Monday, May 28, 2007

Describe Big Pharma in two words

When people bad-mouth the drug companies—and when do they not?—the word "greedy" figures prominently in their vocabulary.

To focus on that one line of complaint, though, is to miss the breadth of public hostility: Consumers think Big Pharma is shifty as well as greedy.

Polling conducted by Harris Interactive for the Pharmaceutical Safety Institute documents the degree to which people don't trust the industry to disclose bad news about its wares. Asked how confident they are that drugmakers "will eventually disseminate all information—positive or negative—that they have regarding the safety of their drugs," few said "extremely" (4 percent) or "very" (10 percent). Thirty percent said they're "fairly" confident, with another 27 percent "somewhat" so. But even such lukewarm trust was more than could be mustered by the 29 percent who declared themselves "not at all" confident of such disclosures.

The numbers were nearly identical when people were asked how confident they are that companies will release news of adverse reactions to any of their drugs "as soon as they have such information."

Source

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