Fact check: Abdul El-Sayed attacks Mike Rogers over pharma industry ties

Mike Rogers’ campaign sent Abdul El-Sayed a cease and desist letter in June, demanding that he stop calling Rogers a ‘pharma lobbyist’
El-Sayed has continued to criticize Rogers for his connections to, and campaign donations from, the pharmaceutical industry
During his time in the US House, from 2001-2015, Rogers had been an advocate of increased access to pain meds

Democratic US Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed continues to attack Republican rival Mike Rogers over his connections to the pharmaceutical industry, including hundreds of thousands in past campaign contributions and sponsorship of legislation to expand access to prescription pain medication.

The sparring began months ago when El-Sayed called Rogers a lobbyist for the drug industry and falsely claimed he’d taken “a $14 million payout” for that work, which prompted the Rogers campaign to send a June 22 cease and desist letter demanding that El-Sayed stop and threatening legal action.

The letter called the description “demonstrably false,” and both state and federal records show Rogers has never registered as a lobbyist of any kind.

El-Sayed has since tweaked his attack — but not by much.

“This is a guy who’s never seen a check from a pharmaceutical lobbyist he didn’t want to cash,” El-Sayed told supporters in primary election night speech, noting he was in medical school when Rogers served in Congress.

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“He sent our campaign a cease and desist for calling him a pharma lobbyist. But I don’t know, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, smells like a duck. How am I supposed to know it’s a goose?”

Rogers’ connections to the pharmaceutical industry are among the claims Bridge Michigan is reviewing in the state’s fiercely competitive US Senate race between El-Sayed, a Democrat, and Rogers, a Republican. The winner will replace longtime Democratic Senator Gary Peters, who is retiring.

So what’s true about Rogers and US drug companies?

The claims

While he’s stopped publicly referring to Rogers as a “pharma lobbyist,” El-Sayed has frequently drawn similar comparisons.

“So look, forgive me, Mike. I just know that you spend so much time with pharma lobbyists I just thought you were one,” he said in his primary victory speech. “You’ve taken so much money for them to raise our prescription drug prices, I just thought that you just got in the business.”

He made similar claims last week in a Detroit press conference.

Rogers has not been a registered lobbyist, but reporting earlier this year from PolitiFact found that before his 2024 Senate run, Rogers received a $30,000 payment from the lobbying firm CGCN Group, which represented more than 50 clients, including drug and medical tech companies.

Rogers campaign spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet told PolitiFact that Rogers did not work on the lobbying side of the firm and instead advised on strategic communications telecommunications issues.

Rogers and pharmaceutical companies

A 2024 Bridge investigation, during Rogers previous run for Senate, found that he was one of the biggest advocates of increased access to pain medications while he was in Congress from 2001-2015.

During that time, only one bill increasing access that he sponsored, co-sponsored or voted for was signed into law. It was the Veterans Pain Care Act of 2008, which was introduced by Minnesota Democrat Tim Walz and had broad bipartisan support. The law mandated that the Department of Veterans Affairs create a comprehensive pain care policy.

In 2003, Rogers introduced the National Pain Care Policy Act in 2003, which began a decade of advocacy by the Republican lawmaker to boost opioid prescriptions, with a goal to “extend accessibility (of pain medications) to more and more Americans suffering from chronic pain.”

Rogers told Bridge he was motivated by personal experience, and recounted how his brother suffered from chronic pain from more than 30 back surgeries, and pain medications were needed to make his life bearable until he died at age 60.

“What we were doing (in Congress) is making sure that true chronic pain sufferers had access to drugs that would at least give some relief and hopefully allow them to spend some time with their family,” he said in 2024.

Pharma donations

A 2016 investigation by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity found that Rogers’ campaign and leadership accounts received at least $310,000 in contributions from groups tied to the pharmaceutical industry from 2006 to 2015.

At the time, Rogers explained those donations by saying that, “I think they said, ‘This guy is a champion, he’s doing something we believe in and we want to support a guy like that.’”

Donations to Rogers came from companies that agreed to settle litigation from Michigan and other states over their roles in the opioid crisis, Bridge reported in 2024.

During his 2024 run for Senate, Rogers received about $73,276 from donors connected to the pharmaceutical manufacturing, pharmaceutical wholesale, pharmacists or biotech product and research sectors, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics

All told, Rogers received about $420,000 from donors in the health care sector, with about $105,000 coming from physicians. This cycle, he’s received about $273,000 from the health sector, including $50,000 from “other physician specialists.”

The bottom line

Rogers was never a registered lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, and El-Sayed has stopped publicly calling him one.

But Rogers has accepted contributions from groups and individuals tied to the pharmaceutical industry in past campaigns and previously advocated for access to opioids for pain management.