By Daniel Connolly
Memphis Commercial Appeal
February 23, 2007
Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School was in Memphis on Thursday to continue her public criticism of big drug companies.
Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of the 2004 book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It,” has accused drug firms of abuses including price-gouging and running biased clinical trials.
She was in Memphis Thursday to speak at the Holiday Inn at the University of Memphis at an event organized by The Economic Club of Memphis.
“(Companies are) involved intimately in every detail of the research,” she said. “And they design the research so that their drugs look better than they really are.”
She has also called for the government to negotiate directly with drug companies for the Medicare Part D drug benefit and has said the current program was designed to help companies, not patients.
PHRMA, a national pharmaceutical industry group, has fired back. The group’s senior vice president, Ken Johnson, said Thursday that her position on Medicare is wrong.
“Marcia Angell’s misguided solution is to let government bureaucrats choose medicines for patients, instead of allowing patients and their doctors to determine the best course of treatment,” he wrote.
He also objected to a recent opinion article Angell wrote in the Boston Globe about PHRMA’s president and CEO Billy Tauzin, a former member of Congress.
Angell wrote that Tauzin sponsored the Medicare Pard D bill and left Congress almost immediately after the legislation passed.
“He was rewarded with a high-paying job as chief executive of the pharmaceutical industry’s trade association,” she wrote.
Johnson said Tauzin left Congress only after he was diagnosed with a deadly form of cancer and that he accepted the PHRMA job after a drug produced by one of the firms in the industry group helped him beat the cancer.
“This experience made him an advocate for researching and developing new medicines to fight diseases,” Johnson wrote.