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A letter from a friend at CCHR on Pfizer fizzing

I became acutely aware of the huge role Big Pharma played in drug pushing using supposedly scientific psych research and lots of promotion. That was 8 years ago and this week I spotted in the Sydney Morning Herald (Thurs 1st) that “the Australian Competition and Consumer Commisssion has introduced rules forcing pharmaceutical companies to declare all gifts to doctors”.
At CCHR many people tell us that they knew what their doctor was going to prescribe by just spotting the biggest bit of blatant advertising on the doc’s desk and this influence has been publicised a lot by CCHR.
This week I have been doing very busy but managed to spot a lovely bit of news in a financial newsletter from the USA on www.growthstockwire.com and I quote from them thru to the end of this post.
Last year, Pfizer spent $7.5 billion in research and development, a huge number for sure. Yet, it spent twice as much on marketing! That’s right, more than $15 billion on a legion of blond bombshells to push its top-sellers like Lipitor and Viagra…
Last December, Pfizer suffered a huge blow when it was forced to pull its top heart drug candidate due to “an imbalance of mortality and cardiovascular events” – meaning it actually induced deaths from heart attacks in clinical trials.
To add to its misery, the company announced two weeks ago that it was pulling yet another blockbuster-to-be off the market. But this time, it wasn’t because of safety problems. The problem was the company couldn’t sell the darn drug, even with its multibillion-dollar marketing budget.
The drug, called Exubera, was the first inhaled version of insulin on the market. The FDA approved it to treat diabetes back in October 2006. Yet, the company only managed to sell $12 million worth of the stuff so far this year. On the In the Pipeline daily blog, Derek Lowe, a drug discovery scientist, calls the sales “horrifyingly tiny… which can be rounded off to zero.”
Pfizer finally threw in the towel and pulled Exubera off the market, at a cost of $3 billion charged against earnings.
To anyone who knows anything about the drug industry, Pfizer is in big trouble. The company’s forecasts for both the side effect-prone heart drug and underperforming Exubera were well north of $2 billion per year. Pfizer hoped to stuff these new drugs in its sales bags in order to replace the $10+ billion it will lose in revenues when its patent on the world’s top-selling drug, Lipitor, expires in 2011.
With these two drugs now in the medical graveyard, there’s absolutely no way the company will be able to replace these expiring sales.
At a $170 billion market capitalisation, I wouldn’t consider touching Pfizer stock until it shed at least 40%-50% of its value, something I think will happen in three to four years’ time. When it does, a lot of folks are going to be unhappy when they open their retirement-fund statements. Pfizer is one of the most widely held stocks on the market. Fund managers just park money there, thinking the company will always be able to push its drugs to doctors and patients, a theory that was never disproved until the Exubera debacle.
I think Dr. Lowe nailed the company’s near-term future prospects:
“Pfizer’s situation remind[s] me of a slow-motion film of a train running toward a cliff… a colleague of mine said ‘Yeah, me too, but in this case they’re still boarding passengers and loading their luggage’.”

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Security Tips For Your Wallet

A corporate attorney sent the following out to the employees in his company:
1. Next time you order cheques, have only your initials (instead of your first name) and last name put on them. If someone takes your chequebook, they will not know if you sign your cheques with just your initials or your first name, but your bank will know how you sign your cheques.
2. Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put “PHOTO ID REQUIRED”.
3. When you are writing cheques to pay on your credit card accounts, DO NOT put the complete account number on the “For” line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number, and anyone who might be handling your cheque as it passes through all the cheque processing channels won’t have access to it.
4. Put your work phone number on your cheques instead of your home phone. If you have a PO Box, use that instead of your home address. If you do not have a PO Box, use your work address. Never have your Centrelink Number printed on your cheques. You can add it if it is necessary, but if you have it printed, anyone can get it.
5. Place the contents of your wallet on a photocopy machine Do both sides of each licence, credit card, etc. You will know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to call and cancel. Keep the photocopy in a safe place. I also carry a photocopy of my passport when travelling either here or abroad. We’ve all heard horror stories about fraud that’s committed on us in stealing a name, address, Social Security number, credit cards.
Unfortunately I, an attorney, have first-hand knowledge because my wallet was stolen last month. Within a week, the thieves ordered an expensive monthly mobile phone package, applied for a VISA credit card, had a credit line approved to buy a Dell computer, received a PIN number from DMV to change my driving record information on-line, and more. But here’s some critical information to limit the damage in case this happens to you or someone you know:
1. We have been told we should cancel our credit cards immediately, but the key is having the toll free numbers and your card numbers handy so you know whom to call. Keep those where you can find them.
2. File a police report immediately in the jurisdiction where your credit cards, etc., were stolen. This proves to credit providers you were diligent, and this is a first step toward an investigation (if there ever is one).
3. But here’s what is perhaps most important of all: (I never even thought to do this.) Call the three national credit reporting organisations immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and Social Security number. I had never heard of doing that until advised by a bank that called to tell me an application for credit was made over the Internet in my name. The alert means any company that checks your credit knows your information was stolen, and they have to contact you by phone to authorise new credit. By the time I was advised to do this, almost two weeks after the theft, all the damage had been done. There are records of all the credit checks initiated by the thieves’ purchases, none of which I knew about before placing the alert. Since then, no additional damage has been done, and the thieves threw my wallet away. This weekend someone handed it in. It seems to have stopped them dead in their tracks.
Now, here are some Australian telephone numbers which you might need to contact if your wallet etc has been stolen:
ANZ 1800 033 844
Bankcard Australia (02) 9281 6633
BankWest 131 718
Centrelink Fraud 137 230
Citibank 132 484
Commonwealth 132 221
CUSCAL- MyCard 1300 135 538
GE Capital 1300 369 904
MasterCard Australia (02) 9466 3700
MasterCard International 1800 120 113
Medicare 132 011
Members Equity 1300 654 998
National 132 265
Passport 131 232
Seniors Card 1300 364 758
St George 1800 028 208
Coles/Myer Source 1300 306 397
Travellers’ Cheques 1800 127 477
Virgin 2000 1800 080 000
Visa Card Australia 1800 621 199
Visa Card International 1800 450 346
Westpac 1800 230 144
Woolworths Ezy Banking 137 288