Monthly Archives: September 2009

Stock market tip: how to profit from the swine flu scare

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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 flu coughThe bad news: scientists are predicting a pandemic of the H1N1 flu virus, commonly called swine flu.  The good news: you can make money from swine flu!  Jim Cramer, the nightly face of Mad Money on CNBC, suggests that stock market investors should climb aboard the gravy train that’s headed for big drug company profits thanks to anti-viral drugs. “Who do I think is the swine flu winner?” is his rhetorical query. “Gilead, a biotech company that developed Tamiflu in 1999. Gilead gets 80% of its sales from its fabulous HIV franchise. But it also earns royalties on the sales of Tamiflu.”

This is apparently how stockbrokers talk – referring to the HIV virus and accompanying drug sale profits as a “fabulous franchise”.  Continue reading →

What drug company sales reps wrote on their BlackBerries

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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 blackberry office

  • A psychiatrist, originally skeptical about prescribing the powerful anti-psychotic drug Seroquel to his patients, becomes a super-prescriber who is rewarded by the drug’s manufacturer with generous $1,500 speaking engagements.
  • a neurologist jokes that she doles out so much Seroquel for her migraine patients that the drug company probably thinks she’s a psychiatrist;  she is rewarded with free trips to Scotland and Spain by the company.
  • a  busy physician has no problem leaving patients to stew in the waiting room while he listens to a pitch about Seroquel from a drug rep. “Dr had 3 patients waiting but did sit down with me x 25 minutes,” the rep wrote in her daily call notes.  Continue reading →

How to translate Big Pharma’s PR-Speak into English

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Purple money pills i stock 500 2That bad smell is the stench of yet another pharmaceutical company getting caught red-handed with their fingers in your wallet. If the folks at Pfizer Inc. had mugged you in the street and threatened your life, they’d all be in jail. But because they can afford a legal team that O.J. Simpson would have envied, they get off with a settlement of $2.3 billion.

That penalty seems small, however, compared to the $44.2 billion in pharmaceutical sales that the world’s largest drugmaker rang up last year.

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown University acknowledges that, while $2.3 billion is a lot of money,

“…but these are highly profitable drugs. It will not take them very long to make up that deficit. Drug companies will continue this unless the financial downside makes it unprofitable.”

Pfizer has agreed to pay this penalty to settle charges that it illegally marketed the pain drug Bextra and three other medicines for so-called ‘off label’ uses that were not approved by the Food & Drug Administration. It’s the largest health care fraud settlement in the U.S. Justice Department’s history. Continue reading →

How a British university sold out to a drug company

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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sheffield 1

A few years ago, Sheffield University in the U.K. offered over $250,000 to one of its senior medical professors if he would agree to stop criticizing the drug company that was giving research money to the university’s medical school.

For several years, bone metabolism specialist Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn had been complaining to his university about scientific misconduct around a contract between Sheffield and the U.S.-based drug company, Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals. Blumsohn claimed that the company had denied him access to his own key research data on the P&G drug Actonel, and then tried to ghostwrite his analysis of it for publication.   Continue reading →