Unending Pfizer woes?

Multinational pharmaceutical firm Pfizer is reeling under a tsunami of woes again as international media bannered last week a settlement offer it made in the face of massive lawsuits arising from its marketing of the controversial drug Bextra.

The reports say Pfizer has offered to settle personal injury suits filed by patients to the tune of $2.3 billion. The offer needs the approval of a federal judge. If approved, Pfizer will go down in history as the pharmaceutical firm to pay the largest amount ever in a settlement offer.

Pfizer apparently got sued for allegedly marketing Bextra for so-called off-label uses. “Off-label” means promoting the drug for use other than those approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration.

This is not the first time Pfizer is making such settlement. In October last year, the firm agreed to pay out close to $900 million to settle lawsuits filed by patients who claimed they suffered cardiovascular damage from Bextra. The drug is apparently a painkiller. It has since been pulled out from the market.

We can only commiserate with Pfizer and its officers in its Philippine headquarters. This latest woe simply compounds the fall-out of the many adverse issues it is facing in the country.

It will be recalled that just over a month ago, the firm faced allegations that it attempted to bribe the government with millions of pesos worth of discount cards and merchandising collateral in exchange for shelving the move to put a cap on the price of vital medicines.

The accusation was a sequel to earlier allegations that Pfizer played a major role in the strong lobby in Congress to stall the passage of the Cheaper Medicines Act. Much earlier, Pfizer figured in a head-on collision with the government after the Philippine International Trading Corp. attempted to bring in cheaper versions of Pfizer’s Norvasc from India and Pakistan. Pfizer sued PITC in the wake of that move.

To Pfizer’s credit, its current chairman, Jeffrey Kindler, is a lawyer who appears to have the legal acumen needed to minimize the damage of these issues on the Pfizer brand. The view is that it is Kindler’s lawyer instincts that spurred the looming $2.3-billion settlement with the victims of Pfizer’s Bextra. The move, however, is apparently set to cause a 90 percent drop in Pfizer’s net income.

Kindler, it will be recalled, was the unlikely successor to the controversial Henry McKinnel who was forced to resign by the Pfizer board in 2006 due to declining investor confidence and a botched drug experiment which reportedly caused some 82 deaths. 

Some reports have it that McKinnel had called for trade sanctions against the Philippines in the wake of PITC’s move to bring in cheaper versions of Norvasc into the country. McKinnel, however, earned the ire of his fellow Stanford Alumni for such advocacy.

It appears it was under McKinnel’s term when Pfizer’s tsunami of woes, seen as karma by some, began.

Oh, by the way – that Bextra faux pas? They say that began during McKinnel’s watch, too.

Yes, that same McKinnel who reportedly proposed to his Republican friends that sanctions be slapped on the Philippines for the “crime” of aspiring for more affordable medicines.

Won’t Pfizer’s woes ever end?

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