An American doctor turned consumer activist who battled drug companies, lobbyists and regulators during a nearly five-decade crusade against ineffective, risky and overpriced medications, died of a brain tumour on New Year’s day at his home in Washington, aged 86.
Wolfe spent most of his career with the Health Research Group, part of the Washington-based Public Citizen organisation founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader.
Driven to expose drugs and medical devices he was convinced could kill or harm patients, he searched for clues in thousands of research papers and medical journals, stacking them in piles around his office, while scientists at regulatory agencies, especially the US Food and Drug Administration, leaked information to him.
His petitions and lawsuits helped get more than two dozen dangerous or ineffective drugs removed from the market, reports The Washington Post.
The banned medicines include the diabetes drug Phenformin, which was linked to hundreds of deaths; the anti-inflammatory Vioxx, which caused serious heart damage; and the anti-diarrhoeal Lotronex.
He also successfully petitioned federal regulators to include a warning on aspirin bottles about Reye’s syndrome, a potentially fatal condition linked to children’s use of the pain-relief drug for flu or chickenpox.
Wolfe acquired a ferocious reputation in his early campaigns against Alka-Seltzer, cough syrup, contact lenses, food additives, toothpaste and entire professions (dentistry, psychiatry).
An official at the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association, the drug industry’s main lobbyist, told The Washington Post in 1978 that Wolfe’s problem “is an excess of zealotry”.
“He tends to exploit every negative aspect of drug therapy to scare the consumer.”
An FDA official once called him “adversarial, unfair and self-serving.”
But Wolfe was unstoppable: he thought drugmakers, regulators and physician groups were too cosy with one another, leading to the approval of unsafe and ineffective treatments, and he was formidable, especially when testifying to drug-approval panels or in Congress.
“When someone contradicts what Sid thought scientific truth, he went ballistic,” Nader said. “He didn’t suffer fools gladly.”
And when Wolfe found a smoking gun in scientific papers, he often circumvented bureaucrats and went directly to agency heads to effect change, pestering reporters for coverage.
Malcolm Gladwell, a Post business and science reporter in the 1980s, endured many of his phone calls.
“You would never know when you would get off the phone,” Gladwell said in 2022 during an episode of his podcast Revisionist History that focused on Wolfe’s early and widely ignored concerns about opioid painkillers.
Wolfe was born in Cleveland on 12 June 1937. His father was a workplace safety inspector for the Labour Department, and his mother taught English in public schools.
He joined the Atomic Science Club in high school and wrote letters to Albert Einstein.
In 1959, he received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University. A holiday job working with hydrofluoric acid that gave him first-degree burns convinced him not to pursue a career in chemistry.
He went to medical school instead, earning his degree in 1965 at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University). He trained under paediatrician and anti-war activist Benjamin Spock.
To avoid fighting in the Vietnam War, he joined the Public Health Service. He was active in the 1960s protest movements as a member of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a leftist anti-war group that also battled the American Medical Association (AMA) on equality issues in medical care.
After rejecting his membership in the AMA, Wolfe volunteered with groups providing medical care to anti-war demonstrators and the poor.
In 1971, he was conducting blood research at NIH when a scientist friend at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called him with a complaint. Federal regulators, the friend said, were refusing to recall the widely used but contaminated intravenous fluids made by Abbott Laboratories.
Hundreds of patients were sickened, and some died. Abbott said a recall would leave patients without important fluids. The government, in response, told doctors to cease using the fluids at the first sign of infection.
In a fury, Wolfe reached out to Nader, who had recently started Public Citizen. Nader suggested they write a stern letter to the FDA.
“It is a form of malpractice to wait until a patient develops evidence of a blood infection before discontinuing the use of products known to have a high incidence of bacterial contaminants,” they wrote to FDA Commissioner Charles Edwards. “It is a cowardly repudiation of the ethic of preventive medicine.”
They also sent the letter to reporters. A few days later, the FDA recalled millions of bottles of the fluids.
Patients and government scientists began bombarding him with tips about other dangerous medical products on the market.
“It led me to think there were an awful lot of problems that had been well documented, but no one had done anything about them,” he later told The Post. “It seemed more interesting to me to try to do these things than to do research.”
He founded the Health Research Group with Nader in 1971.
In 1980, he self-published Worst Pills, Best Pills: A Consumer’s Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness. It has sold millions of copies and is now distributed by a division of Simon & Schuster.
A decade later, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a “genius” fellowship and $350 000.
“People like Sid can really be a pain in the neck at times,” Edwards, the one-time FDA commissioner, said in 1989. “You have to take your hat off to somebody who has devoted his career to what he’s devoted it to. There are certainly careers that are more fashionable, more lucrative, where you get a lot more kudos.”
Fashionable and lucrative were, indeed, words seldom uttered in the same sentence about Wolfe, who for years never made more than $50 000 annually.
Friends and family often asked Wolfe for health advice. Many of his colleagues were big on vitamins. Not him.
“A lot of public interest people take vitamins, apparently,” he once said. “I tell them that they’re chemicals, that they’re made by the big drug companies just like the stuff they’re fighting against, but they don’t listen.”
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