Author Archives: Walter Armstrong

Avandia on Trial

By Walter Armstrong | Published: July 12, 2010
The mid-July FDA advisory committee meeting to decide the fate of GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia (rosiglitazone) is widely viewed as a test case of how the agency’s new leadership will address controversial drugs with serious risks but confusing data. A request that GSK yank its diabetes blockbuster—three years after first being associated with an increased risk of [...]
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Government Crackdown on the C-Suite

By Walter Armstrong | Published: June 2, 2010
Over the past decade, the drug industry has paid tens of billions of dollars to settle state and federal lawsuits involving the False Claims Act—defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, promoting drugs for unapproved uses, paying kickbacks to doctors and pharmacies, and the like. Stories about off-label promotion of drugs with serious adverse effects and no proven [...]
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When Big Pharma Leaves Town

By Walter Armstrong | Published: November 16, 2009
Image via Wikipedia Wall Street smiles when a drug company gets with the program by “restructuring” and “rightsizing”—cutting costs through headline-grabbing layoffs. But for Main Street, the story of hundreds or thousands of sales reps, say, and researchers getting kicked to the curb is quite different. The two gi-normous mergers that closed in the past month offer [...]
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Tauzin to Boehner: Don’t “Bully” Me

By Walter Armstrong | Published: August 19, 2009
Image via Wikipedia PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin so far shows no sign of waving the white flag in response to an accusatory missive from House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner bludgeoning his former Republican colleague for leading the drug industry’s support of President Obama’s healthcare reform effort. Pointedly CC’d to pharma CEOs – Tauzin’s employers—and simultaneously [...]
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Playing Spot the Healthcare Lobbyist

By Walter Armstrong | Published: July 8, 2009
National Public Radio has posted an interesting, possibly provocative, but certainly confusing, item on its website. It’s a photograph taken late last month during the first Congressional hearings on the trillion-dollar healthcare reform legislation. Actually, it’s not just a photograph but a panoramic, four-frame, interactive feature complete with cutesy rollover icons. More importantly, it shows not [...]
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