NY Times has an axe to grind with pharma
Jan/12/2007 06:19 Filed in: Pharma
Business
So are pharmaceutical companies public corporations who have a responsibility to shareholders and investors or not? Do they have a right to make profits and a return on investment ? The Times would have you believe that big pharma is evil and must yield control to the government because we can't trust them to do the right thing.It is time for the Medicare drug program to work harder for its beneficiaries without worrying so much about the pharmaceutical companies
There a millions of people who have a better quality of life thanks to prescription drugs. We can now control our cholesterol with statins; a diagnosis of AIDS or cancer no longer means a death sentence; and people with arthritis can still stay active all because, in part, to prescription medications. The Times however would have you believe that big pharma is interested in profits at the expense of patient safety. The recent series of articles on Lilly's Zyprexa was shortsighted and poorly researched. I can understand Lilly's settlement with more Zyprexa cases but for the life of me I don't understand why they allow the media to kick them around. It is a disservice to the people who work in the industry and to the millions of patients who continue to lead better lives because of Lilly products.
As a law student I learned that cases are based upon facts and only facts. To my knowledge there is no evidence that Vioxx causes heart disease yet in some litigation against Merck the plaintiff has won their case. Why? Because we want to blame someone and it's so easy to demonize the pharmaceutical companies and put them in the cross-hairs. Someone died and we want to be able to assign blame, right or wrong.
The Times definitely has an axe to grind with big pharma. Some senior editor or owner evidentially wants to socialize medicine so that pharma has less and less to allocate to R&D. They don't understand that it costs upwards of $700 million to get a drug to market and that only one of 7 products actually makes it to market. I hope the American public is smarter than the Times would have us believe. I hope that they can ask the questions which I have raised here today...if they can't than the American pharmaceutical industry as we know it today could be a thing of the past with fewer breakthrough products. Pharma needs a DTC program of its own to tell its side of the story..it's long overdue.
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