AstraZeneca Proves that Ethics Cannot be Legislated

I purposely refrained from commenting on the hullabaloo around AstraZeneca’s Mike Zubillaga expose and firing because practically every other pharma blogger is writing about it, along with a tsunami of message board activities around this incident.

Now that we’ve ridden several crests and troughs since the “money bucket” comment, additional information has come out from AstraZeneca regarding questionable sales activities, including off-label sales efforts and misleading clinical comparisons against competitors.

For those of you familiar with (or work at) AstraZeneca, you already know that this is one paranoid organization. Each employee seems to work under a gag order, which may be understandable given today’s public perception of the pharmaceutical industry, but AstraZeneca seems to be aiming for the reaches of insanity.

Now, I can even applaud paranoia if the result is unparalleled ethical conduct. However, based on recent events coming out of AstraZeneca, it proves that no amount of corporate lawyers and compliance officers and quarterly compliance training program can legislate ethics if the corporate culture rewards results that can come from questionable or unethical conduct.

I was also particularly intrigued that in many cases of concerns being raised about off-label promotion, it was the pharmaceutical sales representatives who raised these concerns to the company or to the outside. Hopefully this should stem public perception (and medical science liaisons’ perception) of sales reps as persona non grata across the board. After all, in the allegations of Abraxane copromotion between Abraxis and AstraZeneca, the MSLs were used “as a resource” in off-label selling efforts, yet the voices of dissent came from the sales reps themselves.

If Peter Rost and the rest of the pro-/anti-industry blogosphere didn’t pick up on this story, AstraZeneca supposedly would not have conducted any investigations on the matter. Now that AstraZeneca is investigating, it’s pointing fingers elsewhere. This is a shame.

P.S. I used to view myself as an industry observer (as opposed to industry critic or proponent) with a certain sense of optimism about the pharmaceutical industry. I’m no longer so optimistic.