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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13656

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

Lilly backs Sunshine Act over declaring gifts to doctors
Pharma Times 2008 May 14
http://www.pharmatimes.com/WorldNews/article.aspx?id=13484&src=EWorldNews


Full text:

Eli Lilly has come out in favour of a newly-revised bill from the US Senate which will force drugmakers to reveal payments they make to physicians.

The Physicians Payments Sunshine Act, sponsored by US Senators Charles Grassley (Republican-Iowa) and Herbert Kohl (Democrat-Wisconsin) has been changed (and some say watered down) to make pharmaceutical firms and devicemakers declare gifts over $500 a year made to doctors, compared to the $25 limit suggested in a previous draft. The revised bipartisan bill, which would establish a national registry of payments, also reduces fines to $1,000-$50,000 from $10,000-$100,000 for each violation.

Lilly, which notes that it is “the first pharmaceutical research company to back such federal legislation”, became the first company to voluntarily make public its clinical trials and data in 2004 and last year it decided to reveal all of its educational grants and charitable contributions. Chief executive John Lechleiter said the firm “welcomes greater transparency in the health care system and believes this legislation represents an important step in building public trust and confidence in the relationships between the pharmaceutical and device industries and physicians.”.

Noting that “a key strength of the Grassley-Kohl bill is that it would create a uniform national standard for reporting physician payments”, he said that it sets expectations and create “a more efficient system for gathering, reporting and understanding such data”.

Sen Grassley said that Lilly deserves credit for its support of the Sunshine Act “and the leadership role it is taking for greater transparency” and praised its “forward-looking endorsement” of the legislation. Sen Kohl added that Lilly’s endorsement “goes to show that transparency of the financial ties between doctors and drugmakers is not only sensible, but do-able”. He ended by urging the rest of the pharmaceutical industry to follow the US major’s lead.

The response to the Sunshine Act has been less warm in other areas and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America says that it hopes any legislation will not “inadvertently imply” that these drugmaker-doctor transactions “are inappropriate.” Others, notably the influential consumer group Public Citizen, gave criticised the idea of lesser fines, saying it will not act as a deterrent to pharma firms.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909