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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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BW advises drug companies to disclose everything

In the wake of reports that popularly-prescribed painkillers produce potentially serious cardiac-related side effects, drugmakers have embarked on public relations campaigns to protect their reputations. What they really need to do, according to Business Week Chief Economist Michael Mandel, is come clean.

Writing in today’s Business Week Online, Mandel suggests:

Starting right now, the pharma industry needs to embrace, enthusiastically, a culture of transparency. That means releasing and aggressively publicizing the results of all research studies, including negative ones. It means keeping patients and doctors alerted to even ambiguous anecdotes of side effects. It means providing doctors with a public forum for reporting their worries about a drug. It means not giving assurances of safety that may not hold up.

In other words, it means practicing ethical public relations.

Why do companies that employ armies of PR practitioners need a magazine’s economist to point this out? Not that drug execs will read the article and suddenly decide that full disclosure is a great idea, but surely some PR people—internal and agency—have recommended simply releasing all studies, thus putting a 30 to the story. What’s left to cover? What could emerge later to breathe new life into the story?

It could be that PR counselors don’t carry a lot of weight in the drug business. Or perhaps companies aren’t getting the best possible advice. Merck (Mandel reports) issued a press release in 2000 immediately after learning that Vioxx could possibly produce cardiovascular side effects. While that was the appropriate response, it took only a month for the company to issue a follow-up press release titled, “Merck Confirms Favorable Cardiovascular Safety Profile of Vioxx.” The press release took issue with what it called “speculative news reports.”

That ill-advised follow-up press release came from somebody with PR responsibilities. Was that individual following orders he or she knew to be inappropriate or did he or she really think it was a good idea? “It’s becoming clear,” Mandel writes, “Merck may have been better off moving more aggressively to publicize the potential side effects of Vioxx, even though doing so would have probably reduced sales for some time.” Mandel concludes:

In a period of rapid technological change, there will inevitably be missteps, pitfalls, and negative consequences. The more information consumers are given, the faster problems will be identified and corrected. And that, in turn, will make the average American more comfortable with innovation. Transparency and growth go together.

There’s a good lesson in Mandel’s conclusion for anybody counseling a company on its response to bad news.

 

 

 

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