Peck reports another questionable PR pitch
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism
In the wake of the discussion over whether public relations folks should offer money to journalists to serve on focus groups for pharmaceutical companies, MedPage Today Executive Editor Peggy Peck writes about a story pitch she recently received via email.
In this case, the PR person offers to set up an interview, record it and then send it to Peck. Sounds like a pretty helpful offer, right? Well, as Peck says, “I would say beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
The email then goes on to suggest questions she might ask in the interview. And, to top it off, the PR person’s signature says the interview will be “provided” by a pharmaceutical company.
See Peck’s post for excerpts from the email and her reaction.
Related
- PR professional offers cash for attending Allergan-hosted event
- PR rep says journalists’ stipend to attend Allergan event was misconstrued
- Skin-crawling example of attempts to buy health care news coverage
PR rep says journalists’ stipend to attend Allergan event was misconstrued
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism
An invitation to journalists to participate in an Allergan-hosted “Facial Aesthetics Advisory Panel” that included an offer of a $250 stipend was misconstrued, according to the public relations representative who sent it.
Sarah Smedley, of Chandler Chicco Companies, said the panel was intended to be “in the nature of a focus group.”
The agency, which sent the invitation to 10 freelancers, wanted the journalists to tell them what types of questions their readers have. Smedley characterized the questions they would put to journalists as broad and not product-specific. Allergan manufactures Botox, Juvederm and Latisse.
They chose freelancers because they have a broad view and write for multiple outlets, according to Smedley. “There was no intention to get stories or coverage; we wanted to listen.”
Two journalists have accepted the invitation but one of them has declined the stipend, she said. “We expected a few to come to participate as experts in the media.”
AHCJ member Lisa Collier Cool shared the invitation with AHCJ, saying she considers this “an all-time low in drug company promotion to the media.”
Karl Stark, AHCJ’s vice president, said the organization’s board of directors was alarmed by the offer.
“We report all the time on the potential conflicts of interest that money creates between drug companies and doctors,” said Stark, a Philadelphia Inquirer editor. “How would this be any different?”
AHCJ’s Statement of Principles includes the advice to:
- Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
- Refuse gifts, favors, and special treatment. Refuse meals from drug companies and device manufacturers and refuse to accept unsolicited product samples sent in the mail.
- Weigh the potential benefits involved in accepting fees, honoraria, free travel, paid expenses from organizers of conferences or events against the desire to preserve our credibility with the audience and the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
“We really regret that Lisa [Collier Cool] misconstrued this,” Smedley said. “The allegation that it was a bribe took my breath away.”
Smedley, who said she has worked in health care public relations for about 15 years, said she was “disappointed that Lisa wouldn’t have called, reached out somehow … for more information.”
She said the invitation has been “misconstrued terribly wrong and out of proportion.”
When asked if she is aware of journalists’ codes of ethics, she replied, “We’re highly aware and we respect journalists and their code of ethics.” She said she also observes the PRSA’s code of ethics.
She does not believe their invitation was unethical and her agency will “conduct focus groups and adhere to codes of ethics, as we’ve always done.” This is the first focus group of this kind for Allergan.
A spokeswoman for Allergan told Forbes’ Matthew Herper that the stipend was “for their participation in a three-hour meeting as a means to compensate them for their time, nothing more.”
PR professional offers cash for attending Allergan-hosted event
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism, Member news, Studies
Journalist Lisa Collier Cool was “truly appalled” to receive an email that offered her a $250 stipend if she would attend a “Facial Aesthetics Advisory Panel” hosted by Allergen – makers of Botox, Juvederm and Latisse.
The PR pro, of Chandler Chicco Companies, a health care public relations firm, wrote:
The goal of this Panel is to engage in a discussion about current facial aesthetics trends and innovations, perceived gaps in data, and any questions, concerns or misperceptions your readers may have about products and treatments. Allergan will provide an overview of the evolution of the facial aesthetics marketplace and then will open the panel for discussion.
As a seasoned reporter in this space, we would greatly value your feedback, and we’d like to offer you a stipend of $250 for your attendance and insights.
Cool, who brought the email to AHCJ’s attention, said she considers this “an all-time low in drug company promotion to the media” and that this is the first time she’s received such an offer in more than 25 years of health reporting.
AHCJ’s Vice President, Karl Stark, said AHCJ’s board of directors was alarmed by the offer.
“We report all the time on the potential conflicts of interest that money creates between drug companies and doctors,” said Stark, a Philadelphia Inquirer editor. “How would this be any different?”
Cool agreed, saying she is “shocked that along with questionable payments to doctors, the pharmaceutical industry – or at least Allergan – is now stooping to offering fees to reporters, presumably in the hope of securing favorable press coverage for its products. I view this as a thinly disguised attempt at bribery and hope that this practice won’t become widespread.”
Certainly accepting such money would violate common ethical guidelines for journalists. For example, AHCJ’s Statement of Principles includes the advice to:
- Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
- Refuse gifts, favors, and special treatment. Refuse meals from drug companies and device manufacturers and refuse to accept unsolicited product samples sent in the mail.
The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics advises journalists to:
- Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
- Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
“Assisting medical companies with their public relations efforts is not the role of journalists,” Stark said.
AHCJ has contacted the representative who sent the email for details on this arrangement, including whether other reporters have taken her up on the offer, if any reporters have raised questions about it and whether this is an approach she or her company has used in the past. We will update this post if we get a response. [Update: PR rep says journalists’ stipend to attend Allergan event was misconstrued]
Meanwhile, Forbes’ Matthew Herper contacted Allergan and posted its response.
PR specialist: Health journalists have critical role
Health journalists may be surprised to find support from Paul Oestreicher, a marketing communications consultant and adjunct professor at New York University with experience in the pharmaceutical industry.
Oestreicher makes the case that the health care industry has a vested interest in increasing the public’s health and science literacy - something he says will be supported by “news outlets being repopulated with professional journalists to help carry information forward.”
Though the pharmaceutical industry has suffered from behavioral, communication and performance missteps that have lowered reputation, it is low health literacy among consumers and the decline of science journalism that are fundamental to this problem.
Oestreicher cites numbers that show the pharmaceutical industry is suffering from a poor reputation that will only be helped by the public’s ability to evaluate medical facts and evidence. He also cites articles and a survey done by AHCJ and the Kaiser Family Foundation about the critical need for journalists who understand scientific studies and statistics.
Professional health and science journalists must help to communicate the progress and the failures, and to differentiate the facts and evidence from the frauds and junk science. Unfortunately, we’ve seen surveys confirm what we already know about the state of health and science journalism over the past few months. It’s a shrinking, wounded profession. We know the symptoms – they’ve been well documented. Like the global economy, journalism needs a recovery plan.
First Amendment defense fails InterMune exec
If any company thinks a press release is protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, can’t be used by the government when bringing criminal charges, well, they can forget about it.
That’s what W. Scott Harkonen, a former chief executive at InterMune, is learning this month, thanks to a federal court ruling that decided a press release can be used by the U.S. Department of Justice to press a criminal indictment; in this case, the charges are wire fraud and misbranding of a medication under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
The backdrop: InterMune marketed a drug called Actimmune to treat chronic granulomatous disease and severe, malignant osteoporosis. In 2000, the company began studying the drug for combating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a fatal lung disease, but the study didn’t show effectiveness. In a 2002 meeting with FDA staffers, InterMune was told a subgroup analysis suggesting a survival trend for some patients was insufficient for approval.
Nonetheless, InterMune began promoting the drug to treat IPF and, in 2002, issued a press release announcing the results of its clinical trial and the headline boasted the drug demonstrated a survival benefit and reduced mortality in people with mild to moderate effects of the disease. Harkonen wrote the headline and byline, and controlled the content of the entire press release, according to the ruling. InterMune also hired a marketing firm to determine whether the press release would affect prescribing behavior of pulmonologists; a survey indicated it would.
But it looks like Harkonen’s words will come back to haunt him. U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel refused to dismiss the indictment, writing: “It is undisputed that the government has the right to regulate false and misleading statements made to doctors and patients about drug products in interstate commerce. Accepting the indictment’s allegations as true for the purposes of this motion, it is clear to the court that the speech at issue is not outside the bounds of the FDCA’s regulatory reach as being wholly protected by the First Amendment as a matter of law.”
Hat tip to FDA Law.
Pharma industry still finding its way in social media
Big pharma continues to dabble, tentatively, with social media. The latest example is GlaxoSmithKline, which this week launched its very own corporate blog, called More Than Medicine. The effort, which is edited by a corporate communications person identified only as Michael M, will purportedly devote more space to health issues but largely avoid discussion of Glaxo products, citing “unique regulatory parameters governing our communications” as a drug maker.
The inaugural blog post, which follows several weeks of internal testing that produced a few posts now on full view, contains some mixed feelings. On one hand, Michael M writes that “it is still unclear how, and in some cases, if pharma can appropriately utilize blogs, wikis, and applications like YouTube and Facebook to provide information about our products.”
“Yet,” he adds, “there is no question that patients, physicians, media, investors, payers, policymakers and others are increasingly turning online to social media resources for information about healthcare issues and products. So we feel obliged to these stakeholders, as well as our shareholders, to productively and appropriately engage in this new space.”
In other words, some trepidation remains, although perhaps not quite as much fear as existed several months ago (look here). Johnson & Johnson launched a corporate blog two years ago, although a blog run by its Centocor unit was recently lost to a corporate reorganization, and Glaxo runs a blog devoted to the Alli diet pill - sort of. There haven’t been any posts since September. However, Novartis, Boehringer-Ingelheim and AstraZeneca all use Twitter to deliver news about their activities; and Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca launched branded YouTube channels.
Nonetheless, in a recent story, Marissa Miley and Rich Thomaselli of Ad Age wrote that big pharma is lumbering toward the digital age. Glaxo, for its part, may disagree. But if the drug maker truly wants to create dialogue around issues at the core of its corporate mission, Michael M should be identified properly. Glaxo is more likely to connect with the public if the public feels a real person is at the helm, not an semi-anonymous mouthpiece.
Marketing treats risk factors as diseases
Maryann Napoli writes in the American Journal of Nursing that “in the name of prevention, millions of Americans have accepted the idea that it’s reasonable to treat a risk factor such as bone loss or high cholesterol as if it were a disease.”
Napoli zeroes in on low bone density, a risk factor for hip fractures that, through careful marketing, promotion of regular screenings and celebrity endorsements — all funded by a major pharmaceutical corporation — has been inflated into a disease that has sold millions of dollars worth of bone-density drugs. All this despite the fact that the affect of the drugs in prevention of hip fractures is minimal at best.
According to Napoli, “consumer advocate Barbara Mintzes summed up the situation nicely: “Bone mineral density testing is a poor predictor of future fractures but an excellent predictor of start of drug use.”"
More people should question the wisdom of starting long-term drug therapy. Often the magnitude of the risk factor has been overestimated, or the danger of the disease itself exaggerated, by people trying to sell you something —like a drug you must take for the rest of your life.
Academic docs collect money from manufacturers
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals
In a two-day series, “Side Effects: Are doctor’s loyalties divided?,” John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on university doctors who are paid by drug companies and device manufacturers.
“More than 40 University of Wisconsin-Madison physicians were paid in 2007 to work as speakers or authors by drug or medical device companies, records show. In most cases, they worked for at least two companies, and sometimes three or four. Several doctors described their work as promotional.”
Fauber looks at concerns that it can be hard to distinguish between education and marketing and that such practices “can influence patient care and raise the cost of treatment, in addition to blurring the line between research and marketing.”
He also points out that it may be difficult to figure out just how much drug company money is going to doctors because some of it goes through medical education and communication companies that are funded by drug companies and used to pay doctors to give speeches.
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