I would be surprised if there aren’t many other students posting about the December lawsuit over the improper marketing of Amgen’s anemia drug. What did they do (other than pay a lawsuit of $762 million)? Well, they advertised the drug as being ok in higher doses than what was recommended, told people they could use it as a cure of things it couldn’t, and bribed doctors to prescribe more of the drug than needed. But hey, they made sales of $2.3 billion in 2011 and in Amgen’s company values they include being ethical, trustworthy and ensuring quality…
There is clearly something mighty wrong with this whole scenario. Now, I’m not here to discuss this particular issue, its more the moral of the story I’m somewhat more concerned about, specifically, how on Earth could something like this happen? This is meddling in people’s physical wellbeing! How anyone could be so careless as to market and promote potentially harming large numbers of people for profit is beyond me, especially in the “developed” world such as it is.
The worst part to me is that how many people do you have to have on board for such a thing to operate so successfully? All the doctors, execs, the marketing team, the list goes on. This is only one of several examples I’ve been able to find. I find it unnerving, how can people know what is safe and what is just false marketing? I certainly wouldn’t recognize the difference. What also concerns me is how can it be assured that companies won’t try these practices again? The government likely can’t cover the costs of heavy regulation, so where is the solution? I find it shocking how the only consequence of this and other incidents has been fines, perhaps its time for harsher penalties?
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3 replies on “Amgen’s Aranesp Mishap (not actually a mishap, it just sounded good for a title, its actually a scandal)”
Hi Jonathan,
I thought your article was quite informative of an event that occurs at a shockingly high rate. It is curious how this happens in our “developed”, its possible that as our society grows so does our need to outperform each other in materialistic ways and thus we have gross mismanagement in the worst ways.
This blew me away!! I cannot even begin to go into how unethical this issue is. People trust doctors and drug companies in general as they are trained professionals here to provide medication and services to make people healthier, and to know that a company would take advantage of this trust, but I agree with you that it is shocking that it cannot be assured that companies would not try this practice again in the future. All I can say is shame on Amgen’s marketing strategy for this drug, completely despicable!!
Wow. Your post is crazy. Health is very important in people’s lives now a days. Something like this will surely affect their health. How can drug companies do this to people? I totally agree with you that this article is shocking and just really unethical. The consequences of these false marketing should be more than fines. We are talking about people’s health in this article and this mean life or death. The fines are only money which can’t really bring people back to life and take back what people has consumed. How can we really measure what to make as a consequence for this though? This is a really mind boggling topic…