Spin Doctors and Spun Bioethics

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The Eli Lilly drug company used the Belsito & Company PR firm in its deceptive marketing campaign to promote Xigris, its drug for treatment of sepsis. A report in the New England Journal of Medicine accuses the company of initiating false reports of a shortage of the drug. Belsito and Company spread the word that "the drug was being rationed and physicians were being 'systematically forced' to decide who would live and who would die. As part of this effort, Lilly provided a group of physicians and bioethicists with a $1.8 million grant to form the Values, Ethics, and Rationing in Critical Care (VERICC) Task Force, purportedly to address ethical issues raised by rationing in the intensive care unit. Finally, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign was established, in theory to raise awareness of severe sepsis and generate momentum toward the development of treatment guidelines." This marketing campaign is especially troublesome because Xigris has been linked to increased risk of serious bleeding in patients who use it. (As we noted back in 2003, Carl Elliott at the University of Minnesota medical school has been raising concerns about this for years.)