"The $430 million penalty was widely referred to as a slap on the wrist," said David Franklin, the Neurontin whistleblower from Pfizer.And U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris was also fed up: "You can't thumb your nose at the FDA," Saris said.
Everyone else is linking to this story, so here it is.
1 comment:
Yesterday, I casually brought up the PHARMA fines with a group of well know PHARMA MDs. These are MEN who run the academic studies for PHARMA and serve on MANY PHARMA driven advisory boards. Some give drug talks and study PHARMA, others just use PHARMA as treatment in their studies.
The consensus had contempt for DTC marketing (remember these are MDs), they had contempt for research driven by PHARMA (oh.. the hypocrisy), AND, they felt that all the fines WERE slaps on the wrists, and had heard they were "no big deal to PHARMA." I believe the words "wrist slap" and "cost of doing business" were thrown around.
Interestingly, their major critique involved comparisons of the PHARMA medications to NON-Adequate doses of the comparison medication. That is, the MDs were laughing about the fact that often the promoted drug is pitted against a 1/2 - 3/4 dosage of the competition medication. One MD said he calls them out on this while on the advisory panels.
This would be interesting to examine in a meta analysis.
Cheers.
BK
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