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Gerald Posner

Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of thirteen acclaimed books, including New York Times nonfiction bestsellers Case Closed, Why America Slept and God’s Bankers. Posner was a finalist for the Pulitzer in History. His articles appear regularly in national and international magazines and he is a regular contributor to NBC, the History Channel, CNN, FOX News, CBS, and MSNBC.

“A merciless pit bull of an investigator” concluded the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times said his latest book (2020), PHARMA, was “a withering and encyclopedic indictment of a drug industry that often seems to prioritize profits over patients…[it] reads like a pharmaceutical version of cops and robbers.” Emmy-award winning documentarian, R. J. Cutler, is producing a six-part series based on PHARMA.

Categories: Author and Writer, Health Care, Health Care - Mental Health, Addiction and Recovery, Health Care - Patient Safety, Quality, Nursing / Care for the Caregiver, Human Interest, New to AEISpeakers

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Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America

Pharmaceutical breakthroughs such as antibiotics and vaccines rank among some of the greatest advancements in human history. Yet exorbitant prices for life-saving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on prescription opioids have caused many to lose faith in drug companies.

Now, Americans are demanding a national reckoning with a monolithic industry that finds itself at the intersection of private enterprise and public health.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Gerald Posner presents a fascinating story of how the industry got started around the time of the Civil War and morphed into one of the largest and most profitable in the world.

In a 45-minute presentation, with PowerPoint, based on his book PHARMA –-- winner of the 2020 Florida Book Award for Best General Nonfiction --- Posner presents the inside story of the American drug business. Along the way he introduces brilliant scientists, incorruptible government regulators, and brave whistleblowers facing off against company executives often blinded by the bottom line. Posner reveals how the basic conflict in many companies is between innovation in the lab that runs into greed in the boardroom.

Posner illustrates how addictive products are part of the industry’s DNA, from the days when corner drugstores sold morphine, heroin, and cocaine, to the past two decades of dangerously overprescribed opioids.

Posner also covers the golden age of the industry in the 1950s after the success of the World War II penicillin project. As the industry adopts Madison Avenue marketing, it goes through a series of incredibly profitable boom and bust drugs, including Valium, antidepressants, and ultimately opioid pain killers. He provides an unsparing account of the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America’s wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the center of the opioid crisis.

Covid-19 and the rollout of the successful vaccines is in the final part of Posner’s presentation. He reveals what pandemic infectious disease doctors told him they feared the most (Chapter 51 is “The Coming Pandemic). It is not Covid.

Posner finishes by bringing the listener inside the race for the vaccines and how the mRNA technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines might revolutionize prescription medications going forward.

It is a presentation much like the industry it is about. Fascinating, at times infuriating, but also filled with hope for the future.

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

Books

Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America

Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America

Award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Gerald Posner traces the heroes and villains of the trillion-dollar-a-year pharmaceutical industry and uncovers how those once entrusted with improving life have often betrayed that ideal to corruption and reckless profiteering—with deadly consequences.

You can purchase this book here

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

Pulitzer Prize Finalist: “By far the most lucid and compelling account . . . of what probably did happen in Dallas—and what almost certainly did not.” —The New York Times Book Review
The Kennedy assassination has reverberated for five decades, with tales of secret plots, multiple killers, and government cabals often overshadowing the event itself. As Gerald Posner writes, “Fifty years after the assassination, the biggest casualty has been the truth.” In this first-ever digital edition of his classic work, updated with a special comment for the fiftieth anniversary, Posner lays to rest all of the convoluted conspiracy theories—concerning the mafia, a second shooter, and the CIA—that have obscured over the decades what really happened in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

You can purchase this book here

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

A deeply reported, New York Times bestselling exposé of the money and the clerics-turned-financiers at the heart of the Vatican—the world’s biggest, most powerful religious institution—from an acclaimed journalist with “exhaustive research techniques” (The New York Times).

You can purchase this book here

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