The cows are long gone

We may have finally found a drug company representative we can trust.

Earlier this month, a BBC News report quoted Allen Roses (a senior executive of Europe’s largest drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline) as saying that more than 90 percent of all drugs are effective for only 30 to 50 percent of those who use them.

I had to read that twice to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me.

That comment is something you might expect to hear from a dedicated herbalist or some other alternative healthcare practitioner. But you don’t expect to hear it from a high-placed honcho for an international drug giant.

Why would Mr. Roses utter such a statement? Apparently because he’s a genetics expert with an eye toward the future of pharmaceuticals in which drugs will be tailored for specific genetic types.

It seems, however, that other executives at GSK may not have been delighted by the press coverage of Mr. Roses’ comment. The following day, the UK’s Daily Mail reported that GSK was “on the warpath” over the way the comment had been portrayed as a “gaffe.”

A GSK spokesman told the Daily Mail that Mr. Roses’ statement had been misrepresented. The unnamed spokesman said that anyone working in healthcare knows that “most people respond differently to medicines.” And, “Although medicines may not work in all patients, they do work in a very large proportion.”

So the spokesman basically rephrased Mr. Roses’ comment to make it more ambiguous, without actually refuting the truth of it.

That’s what you call closing the barn door after the cows are out.

But we already knew the truth about those “cows.”

To Your Good Health,

Jenny Thompson
Health Sciences Institute

Sources:

“Drugs Don’t Work on Many People” BBC News, 12/8/03, news.bbc.co.uk
“Glaxo Sees Red Over ‘Clanger'” The Daily Mail, 12/9/03, thisismoney.com