Video at link:

Bernie Sanders: "I think this is a prelude not only to cutting benefits, but to privatizing Social Security ... why do you lie so much about Social Security? Why do you make it look like it's a broken system? The reason is to get people to lose faith in the system so you can give it over to Wall St"

No, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren aren't top recipients of pharmaceutical industry donations

Behind misleading claim by RFK Jr. is a quirk in the OpenSecrets site

Sanders, in fact, received no contributions at all from political action committees affiliated with drug companies, or from top pharmaceutical executives. But because of a quirk in the site's methodology, donations from individual, low-ranking employees are counted the same as official contributions from corporate PACs.

Typically, in Washington, corporations' support for political candidates is measured by donations from its PAC, and to an extent, from its top executives.

OpenSecrets, by contrast, measures corporate giving by combining PAC spending with any contribution of $200 or more from any company employee. In other words: if an entry-level human resources officer at a pharmaceutical company wrote Sanders or Warren even a modest check, the website would count that sum toward the company's total giving, no differently than a check written by the company's PAC.

This methodology appears to have misled users. Both Sanders and Warren ran for president in 2020, and raised millions of dollars from supporters across the country. Many of them were rank-and-file employees at drug companies, whose voting preferences may not always align with their companies' interests.

"Some of the people making these claims know full well that they're being misleading," said Daniel Weiner, the director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice. "There is a distinction between a random donation from someone who happens to work in a particular industry, versus a donation from a corporate PAC."

Historically, Democrats have favored aggressive measures to reduce drug prices, while many Republicans have argued that limiting drug companies' profits could stifle future innovation of lifesaving medicines.

When measuring PAC spending specifically, Sanders and Warren are nowhere near the top. According to OpenSecrets, neither is among Capitol Hill's top 25 recipients of donations from pharmaceutical manufacturing PACs. In 2020, the top pharmaceutical PAC recipient in Congress was Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), who accepted $240,600 in official committee gifts; in 2024, it was Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), who accepted $441,800.

And I'm not the one blasting millionaires and billionaires, Bernie is. And he does it while collecting 2 million a year from Pharma in exchange for votes that benefit them.
#20 | Posted by fishpaw

See my above post #24.

Ok, I'm sorry, just because he got the donations from the execs from big pharma doesn't mean he got it from Big Pharma. LOL.
#32 | Posted by fishpaw

No, that's not what the article said. Why would big pharma executives vote for Bernie, who is a champion of cutting drig prices? They didn't.

Also from the above linked to article

During his 2020 presidential run, Sanders pledged to reject contributions from PACs, and even returned donations of over $200 from "lobbyists, or executives of health insurance or pharmaceutical companies." In that statement, the Sanders campaign explicitly said it would accept contributions from "rank-and-file workers employed by pharmaceutical giants."

A STAT examination of Senate and presidential campaign committees for Warren and Sanders since 2016 found no donations from PACs related to the brand-drug lobby PhRMA or any of its 26 current member companies, or from three companies that left the organization recently. No CEOs of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies by market cap donated to either of the senators since at least 2016.