Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18231

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

Goozner M
Inside The Pfizer Marketing Machine
GoozNews 2010 Jun 14
http://web.archive.org/web/20101011043601/http://gooznews.com/node/3372

Full text:

This morning I spun by the annual Washington conference of the Drug Industry Association to listen to a session devoted to industry-physician relationships in the wake of the new disclosure law. Starting in 2013, every company will be required to record every payment to every physician over $100 in a publicly available database. Needless to say, the session was well attended.

Cole Werble, a journalist whose father started The Pink Sheet empire (full disclosure: I now freelance for that publication) and who is now running an independent research shop, used as his text the corporate integrity agreement attached to the Pfizer-government $2 billion settlement. He took all the data in the public disclosure required by that agreement, put it in his own spread sheet, and came up with the following analysis:

In the last six months of last year, Pfizer made over $20 million in payments to more than 4,800 physicians;
Most of the payments — 58 percent or $12 million — went for speakers bureau fees, which the Institute of Medicine’s task force on managing conflicts of interest in medicine considered the most troubling form of industry-physician interaction since it is almost always related to drug-specific marketing; and
The average fee per physicians was $3,400, but 7 percent of speakers made over $10,000. In other words, a relatively small number of company-paid “thought leaders” made off with most of the cash, while most of the physicians in the list received a few hundred dollars.
Werble’s reaction to his own analysis of the report: “Elections have walk around money; this felt like talk around money.”