Gates Official’s Former Role at Drug Company Comes Under Scrutiny

The head of global health for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is under scrutiny by members of Congress for his previous job at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

The Senate Finance Committee is investigating whether the drug company GlaxoSmithKline knew of possible health risks associated with the diabetes medicine Avandia. The committee’s senior members, Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, and Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, released a report over the weekend that says that the company intimidated outside researchers from studying the drug.

A figure in this controversy is Tachi Yamada, the Gates official who formerly served as director of research for SmithKline, the predecessor to GlaxoSmithKline.

Only a small portion of the 334-page report focuses on Dr. Yamada. But it says he made phone calls to officials at the University of North Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania to shut down studies of possible negative side effects of Avandia.

At the University of Pennsylvania, two researchers said that phone calls by Dr. Yamada and other drug company executives “were highly unprofessional and had a chilling effect on their professional activities.”

The report says Dr. Yamada denied trying to intimidate anyone and that he contacted the universities because he was interested in finding out whether the drug caused any problems.

In a statement, GlaxoSmithKline says the Senate report “cherry-picks information from documents, which mischaracterizes GlaxoSmithKline’s comprehensive efforts to research Avandia and communicate those findings to regulators, physicians, and patients.”

For the Gates foundation, this is not the first time its director of global health has been under investigation by federal officials. Its previous director, Richard Klausner, left the Seattle grant maker after the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, examined whether he violated conflict-of-interest policies while at the National Cancer Institute.

At the time, Mr. Klausner denied any wrongdoing, and the foundation said his resignation had nothing to do with the investigation.