Losing Faith in Healthcare Industry

According to an article in The New York Times by Gardiner Harris and Duff Wilson, pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline will pay $750 million in law suits for selling 20 tainted or ineffective drugs (Harris & Wilson, Glaxo to Pay $750 Million for Sale of Bad Products).

“Among the drugs affected were Paxil, an antidepressant; Bactroban, an ointment; Avandia, a troubled diabetes drug; Coreg, a heart drug; and Tagamet, an acid reflux drug” (Harris & Wilson). For example, through manufacturing, the active ingredient of Paxil CR was separated and never packaged; causing consumers to only receive the “barrier chemical,” and an ineffective drug.

Harris & Wilson added that there haven’t been any reports of patients suffering health consequences from consuming any of the drugs, but that links would be “difficult to trace.”

GlaxoSmithKline and other pharmaceutical companies have paid billions of dollars in lawsuits because of illegal marketing, but this is the “first successful case ever to assert that a drug maker knowingly sold contaminated products” (Harris & Wilson).

This whistle-blower case was filed by Cheryl D. Eckard, who was the quality manager for GlaxoSmithKline. In 2002, they received a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding their manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico, and they sent Eckard and a team of 100 quality experts to fix the cited problems.  While at the facility, Eckard found that the FDA missed some problems and that the quality control was very poor (Harris & Wilson).

Some of the problems she found were: “…the water system was contaminated; the air system allowed for cross-contamination between products; the warehouse was so overcrowded that rented vans were used for storage; the plant could not ensure the sterility of intravenous drugs for cancer; and pills of differing strengths were sometimes mixed in the same bottles” (Harris & Wilson). Eckard stated that she urged top executives to fix the additional problems, but instead, she was fired.

Regarding this case, Carmen M. Ortiz, the United States attorney for Massachusetts said, “The harm is really in the public’s confidence in the health care industry. When you go to a pharmacy and you buy a drug, you expect that drug is what it purports to be and you don’t expect it to have any micro-organisms or not be sterile or not have the power or have too much power” (Harris & Wilson).

It would be very interesting to conduct a content analysis of GlaxoSmithKline’s responses to this lawsuit through its website and major newspapers and track its attempt to restore relationships with its stockholders, since American shares have already fell 0.35 percent this past Tuesday (Harris & Wilson).  They already released a statement on their website Tuesday regretting their actions, but I think it’s going to take a lot more than that to restore stakeholders’ faith in the industry, let alone GlaxoSmithKline. It would also be interesting to do a content analysis on responses from Johnson & Johnson and McNeil regarding their many recalls in 2010 and compare tactics since in both cases, the companies knowingly sold contaminated drugs in result of internal error.  Hopefully GlaxoSmithKline will do a better job than J&J has.