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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15195

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

Wilson D.
Senator Asks Pfizer About Harvard Payments
The New York Times 2009 Mar 3
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/business/04pfizer.html?_r=1&hp


Notes:

Link to Senator Grassley’s letter: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/2009_03_03_Pfizer_letter.pdf


Full text:

Senator Charles E. Grassley on Tuesday asked the drug maker Pfizer to provide details of its payments to at least 149 faculty members at Harvard Medical School.

The senator, an Iowa Republican who is investigating the drug industry’s influence on the practice of medicine, also asked for any Pfizer e-mail, faxes, letters or photos regarding Harvard medical students who have protested drug company influence.

Mr. Grassley, in a letter to Pfizer, wrote that he was “greatly disturbed” to read an article in The New York Times on Tuesday describing a Pfizer representative taking cellphone photographs of the medical students last October at a campus demonstration against industry influence. “I find this troubling as I have documented several instances where pharmaceutical companies have attempted to intimidate academic critics of drugs,” he wrote.

The request for information about Pfizer payments to Harvard Medical faculty members in the last two years expands Mr. Grassley’s investigation of industry payments to three Harvard psychiatrists who had promoted antipsychotic medicines for children. According to records Mr. Grassley obtained from drug companies, the professors were accused of not properly reporting at least $4.2 million in payments from 2000 to 2007. One of them has been suspended from conducting clinical trials. The investigation continues.

A Pfizer spokesman said on Tuesday that the company “will fully cooperate with Senator Grassley’s request for information.” The spokesman, Ray Kerins, said Pfizer regrets if the photograph taken by the sales representative “was offensive to anyone involved,” but believes the company has acted legally and ethically and that collaboration with medical schools is “a valuable source of innovation and scientific advancement.”

David Cameron, spokesman for Harvard Medical School, said in an e-mail message, “We are unable to provide comment on this matter.”

Mr. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, asked Pfizer to provide details of faculty payments since Jan. 1, 2007, and communications regarding the students since Jan. 1, 2008, to be delivered to him by next Wednesday.

At the October demonstration, which involved about 50 Harvard Medical students and was sponsored by the American Medical Student Association, some protesters saw a man photographing them with a cellphone. He later identified himself as a Pfizer representative but did not give his name. David Tian, one of the students, photographed the man and said he worried that the man had been sending photos to Pfizer.

Mr. Kerins said recently that the man had told him the photos were for the man’s personal use. Mr. Kerins said the man, whom he declined to name, had done nothing improper. Harvard policy prohibits drug representatives from interacting with students on the medical campus but does not bar them from the campus or from taking photographs.

The dean of the medical school, Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, recently appointed a 19-member committee to review the school’s financial conflict of interest policies. Its first meeting, which will not be public, is planned for Thursday.

The American Medical Student Association, in a national survey of medical schools last year, gave the Harvard Medical School an F grade for how well it controlled drug company payments to faculty members. Dr. Flier said Harvard deserved an “incomplete” rather than an F because it had not submitted paperwork to the association. But the students said they had based their grade on Harvard’s published policies.

The Times reported Tuesday that Harvard officials had said about 1,600 of the medical school’s 8,900 professors and lecturers informed the dean that they or a relative had a financial interest in a business related to their teaching, research or clinical care. The faculty disclosures do not specify how much money they receive, nor are they public.

 

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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