Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12634

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Johnson A.
Lilly’s Next CEO Counterpunches for Pharma
The Wall Street Journal 2008 Jan 29
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/01/29/lillys-next-ceo-counterpunches-for-pharma/

Full text:

Some drug execs just sit back and take the PR punches. Not Eli Lilly’s CEO-to-be John Lechleiter.

Lechleiter (pictured) says his company and the industry get a bad rap, and he’s fighting back. “We can talk and talk and talk but we’ve got to walk the talk,” Lechleiter told the Health Blog on his way from hosting Lilly’s fourth-quarter earnings call to a press conference on Indianapolis’ potential bid to host the Super Bowl in 2012. “We’ve been forthright,” he said. “When we’re willing to come back and set the record straight, we’re showing through actions that this is not the stereotype people have of this industry.”

Most recently, the company put out a strongly-worded statement to refute allegations in the New York Times that Lilly buried negative clinical trial results about antidepressant Prozac. “All of which we would have told The New York Times … if only they had called and asked,” the company said in language we’re not accustomed to seeing in a press release. The Times later corrected the article.

Big Pharma seems to be on every Democratic presidential candidate’s list of villains these days–as well as John McCain’s. (Recall his sparring with Mitt Romney over pharma companies as “big bad guys.”) Lechleiter brushes aside the criticism that heats up in campaign years. His main concern, he says, is proving to Lilly’s employees and customers that “we’re not hiding secrets in the closet.”

Lechleiter, age 54, follows in the footsteps of CEO Sidney Taurel, who is stepping down April 1. Taurel is known for his industry activism, no-hold-barred responses to negative press coverage and leading role in the trade group PhRMA.

In an article headlined “The Media on Drugs,” Taurel struck back in the WSJ’s editorial pages against how the press (including reporters at the WSJ) covered the company’s decision to suspend two small trials of experimental blood thinner prasugrel.

“All boats must rise together,” says Lechleiter. “For whatever reason I think we’ve been an easy target, but … we’re one of the great American industries, and that’s a huge piece of common ground.”