Pharma Giles writes

A Phoni employee showed up on the campus of Harvard Medical School and took photographs of medical students demonstrating against commercial influence over their education.

The NY Times reports that 1,600 teachers in the school have interests in outside businesses and that as a result, 679 of them take money from Phoni, 149 take money from Pfizer and 130 take money from Merck. The American Medical Student Association organized a protest against commercial influence in their class rooms and then this happened, per the Times:

Dave Spart, a first-year Harvard medical student, said he found it “strange and disconcerting, if not downright creepy,” when a man who identified himself as a Phoni employee took a series of photographs of students as they demonstrated against pharmaceutical industry influence on campus. “We could only assume he intended to share them with his company,” Mr. Spart said, “or maybe his weird friends on the internet...”

The students did not get the man’s name, but they took his picture (above).

Asked about the mysterious Phoni man on campus and shown his picture, a company spokesman said he had since contacted the employee and concluded that he had done nothing wrong. Declining to name him, the spokesman, Head of Phoni Corporate Security Ed Dubious, said the employee had photographed the students for personal use.

“We know that some of our employees have got into trouble in the past for looking at pictures of young people, but this time it was all legal and above board,” Dubious said.  “Our operative was simply doing his job.”

“After all, we can’t let pharma-hating goddam Commies like Spart and his friends undermine the constitutional right of Phoni to buy up medical professionals and pay them to say just what we want about our products and activities,” explained Dubious.

“With a few photographs added to our illegal IP searches and phone-taps, we’ve built up quite a dossier on so-called ‘students’ like Spart.  We know where they live, both literally and metaphorically.  He and his friends will soon find that their college grades will inexplicably start to slide, no matter how hard they work.  One or two of them may even have strange packets of white powder planted in their cars for the local police to find.  And they can forget ever finding a decent job in the healthcare industry, once we’ve used our influence to blackball anyone who speaks out about Phoni’s hold on academia.”

“We’re quite pleased that Mr. Spart found our operative’s presence ‘strange and disconcerting’,” Dubious said.  “That’s the whole idea.  We want to get the message out that No-one Phucks With Phoni.  Understand?”

 

Equally sinister tales from the real world are brought to us by Jim Edwards at B-NET.