Published 2013.03.04 in CommPRO.biz

Bad Pharma, Trials & Travails

“Everybody’s doing it.” That lame excuse seems the only explanation of rampant bad behavior in the Pharma sector. However, it becomes more than bad behavior when it costs lives. Psychiatrist, journalist, author, Ben Goldacre, a Brit with more degrees and credentials than seem possible for one not quite forty years old, has a new book, Bad Pharma.

This quote from the book sums up his case: “Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer.”

Dr. Goldacre writes a weekly column, “Bad Science,” in the London Guardian. He has a history of well-researched work taking on the quacks and crooks in and on the fringes of medicine. His research on drugs and medical devices spills into America’s Pharma. The more of Dr. Goldacre’s work you read, the more horrified you become. Evidence that bad behavior is not an anomaly; it is common place, driven by the need to meet the quarterly profit marks Wall Street is looking for. And too often supported by doctors on Pharma payrolls who do not speak up publicly for a host of reasons.

How bad is it? This quote from Dr. Goldacre’s book nails it: “Sponsors get what they want. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefit of a statin. This study found 192 trials in total, comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different treatment. The researchers found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favoring the test drug.” When a sponsored trial does not deliver the results its sponsor is looking for, they bury it.

In a New York Times story* Johnson & Johnson, a communications community poster child for its response to the 1982 Tylenol nightmare, comes off practicing the worst of the worst. One of several memos from doctors working for J&J came to light in the first of more than 10,000 artificial hip lawsuits J&J is facing. The consultant was blunt in a memo sent to several J&J “C Suiters”. The doctor’s memo indicated that, “An artificial hip sold by the company was so poorly designed that the company should slow its marketing until it understood why patients were getting hurt.” 

This was not the only such report. Reports that languished for almost two years before J&J recalled the faulty hips. We’re not talking about recalling something simple; a hip replacement involves serious surgery. It would be unconscionable to put a single human being through the risks of this surgery once the dangers were known. To expose tens of thousands was criminal. The human beings –the J&J executives– who chose profit before ethics may have thought “Everybody’s doing it.” It’s time to offer a fitting remedy for such a deadly choice, a jail sentence.
*(02/15/13)

Murdoch Woes

It just keeps getting worse for the Murdoch Empire. An empire so vast that it’s hard to grasp the wide flung tentacles that encompass a host of newspaper, television and entertainment entities spread across the planet. Rupert Murdoch’s shadow darkens almost every English speaking nation in the world, from his birthplace in Australia, to Great Britain and of course the United States. They are all rife with Murdoch properties. 

Things first began to get out of hand in Great Britain. London’s rough and tumble Fleet Street newspaper world, the world that formed the Murdoch culture has ironically exposed behaviors that may end it all for the clan. A rival newspaper, the Guardian, has unearthed one misdeed after another. Most of the media coverage has focused on the telephone hacking the Murdoch London newspapers seemingly used at every opportunity. That, however, is the least of it.

Murdoch scion, James –who heads (in title if not in fact) much of the family enterprise– testified before Parliament that he knew nothing of any hacking beyond one rogue reporter. When the then editor of the now shuttered News of the World and their legal manager came forth with detailed testimony to the contrary, it left James flopping about like a fish out of water. 

Rupert started with a tabloid stable his daddy left him in Australia. He moved on to London while still in his early twenties and much later came to America where he owns a wide array of media from newspapers to motion pictures to television entities. Actually it isn’t “his;” while Murdoch effectively controls News Corp, it is a public company. In fact it is an American company headquartered in New York City.

While fibbing to a parliamentary committee is serious stuff, it is not the worst of the specters looming over the Murdoch Empire. The courts present the most serious threat. News Corp stockholders are lining up to sue. These law suits are serious but not nearly as serious as the gathering storm in Washington. Rupert Murdoch is an American citizen, and News Corp is an American company; both are subject to American laws.

The U.S. Justice Department is looking at bribes paid to London police by News Corp newspapers. Under our Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) American companies are not permitted to practice bribery abroad. News Corp is taking this threat very seriously, as well they should. They have hired a flock of lawyers to deal with it, many of them former Department of Justice FCPA experts.

As the noose tightens it’s hard to see any outcome short of the collapse of the Murdoch Empire. An outcome that would seem foreordained in a company run by a man described by one of his executives as, “a man who wants it all, and doesn't understand anybody telling him he can't have it all." That sounds more like a spoiled child than the kind of person we want running the largest media company in the world. While it fits the trashy tabloid culture that spawned Murdoch, a person of character would have grown into a more ethical mode. It seems a waste to have the resources Rupert Murdoch has amassed devoted to the smarmy ends he put them to.