Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14208

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Hill M.
GlaxoSmithKline drug ad sparks a debate
The Inquirer (Philadelphia) 2008 Aug 29
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/27649374.html

Full text:

Advertisements appearing this week that attack GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. don’t beat around the bush:
“DON’T BE FOOLED: GlaxoSmithKline’s scare tactics are only concerned with protecting its profit, not the health of people with HIV/AIDS,” the ads read.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) is running the spots in the Washington Blade, the Village Voice, and Frontier Magazine to counter GlaxoSmithKline ads that the group fears will scare patients away from new treatments.

In those ads, sharks circle and lions stalk alongside the tag line “avoid hidden dangers from changing your HIV medicine.”

GlaxoSmithKline, one of the largest providers of HIV drugs, has defended its ads as educational. And AHF itself has come under fire from other HIV advocates who say its tactics are questionable. Consumer drug ads are often such a touchy subject that controversy is their most common side effect.

This year alone:

Pfizer Inc. pulled Lipitor ads featuring artificial-heart pioneer Robert Jarvik after it emerged he was not a practicing doctor.

Merck & Co. Inc. and Schering-Plough Corp. stopped advertising their cholesterol pill Vytorin amid questions about why the companies had delayed reporting disapppointing results from a trial of the drug.

Ads for Lipitor, Vytorin and other drugs came under attack during a May congressional hearing titled Direct-to-Consumer Advertising: Marketing, Education or Deception?

That question sums up the disparate views of what is often called “D To C,” or “DTC” for short. Drug companies must submit ads to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before they appear, but the agency does not preapprove them. The FDA may issue a warning letter after an ad appears, but the agency considers only whether the promotions make accurate claims and disclose side effects.

“Basically, in very short and lay terms, an ad cannot be false, cannot be misleading, and must have what is called fair balance,” said Thomas W. Abrams, director of the FDA’s division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications.

The pharmaceutical industry is facing several years of soft sales as patents for blockbuster drugs, such as Lipitor, expire. It is countering that slide with an onslaught of ads. The number of ads submitted to the FDA has more than doubled – from 31,000 in 2001 to 68,000 last year, Abrams said.

He would not comment on the GlaxoSmithKline HIV ads. HIV activists also have criticized a Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. ad featuring an image of a toilet bowl that reads, “Ask your doctor if there are HIV medications with a low risk of diarrhea.” Bristol-Myers’ antiviral drug Reyataz is believed to be less likely than other drugs to cause that side effect.

GlaxoSmithKline, an early leader in HIV treatment, has been losing sales. Since 2003, the company’s share of U.S. sales of HIV antiviral drugs has shrunk from 15 percent to 6 percent, according to IMS Health Inc.

Ads undercutting competitors are common when products have been on the market for a while, pharmaceutical-marketing experts said.

“They’re more or less fighting for market share at this point,” said Michael Capella, an assistant professor of marketing at Villanova University. “One of the classic examples of that would be the Pepsi challenge.”

Bob Huff, antiretroviral project director at Treatment Action Group, a New York advocacy group, said images of sharks and lions only made patients fearful.

“From my perspective, this is the way that GSK has always kind of handled things in the past,” Huff said. “Their modus operandi is always kind of to bash the competition, and they do that in a number of ways.”

AHF President Michael Weinstein said, “Running Jaws ads is just going to raise the anxiety level very high. For people nervous about getting treatment, this could put them over the edge.”

But Debra Parmer, who works to educate people about AIDS in northeast Ohio, said she thought the GlaxoSmithKline ads were effective. They reminded her of a group that promotes condom use by filling a casket with condoms and using the slogan, “A tisket, a tasket, a condom or a casket.”

That image is negative, too, but she said it had encouraged people to use condoms and seek treatment.

Representatives from both Bristol-Myers and GlaxoSmithKline, which has extensive operations in Philadelphia, said they had vetted their ads with people who have HIV before running them.

AHF often mounts public attacks such as this one, which calls the GlaxoSmithKline ads the “Worst Drugs Ever.”

It has criticized many companies in ways that at times have aggravated other HIV/AIDS activists.

Paul Dalton, director of treatment information and advocacy for Project Inform, an advocacy group for people with HIV and AIDS, said he respected AHF for the treatment it provided to people with HIV and AIDS.

But he said the group’s campaigns “are always self-serving.”

In 2004, for example, AIDS activists criticized AHF for settling a lawsuit it had filed against Abbott Laboratories over the price of its AIDS drug by accepting funding for AHF treatment programs even though Abbott did not lower the price of the drug.

In 2003, GlaxoSmithKline’s then-chief executive officer, Jean-Pierre Garnier, accused AHF of blackmail after it had sued the company over its drug prices.

AHF spokesman Ged Kenslea said the group’s sole goal was providing good treatment for patients. He said AHF had gone after many companies, including Gilead Sciences Inc. Gilead’s general counsel, Gregg Altman, is on AHF’s board. The company competes with GlaxoSmithKline, but in an e-mail, Altman said he was not involved in the decision to run ads criticizing Glaxo.