Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15702

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

Edwards J.
Bayer Triggers Scare With White Powder Sent Through Mail
BNet 2009 May 26
http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10002338/bayer-triggers-scare-with-white-powder-sent-through-mail/

Full text:

Bayer sent 33,561 packets of white powder through the U.S. Postal Service in a promotion for aspirin, triggering a federal alert to local emergency services. According to the Boston Herald:

“Police departments are going to be inundated with calls about this. The anthrax scare is still fresh in people’s minds,” said Lawrence Police Chief John J. Romero. “After 9/11 it’s a whole different ballgame, and I think the company should have probably realized it.”

The white powder was Bayer’s Quick Release Cystals, which Bayer is launching in the U.S. The aspirin may show as white powder as the envelopes travel though the postal system, the ProJo blog noted.

Authorities said the product was safe, and Bayer pointed out that the product came in a printed envelope with FDA information and coupons. A total of 178,000 envelopes will eventually be mailed.

The promotion ends May 29.

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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