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Let’s Boycott Henry Schein Inc.

Consumers for Dental Choice announces a boycott of Henry Schein Inc., the dental and medical products colossus whose fingerprints are all over the callous FDA mercury amalgam rule.  We ask all dentists of integrity -- indeed, we ask all health professionals of integrity worldwide -- to stop buying ANY PRODUCT from or through Schein UNTIL Schein announces it will cease selling mercury amalgam.

Our boycott aims to persuade Schein to change its ways -- to stop marketing a product that is 50% mercury when other filling materials are interchangeable.  According to a 2007 report by Bank of America Securities, the switch to exclusive reliance on resin and other alternatives won’t hurt its profits.  As such, ours is a boycott not with an economic goal but with a policy goal: an end to amalgam.  Everyone can win!

We must boycott because Schein is the #1 seller of a highly toxic product, a 19^th century device with no place in modern dentistry.  It has caused and continues to cause untold human misery, and is a particular neurological risk to children and unborn children.  Its mercury is an environmental menace, poisoning other creatures who co-habit this earth with us.  The vapor is proven harmful to professionals and workers in the dental workplace.  Amalgam is a social injustice, still given to working families, soldiers, children with disabilities, etc. -- but no longer to America ’s elite.

We must boycott because FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg came through the revolving door from Schein, and this coziness with corporations resulted in the amalgam rule that is “more responsive to industry than human health” according to an FDA employee.   And the chumminess continues -- two days after the amalgam rule was announced, Commissioner Hamburg assured company officials that her “friendships” at Schein “will outlast the period of my recusal.”  Then Schein’s general counsel wrote Hamburg to thank her for her work at FDA: “We are indebted to you for your service to our country.”  Four days later, Schein CEO Stanley Bergman -- who had paid Hamburg a quarter million dollars a year for the light work of being a corporate director -- bragged to investors about his company’s ties to FDA Commissioner Hamburg months after she left the board, thanking Hamburg for her “insight” to the board “throughout the years.”  In light of this revolving door relationship, do we face the specter of Hamburg approving a spate of dangerous products -- with no consumer warnings, with no consumer disclosures?

Folks, we have one thing that this unholy alliance of corporate America, Wall Street, and FDA leadership can only get if we hand it to them: our dollars (and for our friends around the world, our euros, yen, pounds, cruzeiros, etc.)  We can spend our money blindly or we can spend our money wisely.

Health professionals, please boycott Henry Schein.  Please tell Schein salespeople that the company has an easy way to end this boycott: stop selling amalgam.  Consumers, please ask your dentists, physicians, and other health practitioners to boycott Henry Schein. 

Charlie Brown

16 November 2009

PS:  In a couple of days, I will circulate to dentists and other health professionals a draft letter to Schein that announces support for the boycott, and will ask that that you add your name to it.

PPS--I am informed that some dentists have long-term contracts with Schein; we are not asking that you break any existing contract, and understand that you can’t participate.  We hope that dentists will look to other distributors for long-term contracts.

Charles G. Brown, National Counsel
Consumers for Dental Choice
316 F St., N.E., Suite 210, Washington, DC 20002
Ph. 202.544-6333; fax 202.544-6331
charlie@...,
www.toxicteeth.org
Working for Mercury-Free Dentistry
 

FDA Bungling of Mercury Amalgam Rule Is Damaging Our President

A reputable publication has once again recognized that FDA’s bungling of the mercury amalgam rule is subverting President Obama’s promised reforms of the way Washington does business.  The President has expressed concern that "[e]xposure to mercury leads to serious developmental problems in children as well as problems affecting vision, motor skills, blood pressure, and fertility in adults."  The President also said, “More than five million women of childbearing age have high levels of toxic mercury in their blood and approximately 630,000 newborns are born every year at risk. The EPA estimates that every year, more than one in six children could be at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother’s womb.”  However, the two persons he appointed to run FDA, Margaret Hamburg and Joshua Sharfstein, give carte blanche to the amalgam industry to sell mercury fillings with no consumer disclosures or warnings -- even to market it under the deceptive term “silver fillings.”

An article entitled “Obama Losing at FDA, Too” published in November 4’s FDA Webview concludes that the President’s FDA is “losing for the… failure to deliver on its promises.”  The amalgam rule, “based on defective science,” shows “the Obama team’s grip on the bureaucracy below … is simply too weak.”  According to FDA Webview’s respected editor Jim Dickinson , the amalgam rule could defeat “Commissioner Margaret Hamburg’s No. 1 priority: restoring public trust in FDA.”  The article in particular criticizes Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein for refusing to stop the rule from going into effect, and for buck-passing the decision down to the agency’s “most dysfunctional center,” the Center for Devices, and specifically to its leading amalgam propagandist, dentist Susan Runner.  As a result of such actions, “confidence in the Obama ‘change’ agenda is vanishing broadly.”   

An article by the noted writer Ellen Brown (author of Web of Debt, a seminal work on how the major banks are ruining the American economy) recently appeared in the liberal e-newspaper The Huffington Post, highlighting the 180-degree difference between President Obama’s promise to reduce mercury in products and FDA’s endorsement of its continued use in dentistry.  Brown attributes the sabotaging of the President’s campaign promise to FDA leaders’ placing politics before science, and she suggests that Margaret Hamburg’s entrance through the “revolving door” from #1 amalgam seller Henry Schein, Inc. played a role.  

FDA, too, is defying the President’s promise to bring transparency to government decisions.  Last week, along with Freya Koss of the Pennsylvania Coalition for Mercury-Free Dentistry and Carol Ward, vice-president of Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions (DAMS), I appeared at a hearing of FDA’s transparency task force.  Ironically, it was chaired by the evasive Sharfstein who recently ducked out of a scheduled meeting with Congresswoman Diane Watson. 

Carol, Freya, and I rained on FDA’s transparency parade.  To see our testimony, go to

http://www.capitolconnection.net/capcon/fda/110309/FDA110309.htm and click “Open Comment Session.”  Each is only about 3 minutes in length. 

Charlie

10 November 2009

Charles G. Brown, National Counsel
Consumers for Dental Choice
316 F St., N.E., Suite 210, Washington, DC 20002
Ph. 202.544-6333; fax 202.544-6331
charlie@...,
www.toxicteeth.org
Working for Mercury-Free Dentistry
 

P.S.  Jim Dickinson ’s FDA Webview article about the transparency task force is reprinted below. 

Dental Amalgam Dispute Rears its Head at Transparency Meeting

11/03/2009

Anti-dental amalgam advocates took to an open microphone during an 11/3 FDA Transparency Task Force Meeting to voice their frustration with the agency’s handling of its 8/4 final rule and classification (see earlier story) of the dental mercury filling. "FDA has consistently concealed the toxicity of mercury fillings despite the plethora of existing scientific evidence submitted to the agency for more than 15 years," PA Coalition for Mercury-Free Dentistry founder and director Freya Koss told the task force, which was led by principal deputy commissioner Josh Sharfstein. "This continued cover-up is evidenced by the … no-risk final amalgam ruling that egregiously ignored public testimony and documentation presented at the 2006 amalgam risk hearing."

Joining Koss during the open mic period was Consumers for Dental Choice counsel Charlie Brown, who took the opportunity to blast the rule’s chief architect, CDRH Dental Devices Branch chief Susan Runner, and her "conclusions of no risk" on amalgam. "Susan Runner has as her career goal that consumers and victims will never learn that silver fillings are mercury fillings," he said. Brown also cited the 2006 hearing (see earlier story) where scientists "repudiated" Runner and assistant commissioner for science Norris Alderson for "saying that they were wrong in claiming that amalgam was safe…. What did they do? They rewrote history and said there was no vote on the science by the time the rule was written. That is dishonest and you guys have approved dishonesty, and Runner is in charge of this."

Koss was also critical of Runner. "Dr. Runner’s conclusions are unreasonable and not supported by reputable science," she said. "FDA has continued to downplay and ignore more than 3,000 public comments related to amalgam-associated illnesses, and has diminished and ignored the injuries reported in hundreds of adverse health reports by misrepresenting the number of reports as only 141 in 20 years. There are many, many more."

A visibly frustrated Brown reminded the transparency panel that FDA deputy chief counsel Jeff Senger and he negotiated an agreement last year whereby a warning was added to FDA’s amalgam Web site that said "amalgam causes neurological harm." "What did you do with that warning?" he asked "You moved it from the Web site and hid it. The first page of the Web site doesn’t even say mercury," he complained.

Additionally, Brown criticized commissioner Margaret Hamburg for what he described as her "revolving door" move from the largest seller of amalgam, Henry Schein, to the agency’s top post. "She was warned not to participate in the final rule and yet she participated," he said. "If you are going to conceal the mercury in amalgam…do you plan to conceal the mercury in fish?"

Brown asked the panel to review the 2006 amalgam risk hearing public record, which "will tell you that Runner and Alderson are lying to you and there was a 13-7 repudiation vote." He also asked them to restore the neurological warning on the agency’s amalgam Web site. "This is Susan Runner’s day in the sun. She’s won, the dentists have won, the American people have lost, and Dr. Sharfstein the ball is in your court."