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Welcome to the inaugural Pharma Blogs e-newsletter. If you'd like to receive this e-newsletter next week, click here for a free subscription. With the proliferation of pharmaceutical industry blogs concentrating on breaking news, the purpose of this newsletter is to take a longer look at some of the issues that have popped up in the past week. This week, I'm looking at how the pharmaceutical industry is struggling with Internet communication.
Crass comments or just plain honesty?
Take, for instance, the firing of Michael Zubillaga, a former regional sales director for AstraZeneca. As has been reported in even the mainstream media, Mr. Zubillaga was fired last Friday for comments made in an internal oncology newsletter published for AstraZeneca's mid-Atlantic region employees. In one of his comments, he exhorted sales representatives to make their calls because every office they visit represents a "big bucket of money," and in every visit, they should just "reach [their] hand into the bucket and grab a handful." When the print newsletter was anonymously sent to former Pfizer executive and now industry blogger Dr. Peter Rost, he posted it, and it was spread around the pharma blog universe in an eyeblink.
AstraZeneca's excuse for firing Mr. Zubillaga was that his comments violated the company's compliance program for sales and marketing practices. The cynical sales representatives that haunt Café Pharma, however, say Mr. Zubillaga was just being honest, if crass, in his comments.
John Mack of the Pharma Marketing blog views the flak over Mr. Zubillaga's comments as a sign that the pharmaceutical industry will not be sponsoring any employee-written blogs any time soon. He believes, however, that such blogs can actually benefit pharma companies and even offers a primer on how they develop them.
Speed of the courts outstripped by the Internet
Here's a second example of how the Internet's immediacy can create a furor. Internal documents about the marketing of the schizophrenia drug Zyprexa were leaked in December. The documents, released because of a legal loophole, were spread far and wide over the Internet and obtained by the New York Times. If you want to download them all for yourself, go here.
When Eli Lilly and Co. tried to include five Websites in a permanent injunction against further distribution of the documents, Senior U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein refused. Judge Weinstein cited the impossibility of monitoring millions of Internet sites and said making such a judgment against free speech would be beyond the court's powers. For more details about how the documents were released and what lessons Lilly and other companies can gain from the leaks, I refer readers to the upcoming May issue of Med Ad News.
One of the main problems confronting the industry is its abysmal image among the general public. The leaking of the Zyprexa documents and Mr. Zubillaga's comments are not helping matters. Lilly has admitted that the documents put the company in a bad light, but claim they are not truly representative of the millions of documents the company has already released in previous Zyprexa litigation. AstraZeneca has disavowed Mr. Zubillaga's comments, saying they are not truly representative of the company.
Negative but real
And then there's Café Pharma, which is read with simultaneous fascination and disdain by many folks in the industry. The overall view of the messages boards is that there are some good bits of information, but the reader has to trawl through a lot of scum to get to them. Profanity abounds, and this video, one of a series about the adventures of a fictitious pharmaceutical sales representative, humorously outlines the general Café Pharma way of commenting on subjects, their bosses, and the system in general.
Scurrilous comments from underlings about those in charge are nothing new. The avid student of medieval history is familiar with Procopius of Caesarea's "The Secret History." In his public life, Procopius was a Byzantine court official in the 6th century A.D. who wrote public accounts of events that were flattering to the emperor and empress, Justinian and Theodora. In private, however, he was writing a history that did a real hatchet job on the rulers, with pornographic details that outdo anything said by the Café Pharma pottymouths. There's been a lot of debate about whether "The Secret History" was really written by Procopius; most historians generally agree it was. Then there is the debate about whether what he wrote was true or exaggeration.
View the whole picture
In the end, when forming a view of a time or place, a serious historian has to sit down with all of the sources, sift through them, and look for the points of intersection. Just because it's smutty and vicious doesn't make it a bad primary source. This is where the pharmaceutical industry has a problem: anything not particularly flattering is denied, covered in a mask of shiny spin. Yet the sludge of Café Pharma persists, and the lesson to be learned is that the more the sludge and the behaviors that cause the sludge to appear are denied and suppressed, rather than addressed or acknowledged, the more the discontent grows. Journalists twig on to this because, at their hearts, they are historians many academics call journalism "history in a hurry." The Internet is not just history in a hurry, it's history at lightspeed. The pharmaceutical industry is unable to tell its story because it won't acknowledge the bad bits. Anything that remotely can rescue the industry's reputation gets buried under the old "trade secrets" heading, causing details to come out very slowly, if at all. So the everyday historians journalists and bloggers alike longing for good primary sources, focus on the sludge because it breathes an authenticity the carefully crafted press releases and press statements completely fail to do.
Procopius managed to keep his secret writings out of the public eye during his lifetime, and he had a good motive. Justinian and Theodora would have made his life very painful and very short. Today, the old boy would have blogged it all, anonymously perhaps. Today, a thousand anonymous Procopiuses have hijacked the industry's reputation at lightspeed. Pharmaceutical executives don't have the option of ordering these enemies to be executed, so the sludge bubbles on. If the industry can't counter the sludge in a fast, meaningful way, the industry's good reputation will continue to be tarnished.
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