Canada Drug Talk

Jeffrey Light

"The argument that drug companies can be trusted to provide adequate safety information on their own products has been used by the pharmaceutical industry to fight against government regulation of consumer advertising.  Clearly such trust is misplaced.  As Abbott’s actions have demonstrated, drug companies will attempt to hide unfavorable safety information when they think nobody is watching.

Jeffrey Light is Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Patients not Patents.

Source: Abbott Laboratories Deletes Safety Concerns from Web (Patients not Patents Press Release)

Editor's Note: This company and many others like it were caught by WikiScanner.  WikiScanner was developed by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology.  It reveals changes to an online encyclopedia by linking edits back to the computers from which they were done, using each computer’s unique IP address.

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Robert Bazell

"If anyone doubts the influence of drug company ads on patients and physicians — consider all those wasted billions of dollars for a pill that sells for more than six times as much as another drug that does the same thing, made by the same company."

Robert Bazell is Chief Science and Health Correspondent for NBC News.

Editor's Note: He is, of course, referring to AstraZeneca's Prilosec (costs about $30/month) and Nexium (costs about $200/month).  Nexium (the 'little purple pill') costs six times as much but is only 3 percent better at relieving symptoms.

Shame on AstraZeneca and double shame on the FDA top managers who approved this drug even though the officer assigned to the case concluded that the new drug offered no "significant clinical advance" over the old drug. Your actions wasted billions of dollars a year that could have been put to better use.

The Costly Side Effects of Nexium's Ad Blitz (NBC News)