A Senate Investigator Looks Back: Thacker Speaks // Pharmalot:
"Pharmalot: And how the focus on conflicts of interest get started and why did you seize on that?
Thacker: That was triggered by a New York Times article in the summer of 2007 that involved a woman at the University of Cincinnati and in the story there was this moment - how much money had she taken from AstraZeneca, which supported the study she had done. And she said ‘I don’t know but it’s not a lot.’ It was one of those moments. Essentially, the story was saying this woman was full of it. I walked into my boss’s office and said let’s look at this. Let’s get her forms. We called the chairman of her department and he freaked out and got really nervous. And we sent an email to the general counsel of the university. And Grassley went to the Senate floor and made a speech.
Meanwhile, I learned the NIH had rules on COI and we sent a letter to AstraZeneca about a bunch of doctors in Florida who were high prescribers, and nothing was really there. I couldn’t find a pattern but found a ton of money going to this one professor, Delbello, and it was different from what the company was saying. So we made a chart…and it caused a panic in the university. You know, once you start to talk about peoples’ money and federal funding, they start to freak out and for good reason, because they know it could be shut off. The pharmaceutical industry knows what they’re doing. They’re cultivating these docors. We saw the emails. Some of these doctors are so big the pharmaceutical companies actually fear them because they can move market share. It’s a relationship and we told these companies that if they know some doctors trying to strong arm them, let us know. It goes both ways. Look at it this way - we weren’t going after the Soviet Union, we were going after Afghanistan. We were going after proxy states and the doctors were proxy warriors. And when it comes down to it, they’ll throw the doctors under the bus.
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