Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6295
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
Dixon G.
Pfizer boss admits: our image stinks
Scotsman.com 2006 Oct 22
http://business.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1562152006
Full text:
A SENIOR Pfizer executive has admitted the drugs industry suffers “crippling
cynicism” from the public about its motives and the huge profits it makes.
Jack Watters, Pfizer’s vice-president of medical and regulatory affairs for
Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, said drugs companies were
partly to blame because they have failed to promote the positive
contributions they make to society.
Films such as The Constant Gardener, based on a fictional novel by John Le
Carré, helped perpetuate the idea that drugs companies put profit above
everything else, he said.
The Constant Gardener tells of a villainous multinational pharmaceutical
group that colludes with corrupt governments to test its products on human
guinea pigs in Kenya.
Watters said: “We have done a very poor job of getting the story of what it
is we do out to the medical profession and the general public. Whenever
health and profit are in the same sentence, they don’t sit easily. We are
seen as an enormous marketing and sales operation.
“We need to get the message out that without the pharmaceutical industry,
the world would be a poorer place because there would be no new medicines.
“Probably the biggest resistance is crippling cynicism about ‘Why would you
do anything good for people? You have a profit-driven agenda.’ This is an
industry which makes very considerable profits. I don’t think anyone in this
world has the moral authority to decide what a reasonable profit is and
what’s not.”
New York-based Pfizer, the world’s fourth-biggest company, said last week
that third-quarter sales rose 9% to £6.5bn. Profits hit £1.8bn, up £800m
year on year. Pfizer’s best-selling products include the antidepressant
Zoloft, Norvasc, a treatment for high blood pressure, and anti-impotency
drug Viagra.
Watters, a former registrar from Crieff who lives in New York, said it was
the drugs industry, and not universities and public health bodies, that
carried out the studies into hypertension in 1981 which paved the way for
massive steps forward in treating heart disease.
He added that drugs companies developed successful treatments for victims of
the Aids virus in 1981.
He said: “Aids at that stage was found in North America. It was the
pharmaceutical companies that went to their shelves of products and said:
‘Let’s have a look at what we have got and see what we can do.’ The point is
that it was the pharmaceutical industry that delivered [the breakthrough in
treatment].”
Watters said the industry’s reputation has been damaged by its failure to
tackle the spread of Aids in Africa following the breakdown of apartheid in
South Africa in 1993.
In Sub-Saharan Africa an estimated 21.6 to 27.4 million people are infected
with Aids. The World Health Organisation had set a target of three million
people receiving anti-retroviral HIV drugs in Africa by 2005, but only
around 800,000 are being treated.
Drugs companies’ critics claim products are so expensive that locals cannot
afford them, and firms refuse to agree to voluntary licensing agreements
whereby local companies would be given permission to manufacture drugs.
Watters said: “You couldn’t possibly expect a company in Malawi to
manufacture the same-quality product as elsewhere. We believe price is no
longer an issue. The healthcare infrastructure is not there. Most people
suffering from HIV live where it’s hard to get drugs to them.”
