received Time magazine's Whistleblower Person of the Year Award in 20024 - focused public attention on the reform of corporate accounting and legal practices.

Type
JLME Column
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , Spring 2005 , pp. 160 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2005

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