Health News

Drug Industry Pledges New Openness

May 3, 2005 -- The powerful new head of the pharmaceutical industry's biggest lobbying group is calling for changes, but critics remain skeptical.

Billy Tauzin, the new CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), says drug companies have lost Americans' confidence and that the industry would begin working to "regain the nations' trust."

Meeting formally with reporters for the first time, Tauzin unveiled a series of steps intended to foster openness from an industry known up to now for secrecy about how it tests and prices drugs used by millions of Americans.

But consumer advocates, many of them longtime drug industry critics, still express disappointment that the plans don't address prescription drug costs that have priced medications out of the reach of millions of Americans. They also raised ethical questions about Tauzin, a former congressman for Louisiana who until a year ago led a powerful committee that was heavily lobbied by the group he now represents.

"The industry has found, I think correctly so, that the country has come to resent our industry," Tauzin says. "We've got a problem and we need to cure it."

Tauzin says PhRMA would expand the amount of clinical trial information in its online database, a move designed to give the public more access to the results of drug testing. Companies have in the past suffered criticism for disclosing results that cast their products in a favorable light while sometimes guarding findings that suggest a lack of safety or effectiveness.

Companies will also be encouraged to quickly alert the public when they detect safety problems in drugs already on the U.S. market, he says. Such "post-market" safety monitoring is now under scrutiny in the wake of the recall of the popular painkillers Vioxx and Bextra that were pulled from pharmacy shelves after being linked to heart attacks and strokes.

"If there are indications of that, these indications ought to be known early, and that ought to be communicated," he says.

Tauzin says his group's members, some of the world's largest drug manufacturers, are also close to finalizing new, voluntary ethical standards on direct-to-consumer drug advertisements that many blame for possible overuse of medications, including Vioxx. He says the guidelines, whose details he would not disclose, would call for ads to be "serious and educational."

The group also plans to promote insurance access for Americans who now lack it as well as step up long-standing programs delivering discounted or free drugs to low-income persons.

"It's not about P.R.; it's about doing the right thing. It's not about buying respect, it's about earning it," Tauzin says.

Public relations is by no means left out of PhRMA's strategy, however. Tauzin last week appeared on the daytime Montel Williams talk show to discuss, in part, how pharmaceuticals helped drive his recent bout of small intestine cancer into remission.

In addition to improving companies' public image, the moves are also designed to satisfy lawmakers eager to enact new safety regulations because of problems with Vioxx and other drugs. Tauzin says improved clinical trial disclosures should prove to Congress that tighter regulation by the FDA is unneeded.