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"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Today's Stories

April 30, 2007

Frank Menetrez
Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who's Right and Who's Wrong?

April 28 / 29, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Is Global Warming a Sin?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Versailles on the Potomac

Fred Gardner
Fuel for a Killer: What Drugs Had Cho Taken?

David Orchard
and Michael Mandel

Afghanistan and Iraq are the Same War

Alan Maass
The War on Hip Hop: an Interview with Dave Marsh

Joe Bageant
Why Are Leftists So Damn Afraid of God?

Robert Fantina
The Rhetoric of Dick Cheney: Lying as Art Form

Hanan Ashrawi
Palestine and Peace: the Looming Challenges

Ron Jacobs
Return of the Guitar Army

Nicole Colson
The Surpeme Court Targets Abortion Rights

Ben Terrall
Tracking Torture

Missy Beattie
Quit Your Day Job, George

Harvey Wasserman
The Lesson of Chernobyl

Cindy Beringer
The Horrors of Hutto: Inside Texas' For-Profit Immigrant Prison

Mike Roselle
The Dog Philosophy: What Kant Can't Tell Us About Why We Love Wilderness

RAWA
Freeing Afghanistan

James McEnteer
Where the Movie Villains are American: Screening Films in Bolivia

Poets' Basement
For Stew Albert

Website of the Weekend
Rudy and Donald: the Drag Smooch


April 27, 2007

Eva Liddell
How Can Women Defend Themselves Against Stalkers?

Phyllis Bennis
and Robert Jensen

Moving Beyond Anti-War Politics

Mike Whitney
Where's the Beef?: Padilla and the Zucchini Prosecution

Michael F. Brown
Biden and Pelosi: Failing to Hold Israel Accountable for War Crimes in Lebanon

Jordan Flaherty
Forgotten Mississippi

Margaret Kimberly
John McCain, Cold-Blooded Senator

Christopher Brauchli
The Dangers of Unstable People

Jacob Mundy
Stalemate in the Western Sahara?

Website of the Day
Yee Speaks


April 26, 2007

Andrew Cockburn
Wolfowitz's War

Franklin Lamb
Giuliani Plays the Islamic Terror Card

Patrick Cockburn
Al-Qa'ida Group Behind US Deaths in Iraq

Roger Morris
Dispatches From the Front

Henry Siegman
The Three Nos of Jerusalem

Alevtina Rea
A Sister City Debate in Rachel Corrie's Hometown

Paris
Are You a Hip Hop Apologist?

Nikolas Kozloff
White Racism and the Aymara in Bolivia

Alan Farago
Dow 13,000 Disconnect

Matthew S. Miller
The Limits to Lakoff

Website of the Day
PBS: Blaming Blacks Again


April 25, 2007

Sharon Smith
The Rights of Children in America

David Price
The Long Lost War

Diana Johnstone
Who Wants Sarko? New or Old France?

Brendan Cooney
Cho and Cheney: Killer Looks

Sonja Karkar
Israeli Democracy, For Jews Only?

Brian Concannon
Wolfowitz and Haiti

Lee Gaillard
Baptism Under Fire: Can the Osprey Fly?

Leah Fishbein
Women Under Siege

Dave Lindorff
The First Shoe Drops

Neal Galloway
US Agricultural Policy is Destructive at Home and Abroad

Website of the Day
Anti-War Student Movements: a Short History

 

April 24, 2007

Ishmael Reed
How Imus' Media Collaborators Almost Rescued Their Chief

Lila Rajiva
Tragedy and Irony After Virginia Tech

Paul Craig Roberts
The War Goes Ever On

Patrick Cockburn
Sunnis Protest Baghdad's "Prison Wall"

Ralph Nader
The Corporate Debasement of Earth Day

Mike Whitney
Housing Bubble Boondoggle

Website of the Day
"Refugees"

 

April 23, 2007

Saul Landau
The Courage to Withdraw

Patrick Cockburn
Time of the Death Squads: Iraq as Revenge Tragedy

Robert Fantina
Changing Sentiments

Sam Husseini
The Gonzales Distraction

Corporate Crime Reporter
Bought-and-Paid-For Journalism at the Philly Inquirer

Elizabeth Lalasz
Sick and Getting Sicker

Harvey Wasserman
Earth Day, Incorporated

Dave Lindorff
Huge Win for Impeachment in Vermont: Are You Listening Sen. Leahy?

Gary Leupp
Maoist Homophobia in Nepal?

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of the Christian Right

Website of the Day
No to OLF


April 21 / 22, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Bring Back the Posse

Fred Gardner
Prozac Madness

Kristoffer Larsson
The Islamic Threat to Europe: By the Numbers

Barbara Rose Johnston
Nuclear War and Its Consequences

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Heart of Whiteness: Racism, Wealth and IQ

John Scagliotti
Unlocking Closets, Locking Free Speech

Marjorie Cohn
Gonzo Justice: Counting on Alberto

Patrick Cockburn
Sadr Raises the Stakes

Diana Johnstone
The Absent Middle East

Ron Jacobs
Explaining the Spectre

Evelyn Pringle
How Iraq Was Looted

BANCO
Travesties of Justice in a Black City in Michigan: the Persecution of Rev. Pinkney

Paul Richards
Thinking Big in the Northern Rockies

Dan Bacher
Zapatistas in the Colorado River Delta

Ben Terrall
Showdown at Chevron: SF Protest Against New Iraq Oil Law

Sherwood Ross
How the Taliban Defeated the Pakistani Army in Waziristan

Remi Kanazi
Bill Maher's "Towel-Headed Hos"

Aseem Shrivastava
Behind the Curtain of SEZs

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Reed, Harley and Engel

Website of the Day
Reading Sappho in New Orleans

 

April 20, 2007

Doug Peacock
Beginning of the End for the Yellowstone Grizzly?

Diane Farsetta
Onward, Free Market Soldiers!: Privatizing Public Diplomacy

Tom Clifford
The Surge in Iraqi Civilian Deaths: the Bloodiest 12 Months of the War

Amira Hass
The Holocaust as Political Asset

Nicole Colson
Desperation in Gitmo's Camp 6

Sonja Karkar
Double Jeopardy Entraps Palestinians

Heather Gray
The Supreme Court Looks a Lot Like the Taliban

Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban
Syrian Expeditions

Agustin Velloso
Spain and Iraq, Four Years On

Matthew Koehler
Distorting the News in a Timber Company Town

Website of the Day
Gonzo's Monica

 

April 19, 2007

Emad Mekay /
Jim Lobe
Scoring at the World Bank: Wolfowitz's Quid Pro Quo

Patrick Cockburn
A Day of Bombs and Blood in Baghdad

Larry C. Johnson
The Hobbesian Hell of Iraq: How Many Dead Equal a Failed Government?

Norman Solomon
Bowing Down to Our Own Violence

Saul Williams
Notes from a Hip Hop Head: an Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey

Sunsara Taylor
From Iraq to the Supreme Court: a New Dark Ages for Women

Harvey Wasserman
How Green is Tom Friedman?

Christopher Brauchli
Apologies, Incorporated

Anthony Papa
Nightmare Behind Bars: John Valverde's Fight for Freedom

Dave Lindorff
Betraying Thomas Jefferson

Website of the Day
The Best Antiwar Song of the Iraq War?


April 18, 2007

Lila Rajiva
More Gun Laws or Fewer Idiots? How the Va Tech Administration Failed Its Campus

Landau / Hassen
Tancredo as 17th Century Indian Chief?

Charles Fisher /
Randy Fisher

Don Imus's Firing and the Hip-Hop Culture

Diane Christian
Facing Death Politically

Kevin Prosen
Meeting the Resistance in Iraq

China Hand
Gold Digging: The U.S. Treasury Department's Economic Campaign Against North Korea

Peter Rost, MD
The Strange Profits from a Re-Branded Cancer Drug

Justin Akers Chacón
What's Inside the STRIVE Bill

Jerry Kroth
Virginia Tech and Cho Seung Hui: Love and Unhappiness in an Alien Culture

Sherwood Ross
Massacre at Va Tech: a Brief Glimpse into Daily Life in Iraq

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Bonfire of the Hannities

Alice Cherbonnier
Why South Dakota's "Informed Consent" Law Doesn't Go Far Enough

Website of the Year?
"I Hope I Die Before I Get Old"

 

April 17, 2007

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
The Elections in France: a Coming Political Tsunami

Paul Craig Roberts
Bloodbath in Blacksburg

Frida Berrigan
Militarizing the Border

Alison Weir
The Message of PBS's "Crossroads" Series: Some Muslims Aren't Bad

John Walsh
Why is the Peace Movement Silent About AIPAC?

Jason Hribal
Resistance is Futile: Emily the Cow and Tyke the Elephant

Evelyn Pringle
The Iraq Money Trail

Ben Terrall
Cuban Exiles Get Hero's Welcome; Haitian Refugees Get Shafted

Stan Cox
1040s and Death Certificates

Soren Ambrose
Confidence Crisis at the IMF

Website of the Day
Go Ahead and Yell: "FIRE!"

 

April 16, 2007

John F. Sugg
Hate and Hypocrisy in the Cox Empire

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Escalating Military Spending: Income Redistribution in Disguise

Carl G. Estabrook
The Politics of the Useful Threat: It Didn't Start with the Neo-Cons

Paul Craig Roberts
The Party of Brownshirts

Uri Avnery
Blood on Our Hands

Ralph Nader
Where Are the Cries of Outrage Over Military Rapes?

Eamon McCann
Shame of the Empire: Simon, Sir Bono and Tinkerbelle

Lee Sustar
Decoding the Democrats

Mike Whitney
Trouble in Squanderville: Bubble People and the Faith-Based Market

Don Fitz
Solar Capitalism?

Stephen Lendman
Ecuador Votes for Revolutionary Change

Website of the Day
Black Mesa Water Coalition

 

April 14 / 15, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Ho Industry Whores

Jorge Mariscal
Gen. Petraeus's Field Manual: a Traveler's Guide to Big Muddy

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Beautiful and the Dammed: How the West Got Flooded

Dave Marsh
The Imus Affair, Hip Hop and Politics

Dr. Trudy Bond
Shrinks, Lies and Torture: How Psychologists Became the Pentagon's Bitches

Joe Bageant
A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard

Fidel Castro
The Terrorist Walks

Alfredo Molano
"More Than Complicated"

Alan Farago
When Miami Crashes

Michael Neumann
Anglophone Fantasies and French Realities

Fred Gardner
Barbara McNair's Unsung Heroism: Bringing Down the Owner of EST

Ron Jacobs
A Conversation with Three Iraq Veterans Against the War

Gail Dines
Racy Sex, Sexy Racism

Linda Ford
Imus and Lady Hoopsters: a Long History of Bias Against Women Athletes

Missy Beattie
What Would Imus Do?: Iraq, Ho, Ho, Ho

Dan La Botz
Farm Labor Organizer Murdered in Mexico

Giuliana Sgrena
The Lies of Mario Lozano

Laura Carlsen
A Moratorium on Free Trade Agreements

Abu Spinoza
Wolfowitz's Real Crimes

Elizabeth Schulte
Grinding It Out with Quentin Tarantino

Poets' Basement
Davies, Harley, Engel and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Vonnegut's Final Interview

 

April 13, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Shattering of Mosul

Stephen Soldz
Aid and Comfort for Torturers: Psychology and Coercive Interrogations in Historical Perspective

George Ciccarriello-Maher
The Failed Chávez Coup: Five Years On

Laith al-Saud
Kirkuk, Oil and the Kurds

Dave Zirin
Memo to Imus

John Ross
Drawing a Line in the Heartland

Ramzy Baroud
America as Proxy

Harvey Wasserman
The Novelist Who Hated War: Peace Be With You, Mr. Vonnegut

Lopez, Olivo and Garcia
Columbia University's Two-Tiered Punishments

Dols, Fukumori, Judd and Tillett-Saks
Columbia: On the Wrong Side of Justice

Website of the Day
Democrats: an Iraq Scorecard

 

April 12, 2007

JoAnn Wypijewski
We May be Rid of Imus, But We're Still Stuck with the Culture

Paul Craig Roberts
Big Profits from Big Brother

Marjorie Cohn
U.S. Attorneys and Voting Rights

Evelyn Pringle
Bush Family War Profiteering: Will Congress Finally Cut Them Off?

Ron Jacobs
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Norman Solomon
The Awful Truth About Hillary, Barack and John

Joe DeRaymond
The Release of Dennis Counterman: The Justice Game, the Alford Plea and Death Row

Nicola Nasser
Squeezing Palestinians into an Impossible Mission

Nikolas Kozloff
Chile, a Country Geographically Located in South America "By Accident"

William S. Lind
Horatio Hornblower's Worst Nightmare

Siegfried L. Sassoon
A Statement Against the Continuation of the War

Website of the Day
Where You Want This Killin' Done?

 


April 11, 2007

R. T. Naylor
Quebec's Lessons for the US: How "Wars on Terror" Should be Fought

Vijay Prashad
The Generation of IEDs and iPods

Patrick Cockburn
The Myth of Tal Afar

Winslow T. Wheeler
When Will the War Money Really Run Out?

Jack Balkwill
Prison for a Peacemaker: A Vietnam Vet Interviews Kathy Kelly

Alan Farago
Florida's Fundamentally Weak Environmental Movement

Russell D. Hoffman
The Carbon Offset Tax is Just Another Nuke Bailout

Peter Rost, MD
The Fine Print on Drug Industry Kickbacks

Mike Whitney
Doomsday for the Greenback?

Dave Lindorff
Torture and Selective Outrage

Susie Day
Peter Pace Porks a Peck of Pinko Perverts

Website of the Day
Save the Internet!

 

April 10, 2007

James G. Abourezk
How Syria Helped the US in the "War on Terror"-and How Bush Said "Thanks"

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Why Imus Should be Fired-And Why He Won't Be

Joshua Frank
Democrats for War

Lee Sustar
How Concessions by UAW Lost Jobs

Joseph Grosso
Tiger Woods in Dubai: Luxury and Exploitation

Nirmal Ghosh
China and the Fate of the Tiger

Robert Jensen
Impeach the System

Ramzy Baroud
Not an Intellectual Squabble

Paul Rockwell
History Will Vindicate Lt. Ehren Watada

Mario Joseph and
Brian Concannon

Solidaridad? Chávez in Haiti

Fred Wilhelms
Why the New Royalty Rates Hurt Artists

Website of the Day
Thaw!

 

April 9, 2007

Saul Landau
Whining Imperialists

Uri Avnery
Shalom, Shin Bet

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Nightmare: an Interview with Nahla Al-Arian

Gideon Levy
Israel Does Not Want Peace

Corporate Crime Reporter
Big Coal Invokes Reverse Nuremberg Defense

Evelyn Pringle
The Surge in Casualties

Hill Kemp
Mega Lessons from Iraq War, Year 5

Martha Rosenberg
Monsanto's Desperate Plea: "Regulate Our Competitors!"

Keith Rosenthal
Behind Boston's Recent "Crime Wave"

Jane Stillwater
Green Zone Cabin Fever

Website of the Day
Support Norman Finkelstein


April 7 / 8, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Dogs Don't Bleed: How Giuliani Lost America

Sara Roy
A Jewish Plea

Arno J. Mayer
Back to Cleopatra's Nose: Bush-Bashing and Empire's Onward March

Jeffrey St. Clair
In the Realm of the Grizzly Kings

Vicente Navarro
Why Huntington and Beck Are Wrong

Fidel Castro
Where Have All the Bees Gone? And Other Reflections on the Internationalizaton of Genocide

Fred Gardner
Medical News from the Business Pages

Ralph Nader
The IRS Owes You Money

David N. Rahni
Test Tube Zealots: American Chemical Society Purges Iranian Chemists

Arthur Neslen
When an Anti-Semite is Not an Anti-Semite

Pratyush Chandra
Joseph Stiglitz's "Another World"

Missy Beattie
Enough Already! The Politics of Exasperation

Marc Levy
A Beginner's Guide to Combat

Poets' Basement
Reiss, Holt, Orloski and Louise

Website of the Weekend
Reactor Man

 

April 6, 2007

Franklin Lamb
Why is Hezbollah on the Terrorism List?

Gloria La Riva
On the Case of the Cuban Five and Luis Posada Carriles

Corporate Crime Reporter
The Politics of Coal in West Virginia

Ron Jacobs
Good Friday, Beethoven and Patti Smith

Felice Pace
Simon Says: The Pro-Israel Bias of NPR

Walter Brasch
Treason in the White House?

David Swanson
Heroes, Sung and Unsung

Sylvia Syracuse
Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala


April 5, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
A De Facto Hostage Exchange

Tom Barry
The Fred Thompson Factor

Richard W. Behan
Congressional Complicity

Nicola Nasser
Playing US Politics with Iraqi Blood for Oil

Bernadine Dohrn
The New and Old SDS: Convergence Not Division

Laray Polk
Lucky Dragon: Does the World Really Need a New H-Bomb?

Helen Redmond
Female Chauvinist Pigs?

 

April 4, 2007

Col. Dan Smith
"Have You No Sense of Decency?": the Tillman Affair and the Moral Decay of the Army

Joshua Frank
Democratic Blood Money: Sen. Feinstein's War Profiteering

Margaret Kimberly
Of Confessions and Torture

Sharon Smith
Circuit City's Guinea Pigs: the Latest Trend in Corporate America

Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

Martin Luther King,Jr.
Beyond Vietnam

Bill Quigley
Incident at Fort Huachuca, the Army's Torture Training Center

Dave Zirin
Picking Chicago's Pockets with the Olympics

Evelyn Pringle
Drug Companies Want Women of Childrearing Years

Peter Rost, MD
Pfizer's Puny Fine

Website of the Day
Crash of the Honey Bees

 

April 3, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
US's Bungled Plan to Kidnap Iran's Top Spook Prompted hostage Taking

Marjorie Cohn
Coming Up Short on Habeas Corpus for Gitmo Detainees

Brian M. Downing
The Army's Road to Iraq

Corporate Crime Reporter
Coddling Pfizer: Praise the Criminal, Dis the Whistleblower

Carol Norris
A Psychologist on Sexual Assault: Yes, Virginia, There is a Sollution

Ralph Nader
Tailpipe Blues

Dave Lindorff
I Quit: A Movement of One (Or a Maybe a Million)

Scott Bontz
The Great Depletion

Thomas Dolby
Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Racism and the National Anthem

Website of the Day
Cockburn on BookTV


April 2, 2007

Gary Leupp
A Bogus Hostage Crisis

Uri Avnery
Condi in the Middle East: Olmert and the Pussycat

James Petras
Palestine: The Political Economy of a Disaster

Norman Solomon
McCain in Baghdad: Walking in McNamara's Footsteps

Robert Fisk
War of Humiliation

Stanley Heller
A Neocon Looks Two Conquests Ahead: The Ravings of James Woolsey

Sherwood Ross
How the Pentagon Cheats Iraq Vets Out of Medical Care and Disability Pay

Monica Benderman
On Keeping Men Alive: Report from Ft. Stewart

Stephen Fleischman
Winners and Losers in a Dog-Eat-Dog System

Anne McElroy Dachel
Never Mind the Mercury

Website of the Day
Midwestern Common Sense on the War


March 31 / April 1, 2007

Cockburn / St. Clair
That Was an Antiwar Vote?

Fred Gardner
How Corrupt is Malcolm Gladwell? Shilling for Enron and Breast Cancer

Greg Moses
The Pirates of Homeland Security

Gary Leupp
300 vs. Iran (and Herodotus)

Robert Fisk
Shakespeare and War

Roger Morris
The Politics of the Witch Hunt

Conn Hallinan
The Price of Fire: Oil, Water and Resistance in Bolivia

Kristin J. Anderson
A Protocol for Death

Jason Hribal
California's Most Unhappy Cows

John Ross
Strange Fruit Down South

Christopher Brauchli
Bush and the Politics of Falsehoods: If You're Going to Lie, Lie Big

David Underhill
War Breeds Stranger Bedfellows

Elizabeth Schulte
The Pentagon's "Don't Ask" Disaster

Ben Terrall
Time for Lula to Stop Doing Bush's Dirty Work in Haiti

Missy Beattie
Guess Who Isn't Coming to Dinner: The Story of King Abdullah and the O-Word

Sonja Karkar
How Palestine Became Israel's Land

Daniel Wolff
Have You Heard the News?

David Vest
A Romanian Jazz Rebel Drops a Bomb on Paris

Ron Jacobs
Wynton Marsalis Checks In on the Land That Never Has Been Yet

Poets' Basement
Davies, Holt, Wigley and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Kansas City Rocks

 

 

Subscribe Online

April 30, 2007

Whistleblower Says Drug Company Promoted Maraviroc Prior to FDA Approval

Did Pfizer Illegally Market Its New HIV/AIDS Drug?

By PETER ROST, MD

The biggest Big Pharma success story last week was described in the headline "FDA panel backs Pfizer HIV drug."

The drug is maraviroc, and it will be the first CCR5 receptor antagonist on the market. This group of drugs blocks a secondary but crucial doorway typically used by the human immunodeficiency virus to enter white blood cells. Barbara Ryan, analyst for Deutsche Bank North America, projects that annual sales will peak at $500 million by 2011.

But now there's a fly in Pfizer's ointment; an internal whistleblower, whom we'll call Jane Roe. She claims that Pfizer used the HIV sales force to illegally promote the drug to doctors before approval.

Roe says that the illegal conduct started already in November 2006, when Pfizer was trying to set up "expanded access sites" throughout the country for a maraviroc experience trial. The sales reps were used as liaisons to help medical affairs enroll new research sites and the sales reps were allegedly asked to promote the "trial," in which doctors were paid $1200 per patient for one year, along with free drug.

Evidence of this, Roe says, is an "unapproved slide set" for maraviroc, which was given to some HIV sales reps in November 2006. The reps were then asked to give these slides to key doctors (presentation here) The slides were allegedly used to "goose the skids" as well as in verbal discussions which included data outside what was published. Roe claims she was asked to slip the slide presentation on a memory stick to physicians whom the company trusted.

Roe points out that the actual paying of a fee to institutions is not generally wrong but using sales reps to promote a drug before approval violates FDA rules. Normally drug companies avoid using the sales force in any prelaunch activity, because it looks by definition like, well, selling . . . . and they need FDA approval to do that.

Roe says that some reps expressed concern to her, but were unwilling to rock the boat and went along with this unusual task. She says many physicians were also concerned that she and her colleagues were putting themselves in a difficult situation by participating in this program and some were upset.

Roe goes on to say that, "a researcher told the medical director she wasn't interested and said very loudly she did not know we were coming in to strong-arm her. It was during a lunch meeting at her office and very uncomfortable. I think as a result of these actions at the very least people thought we were inept running around with sales reps and a medical director who had never worked in a clinic or had no HIV experience. "

Roe claims this effort was directed by senior sales management and medical affairs, and she has shown me an e-mail from a Pfizer medical director for the HIV team, with an MS, PhD degree after the name, which supports the allegation that there was an ongoing coordination between medical affairs and the sales force to enroll physicians in the trial. Roe also says she was part of several meetings the medical director had with doctors.

In fact, Roe and some others in the sales force were so disturbed by this program that they not only objected to the company, but also recently reported this to the HHS Office of the Inspector General. (Pfizer has been forced to sign a Corporate Integrity Agreement, and any violation of this agreement is handled by the OIG.)

The sales force promotion of the "trial" went on until January 2007, when the sales force involvement was abruptly stopped. Also noteworthy, is that Roe says the sales reps were recently asked to delete all materials related to maraviroc.

A closer scrutiny of the slide presentation reveals that the author name electronically embedded in the presentation is not the doctor on the first slide, but "Peter Pinkowish."

His name can be found on another HIV related slide presentation, for Bristol-Myers Squibb (available for download here), in which his title is "Medical Editor." So here we have the first clue that this was a slide show written by a hired gun. That smells marketing. In yet another medical paper, related to hormone therapy Pinkowish's title is "Medical Writer," and it wouldn't be far-fetched to assume that this is a person working for a medical education agency, churning out advertising disguised as semi-scientific papers and presentations for drug companies.

So why would Pfizer risk its reputation, using the sales force to premarket doctors?

Roe responds, "It is my understanding the enrollment has hit several obstacles because as I mentioned the complexity of miraviroc as well as the test that need to accompany it. The research shows half of all people or thereabouts cannot safely take this product. It has become a very difficult issue which is why in my opinion they enlisted the sales force to get buy-in prior to approval. It has become clear that Pfizer's commitment to HIV may depend on the approval and success of this product. Maraviroc provides a needed benefit to HIV patients and even though it may never be a Pfizer blockbuster it fills a gap since the current Pfizer HIV product Viracept is almost 9 years old and not considered first line very often. It seems this was a desperate attempt to impact futures sales; I guess some call this premarketing I call it bullshit and against the law."

Peter Rost, M.D., is a former Vice President of Pfizer. He became well known in 2004 when he emerged as the first drug company executive to speak out in favor of reimportation of drugs. He is the author of "The Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman." See: http://the-whistleblower-by-peter-rost.blogspot.com/

 


 

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"The Case Against Israel"
Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz

WHAT'S INSIDE
Grand Theft Pentagon:
Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror

by Jeffrey St. Clair

 

 

 


The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

 

 


CITY BEAUTIFUL
By Tennessee Reed

 


Bruce Springsteen On Tour
By Dave Marsh

 

The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"