Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9855

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

Hensley S.
Pfizer’s Kindler Speaks, Briefly
The Wall Street Journal Health Blog 2007 Apr 2
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/04/02/pfizers-kindler-speaks-briefly/?mod=yahoo_hs

Full text:

Newsweek lands a rare interview with Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler. And it’s the latest opportunity to take the temperature of the man who’s trying to fix the world’s largest drug maker.

Since taking over at Pfizer last July, Kindler (pictured left) hasn’t talked much with the press. He did a few interviews after the company’s busted bet on torcetrapib, a booster of good cholesterol, last December. He’s also been available at brief press conferences after meetings with analysts on the company’s pipeline and his restructuring plan.

Still the new guy on the pharma block, Kindler concedes that being CEO is “much more complicated” than he imagined. The former general counsel says he makes up for his science deficit by making sure there are “really talented and knowledgeable people running the different aspects of the business, including the science side of things.”

By far his biggest concern is keeping Pfizer employees charged up and on task, despite layoffs and uncertainty about the future. “The only good thing I can say is that I have discovered that most people in this company-including some of the people who are leaving-recognize that we’re doing the things we need to do,” he says. I hear from employees who say a lot of the changes that we’re making, as painful as they are, are overdue.”

Kindler also takes on criticism of drug company marketing, saying that direct-to-consumer advertising could benefit by returning to “a real science orientation, a balance about the risks and the benefits.” (More on that from Health Blog later.)

He defends the drug industry from the popular view that “we were more of a marketing operation than a science operation, and that we were spending so much money on marketing that we could reduce the prices of our drugs. That’s not economically factual, but I think we have, to some extent, ourselves to blame for that.”

Ed Silverman, who blogs about the pharmaceutical industry as Pharmalot, annotated the Kindler interview here.
[ http://pharmalot.com/2007/04/pfizers_jeff_kindler_in_his_ow_1.php ]