What Will Be The End Result Of Bullying Biopharma?
By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL
If as adults we could invisibly walk on school playgrounds during recess, we might hear the stock response recited when encountering a bully — ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
How could we be so wrong?
Words most certainly hurt, but not just people. Companies, even entire industries, can be negatively impacted by the words we chose to describe their leaders, companies, and products. For example, consider a recent Wall Street Journal article by Peter Loftus with the headline — Ads for Costly Drugs Get Airtime.
Are We Forgetting The Positive Effects Of Drugs?
Ever since the FDA began allowing pharmaceutical companies to advertise prescription medication directly to consumers and drug companies figured out how to do so in keeping with all of the rules, DTC television advertising has been an integral component of biopharmaceutical marketing campaigns. According to Loftus, viewers of Fox’s broadcast of “Grease Live” on January 31 were treated to a glimpse of the latest biopharmaceutical industry marketing tactic — television commercials touting “costly” drugs. The commercial he references is for Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (BMS) Opdivio (nivolumab), indicated for melanoma, lung cancer, or kidney cancer, and shows patients and family members gazing up at hopeful messages projected onto buildings (e.g., A chance to live longer). Bruce Radcliff, a patient currently taking the drug since before it was commercially available, says the television spot creates “hope” for those suffering from this serious disease. And yet, the headline and focus of the article are about how much drug companies spend annually on television advertising, which — to me — is missing the big picture. For example, in the article Loftus claims that it would cost the average U.S. patient about $12,500 a month for Opdivio. He doesn’t explain how he arrived at that cost nor how he defines the average U.S. patient. Nevertheless, with a wholesale acquisition cost (WAC) in the $130,000/year ballpark (which does not reflect what wholesale distributors, payers, and PBMs actually pay), even if these cancer patients were paying only 25 percent of the WAC price out of their own pockets, $2,700 a month for most Americans is pretty darn expensive. But what cannot be debated is the drug’s effectiveness for those who are suffering.
Negativity — Words To Write By
U.S. presidential political candidates have set their sights on targeting “high-priced” drugs and the companies that make them as not only the big political issue for 2016, but a populist cause that could pull voters across party lines. For example, in October 2015, Hillary Clinton listed drug companies as one of her enemies. Members of mainstream media have joined in the fray, using unflattering adjectives to describe drug companies and the cures they develop. Let’s forget the fact that BMS researched, developed, gained FDA approval for, and is now manufacturing (all costly propositions) Opdivio, a drug that, when you combine all of the cancers for which it is indicated, benefits less than .1 percent of the entire U.S. population! But given our society’s current penchant for sensationalism, and mainstream media’s eager willingness to satisfy our craving, can we blame Loftus for using the word costly to describe drugs? While accurate, it’s not very surprising. When you think about it, he could have easily picked a variety of other adjectives to describe these same drugs (e.g., life-sustaining, life-altering, life-enhancing) and been just as truthful. If the headline had read, “Ads for Miracle Drugs Get Airtime,” do you think it would get America’s full attention? Miracle was once a term associated with Gilead Sciences and its Hepatitis C cure. But as we continue to focus on the cost of Gilead’s drug, absent is the societal value it brings. Instead, the mass media has taken to using more words like greedy to describe drug developers. From my perspective, our society has become content to bullying biopharma, and I wonder to what end. After all, when you consider all the positive things this industry has done (e.g., developed treatments that have shifted being diagnosed HIV positive from death sentence to a manageable chronic disease), is it possible that our embrace of mainstream media’s negativity has resulted in a brainwashed sense of societal biopharma entitlement that not only lacks any trace of gratitude, but fairness as well?