Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9122

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

Rubin R.
Pfizer enlists doctors to defend Lipitor
USA Today 2007 Apr 2
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-04-02-pfizer-lipitor_N.htm

Full text:

Pfizer, faced with the potential loss of billions of dollars as patients with high cholesterol switch from Lipitor to generic Zocor, has been helping doctors wage a letter-writing campaign to slow the tide.

Lipitor’s U.S. patent doesn’t expire until March 2010, but health plans are encouraging patients and doctors to switch to the cheaper generic Zocor, or simvastatin.

Generic simvastatin became available in the USA last June. By December, doctors had written 2.5 million prescriptions for it, Consumers Union says. Lipitor still accounted for 43% of all statin prescriptions in the latter half of 2006, the group found.

Pfizer sent doctors a CD containing two letters, one to health plans, one to pharmacists. The letters argue that switching from Lipitor to a generic statin “for cost reasons alone will undermine the clinical judgment that went into the decision to prescribe Lipitor for this patient.”

“They’re using doctors as a human shield to protect them from losing business,” said Sidney Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group. “I would say it’s unethical.”

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Pfizer | Lipitor | Zocor | Sidney Wolfe | Express Scripts | Wellpoint
Wolfe added that the generic statin is just as effective as Lipitor.

Pfizer spokeswoman Vanessa Aristide did not answer questions about when the company began shipping the CDs or how many doctors have received them. The letters “were developed at the request of physicians who said that they would like to reach out to plans to let them know their thoughts on what should drive prescribing decisions for their patients,” Pfizer said in a statement provided by Aristide.

Generic statins (pravastatin and lovastatin are also available) helped Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits management company, save its client health plans $126 million in 2006, said Ed Weisbart with Express Scripts.

Simvastatin is in WellPoint’s GenericSelect program, which is available through Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans in 14 states. WellPoint’s Brian Sweet says switching saves plans $70 to $80 a month per patient.

“In its day, simvastatin was a phenomenal blockbuster,” says cardiologist James Moon, who has helped spearhead the switch from Lipitor to simvastatin in Great Britain, where the latter went generic in 2004. “It now also represents fantastic value for the money.”

The 40-milligram dose of Lipitor may still be appropriate for patients who need the most aggressive treatment, such as those who have had a heart attack, says Moon, of London’s University College. Aristide says a quarter of Lipitor patients take that high of a dose.