Not-So-Public Relations

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The standard treatment for sepsis, an infection of the blood, costs $50 per day, but Eli Lilly has a new drug out called Xigris, which may not be any better than older treatments but costs $6,800 per treatment. That's not exactly an easy sell, but Lilly has hired a PR firm to launch a campaign called "The Ethics, the Urgency and the Potential," whose premise is that it is "unethical not to use the drug." "To reinforce the point," writes Carl Elliott, "Lilly has funded a $1.8 million project called the 'Values, Ethics & Rationing in Critical Care Task Force,' in which bioethicists and physicians from various American medical schools will examine the ethics of rationing certain drugs and services. It is a brilliant strategy. There is no better way to enlist bioethicists in the cause of consumer capitalism than to convince them they are working for social justice. ... It's no mystery, then, why pharmaceutical companies want to brand themselves with bioethics. But do bioethicists really want to brand themselves with Pharma? To take only one example: The pharmaceutical sponsors of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics and its faculty's projects are now facing multimillion dollar fraud sanctions (AstraZeneca), a Nigerian lawsuit for research abuse (Pfizer), massive class-action payouts (Wyeth-Ayerst), a criminal probe into obstruction of justice (Schering Plough), an ongoing fraud lawsuit (Merck and Medco), and allegations of suppressing research data on suicide in children (GlaxoSmithKline)."