{"id":39436,"date":"2013-08-23T22:16:51","date_gmt":"2013-08-24T02:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=39436"},"modified":"2013-08-23T23:41:09","modified_gmt":"2013-08-24T03:41:09","slug":"an-epidemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/08\/23\/an-epidemic\/","title":{"rendered":"an epidemic…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Eli Lilly says "deeply concerned" by bribery allegations in China \t<\/a><\/div>\n
Reuters <\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n
Aug 22, 2013<\/div>\n

U.S. drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co said it was "deeply concerned" about allegations published in a Chinese newspaper that it spent more than 30 million yuan<\/span> ($4.90 million) to bribe doctors in China<\/span> to prescribe the firm’s medicines instead of rival products. A former senior manager for the company, identified by the pseudonym Wang Wei, told the 21st Century Business<\/span> Herald that bribery and illegal payments at Eli Lilly’s China operations were widespread, the paper reported on Thursday. <\/p>\n

Eli Lilly is the third foreign drugmaker to face whistleblower accusations in the newspaper this month. The reports coincide with multiple Chinese investigations into the pharmaceutical sector, spanning alleged corruption to how drugs are priced. "In order to hit sales at rival companies and push the company’s own products, bribes and special payments of all sorts were extremely common at the company. The level of the problem was just as bad as at GlaxoSmithKline<\/span>," Wang was quoted as saying…<\/div>\n
hat tip to Pharmagossip<\/a><\/strong>   <\/sup> <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I’ll bet Eli Lilly really is deeply concerned<\/em>. Just as Richard Nixon was probably deeply concerned<\/em> about the exposure of the White House Tapes or Al Capone was deeply concerned<\/em> about those pesky I.R.S. probes. Such deep concern<\/em> is something of a universal lament among those in the recently busted set. But I’m not a bit deeply surprised<\/em> by these stories from China. When I read these stories, I remember once meeting a man whose chosen profession was armed robbery. He said, "You people are really lucky that we criminals are so damn dumb. We always think we’re so smart. This time, I can get away with it. This time I’ve figured all the angles. Later, I sit in jail and think up ways to do it better next time. So damned dumb!<\/em>" <\/div>\n

I doubt that pharmaceutical companies hire sales people who are like this man, criminals by design. But what they do seem to do is regularly create an atmosphere that produces this kind of criminal outcome. The way you get ahead is by meeting or exceeding sales goals that are independent of the value or need for the product. In the last post, I was talking about sitting through the Trial in Texas where a regional sales manager calmly testified about training his his reps not just to lie, but teaching them how to do it. And then they rolled out a diagram that had the "chain of command" from his level all the way to the top of the corporation [J&J], and he traced for us meetings that documented the source of this kind of training all the way up the chain. The suit was settled within a day or so of his testimony. It was a disillusioning morning.<\/p>\n

Now, in the ChinaGate story, we have two pharmaceutical companies implicated that have recently paid huge criminal fines – GlaxoSmithKline [Biggest Deal Ever: Glaxo Pays $3B For Bad Behavior<\/a>] and Lilly [Eli Lilly and Company Agrees to Pay $1.415 Billion to Resolve Allegations of Off-label Promotion of Zyprexa<\/a>]. Both have signed Corporate Integrity Agreements. And now they’re embroiled in allegations that they directly bribed Chinese doctors to prescribe their drugs. While that may say something about Chinese medicine, it says a lot about these companies. The kind of money they’ve shelled out for bribes is too much to hide as simply local expenses. I hope the earlier speculations [a credible shot… <\/a>] that the Western Governments will wake up and investigate these companies and this industry from top to bottom, inside and out, are right. This is an epidemic…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eli Lilly says "deeply concerned" by bribery allegations in China Reuters Aug 22, 2013 U.S. drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co said it was "deeply concerned" about allegations published in a Chinese newspaper that it spent more than 30 million yuan ($4.90 million) to bribe doctors in China to prescribe the firm’s medicines instead of rival […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39436"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39447,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39436\/revisions\/39447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}