corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18469

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

Comer B
PhRMA sweats Witty's EU samples cap
Medical Marketing & Media 2010 July 9
http://www.mmm-online.com/phrma-sweats-wittys-eu-samples-cap/article/174280/


Full text:

PhRMA said the reasoning behind a sharp cap on samples mandated by its European counterpart doesn’t apply in the US.

GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty, who also serves as president of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry and Associates (EFPIA), said in an EFPIA statement dated June 24 that “full adherence” to a new set of codes, one of which limits the number of samples a company can offer to any one physician (in the EU), is “essential,” and that “breaches should not be tolerated.”

Asked whether pharmaceutical companies in the US would be held to similar drug sampling limitations, PhRMA issued a statement emphasizing the “value of pharmaceutical samples” in the US, both for physicians and patients.

The ceiling on samples, known in shorthand as the “4 × 2” rule, limits EFPIA’s members – which include all of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies – to four sample packets per year, per doctor, for no more than two years after a drug is approved, according to the trade group’s leadership statement.

Colin Mackay, an EFPIA spokesperson, said in an email that “there will be penalties” for non-compliance among member companies, adding that “even self-regulation needs some kind of sanction to be effective,” although those penalties have not yet been codified, according to Mackay.

“There are many significant differences between European health care systems and the health care laws in place in the United States,” said PhRMA SVP Ken Johnson, in the statement. “In the US, free samples have helped improve the quality of life for millions of patients.”

Representatives at GlaxoSmithKline were not immediately available for comment.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








What these howls of outrage and hurt amount to is that the medical profession is distressed to find its high opinion of itself not shared by writers of [prescription] drug advertising. It would be a great step forward if doctors stopped bemoaning this attack on their professional maturity and began recognizing how thoroughly justified it is.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963