One of my last freelance writing gigs before leaving the States was with a medical advertising firm charged with creating marketing materials for Pfizer. It was my first (and hopefully) last encounter with a Pfizer-mandated editorial formula that limited the number of syllables per sentence (I kid you not).
On an entirely different note, Pfizer has been fined a record $2.3 billion for fraudulently marketing a painkiller named Bextra. The settlement includes a concession by Pfizer that they had pushed doctors to prescribe unsafe doses of the drug prior to its removal from the market in 2005.
In other news, a 2004 marketing plan for an expensive antidepressant called Lexapro is 'circulating the US Senate', either to open Senators' eyes to its makers deplorable marketing practices or as a precursor to action being taken against Forest Laboratories for having 'illegally marketed both Lexapro and a closely related antidepressant, Celexa, for use in children and paid kickbacks to doctors to induce them to prescribe the medicines to children'.
Anyone with even the slightly knowledge of the nefarious tactics used by pharmaceutical manufacturers to woo doctors into prescribing their products won't be surprised by these pieces of news. What I find shocking is that the Obama administration has apparently granted Big Pharma immunity from health care reform.
That's like planning to disinfect a room but leaving a rotting corpse on the rug. Counter-intuitive, no?
1 comment:
we'll chat...had dinner with one of my dearest friends, a pfizer lawyer, tonight...no clear cut answers, just lots of thought provoking questions (which is always the case)
Post a Comment