I've just posted this as a comment...

...on the Pharmalot thread that covers the Bob Fiddaman intimidation story, and I thought it summed up my position so succinctly that I'd post it, here, too:

Former pharma Marketing Exec wrote:
“…In the end, when you connect all the dots - and the dots always get connected - you can actually see the extent the management went to in order to cover up and deceive the very market they serve. The patients, their own scientific advisory board, their KOL’s…”

Yes, and yet, despite this evident and flagrant abuse of trust, it seems that no significant effort is being made to remedy the deficiencies of the system that permitted it to happen, in the first place. There will be a bit of superficial tweaking, obviously, but there will be no attempt to change the culture of secrecy and blind eye.

There is no argument, here: the drug doesn’t work in any but the tiniest proportion of depressed people. And it’s dangerous. The Company knew both these things, but continued to press the drug on an unwitting public. The only thing that saves GSK from a very public humiliation in the criminal courts, is, I suspect “the public interest,” as perceived.

That is, I imagine, the damage to the UK economy (loss of jobs - and people are already being laid off in Eire, where the drug is manufactured), and, more pointedly, loss of public confidence in a lie that should never have been peddled, when there is no alternative treatment that people are willing to consider, are the things that will be used as justification for doing nothing meaningful, at all. Meanwhile, people such as Bob Fiddaman will continue to receive shitty letters from halfwit lawyers on behalf of mealy-mouthed jobsworths.

Shit sticks. The things that GSK (and its regulators), would have to do in order to restore public trust are unconscionable for people with the mindset that these people have. It would mean that they have to admit that they were wrong - and they’ve positioned themselves such that that is not a possibility.

Matt