Latest Drugwonks' Blog
Here’s what Senator Charles Grassley had to say in wake of yesterday’s Vioxx verdict, “The Food and Drug Administration was also negligent in the Vioxx case … Those running the nation’s public safety agency repeatedly dismissed the concerns of their own scientists and seemed to do everything possible to keep the public in the dark about emerging problems with Vioxx.” Not only is this untrue and unfair to the 10,000 FDA career employees who work tirelessly on behalf of the public health, it is also a very clear sign that the Senator from Blameland is more interested in chest-thumping than helping to advance the public health. Chalk up another one for “Body Slam Chuck,” the King of Destructive Criticism. And talk about bellying up to the tort bar! I wonder how much more money the Senator will get from the trial lawyer lizards as a reward for such vituperative rants?
A rant appeared on Dr. John Grohol’s World of Psychology blog assailing GlaxoSmithKline for targeting a direct-to-consumer education campaign at, well, the consumer. The author is peeved not only because GlaxoSmithKline and other drug companies actually make a profit, but that they are advertising their products by repackaging already available information. He argues instead that drug companies should spend shareholder dollars promoting free online depression information or, better yet, send people directly to psychologistsâ offices without mention of any drug. (This is particularly rich since the host site, which repackages and serves as a portal to already available information, prominently pushes a book by Grohol on which he is presumably earning a profit.)
It might never occur to the author that the advertising from a drug company is actually the impetus that pushes a person suffering from depression into a doctor’s office. After all, GlaxoSmithKline and all other drug companies are powerless to 1) force anyone to purchase company products or 2) even sell products directly to consumers. Drug companies must rely on the professional opinion of doctors who may or may not prescribe the company’s product that provided the push to get the patient to seek professional help.
If one thinks that depression is an under-treated condition that has negative consequences for individuals, rants such as this are irrational. Perhaps the author might want to spend some quality time on a couch.
I hope this verdict will not chill the nascent movement towards more open and transparent sharing of information between the pharmaceutical industry, FDA, physicians, and patients. Now is not the time to let lawyers rule.
Nope, not a typo. Fee Speech. Like in speech you get paid for. Specifically the kind of speech doctors use when they get paid to talk with the investment community. Some (now including the venerable NY Times) believe that doctors participating in clinical trials shouldn’t talk to investors for fear that they will share confidential information. Should clinical investigators share confidential information — most certainly not — but that’s a lot different than saying they shouldn’t be allowed to speak with Wall Street types. It’s a slippery slope, friends. First ne parlez pas avec investors and then, who else? How about reporters? How about patients? How about each other? Are we really willing to say adieu to the free exchange of (appropriate) scientific information? It’s odd to me (but, alas, not surprising) that the same people who want full disclosure of clinical trial data want to muzzle trial clinicians. This isn’t to say that loose lips shouldn’t be slapped shut, they should —but the way to deal with blabbermouth docs is to aggressively put an end to such behavior through legal and professional remedies, not by selectively applying the First Amendment.
The Los Angeles Times uncovered a price-gouging scam on our nation’s pharmaceutical consumers. Americans, eager to acquire price controlled brand-name drugs from Canada, have been filling there generic prescriptions up North as well. They’ve been overpaying by as much as 78 percent compared to what they could have purchased at the corner drugstore, according to a study by the Fraser Institute, on which the story relies. Canada’s complicated price control system, which also controls competition and provides an effective floor as well as a ceiling for prices, makes generic drugs a bad deal in Canada. The Fraser Institute study pegs the cost difference at 78 percent for the 100 most popular generic drugs. It has long been known among serious researchers, as opposed to bus hopping activists and politicians, that it’s unclear if the basket of drugs Americans actually purchase, due to an abundance of generics, costs more or less in the United States than it would in Canada.
One thing is clear: It’s the fierce competition of free market in the United States that produces both the innovation necessary for the cutting-edge drugs that Canada’s government price controls and the low, low prices for generic drugs that have lost patent protection.
Let me be blunt: The current political assault on direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals is absurd, in that the essential “insight” underpinning such criticism is the preposterous premise that patients can be made better off by withholding information from them. But that eternal truth has not prevented those convinced that ordinary people are morons from arguing that the recent Vioxx fiasco (the public discussion, not the drug itself) would have been tempered had advertising not misled people into “overuse” of the drug. Oh, please. Consider an adverse drug effect that shows up in, say, three people in 100,000. In a clinical trial of 20,000 patients, it easily might not show up at all; that is the basic nature of the inference (“type 1/type 2” error tradeoff) problem afflicting all statistical analyses. Is it due to “negligence” that unknown problems might emerge in the general population of consumers? Or is it more fundamentally the result of the harsh reality that clinical trials are not free, and that larger ones would engender even greater costs, and thus fewer medicines and more human suffering over the long term? Only within the Beltway and among the plaintiffs’ bar is “a” the correct answer. And probably also in California.
There is a ballot initiative to be decided by the voters of California this fall — Proposition 79 — that would attempt and fail to deliver steep pharmaceutical price discounts to over half of the state population, even as it would enrich the lawyers. Call it the “Fewer Medicines and More Lawsuits” initiative. It would attempt to force those discounts for the middle class by excluding from the MediCal (California Medicaid) formulary drugs from producers refusing to accept the California price controls imposed by the bureaucrats and politicians. So much for the actual health interests of the poor and near-poor. In any event, the federal government (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) will not allow benefits for the poor to be mortgaged in favor of attempts by the political class to subsidize the middle class. That is what actually happened (or failed to happen) in Maine. What will emerge is an avalanche of lawsuits, because the initiative allows any citizen (that is, any lawyer) to sue on grounds of “profiteering” whenever a prescription is filled at an “unconscionable” price or at a price yielding a profit “unjust” or “unreasonable.” By the way, none of those terms is defined, and, no, the attorney needs no actual client. And the “antidiscrimination” provisions would force the price controls onto the entire market, and other states would find themselves unable to resist the pressures to impose a similar program, lest consumers in other states pay less. Presto! The long run collapse of the pharmaceutical sector would be upon us. Such are the wages of left-wing compassion.
This just in from the London Daily Telegraph, “Illegal sales of counterfeit medicines are booming, fuelled by a combination of the arrival of lifestyle drugs for ‘embarrassing’ conditions such as impotence, hair loss and obesity and their easy marketing on the internet, Britain’s drugs watchdog said yesterday.” Is this the first step towards blaming pharmaceutical companies for the frightening increase in global ethical drug counterfeiting? I’m sure there are some who will make that argument (hello Marcia!), but that’s not going to help address the problem. It’s like the old story about the police asking famous bank robber Willy Sutton why he robbed banks. His reply, “Because that’s where the money is.” The solution to drug counterfeiting isn’t fewer medicines, it’s increased vigilance. But, somehow I feel there are will be others who are ready and willing to blame pharmaceutical firms. How about this for a solution, no new drugs.
FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford has just announced that he and other members of senior agency management will travel to Miami, Boston, and Phoenix to hold open public meetings, according to the Wall Street Journal, “on any area the agency regulates, which includes drugs, medical devices, dietary supplements and most food products.” Well, that should certainly make for an interesting trip. Hopefully Les and crew will hear from some real people and not just politicians, “advocates,” and other sundry usual suspects. If you’d like to get on the agenda, visit http://www.grad.usda.gov/vision.
When Pfizer Vice Chairman Karen Katen appeared alongside Billy Tauzin at PhRMA’s recent announcement of the trade organizations DTC “Guiding Principles,” there was a lot of doubt as to whether her comments were anything more than supportive rhetoric. Well, today Pfizer proved they are willing, ready and able to really make a difference to DTC advertising and, more importantly, to truly advancing the public health.
At present risk information in DTC ads is neither designed nor delivered to be user-friendly. At present it is designed to be “in compliance” — and to truly advance the public health these things cannot be mutually exclusive. One of the things that Pfizer announced today is that they will undertake research (with input from the FDA and third parties) to help improve risk communication in DTC TV advertising, and will adjust risk communications accordingly. And, as far as the so-called “brief summary” is concerned, Pfizer has submitted to the FDA for review a new consumer-friendly and consumer-tested print brief summary. I hope they share their concepts more broadly, because if it works, there are broader public health communications lessons to be learned. And it’s about time because, as folks within FDA are fond of saying, the current brief summary is like the Holy Roman Empire. It is neither brief nor a summary. And it most certainly is not a useful public health tool. If Pfizer can help change this, more power to them — and to all of us.
And when it comes to disease awareness, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company is stepping up to the plate and putting their money where their mouth is. In 2006, Pfizer will invest on par with what it spends on a branded advertising to create more disease awareness with advertisements that do not mention a product; address crucial public health issues such as health literacy, compliance and improving the patient/physician relationship through additional non-product advertising; and continue a dedicated advertising campaign to promote their “Pfizer Helpful Answers” program that helps people who need help affording the medications they need.
These announcements are more than programs inoculating Pfizer against the anti-DTC desperados. It’s about saving lives and saving our health care system big bucks. Improving disease awareness, treating people appropriately and promoting compliance with medical treatments helps eliminate the costs associated with under-diagnosis, under-treatment and untreated conditions, which often lead to more surgeries and expensive hospital care. Understandable and accessible information, in the form of direct-to-consumer advertising (disease awareness as well as branded messages) also helps with other costly factors, such as low health literacy (which costs our health care system approximately $58 billion annually) and noncompliance (estimated at more than $100 billion a year in increased emergency room visits, hospital and nursing home admissions, and lost productivity).
Kudos Karen.
Center for Medicine in the Public Interest is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization promoting innovative solutions that advance medical progress, reduce health disparities, extend life and make health care more affordable, preventive and patient-centered. CMPI also provides the public, policymakers and the media a reliable source of independent scientific analysis on issues ranging from personalized medicine, food and drug safety, health care reform and comparative effectiveness.
