Eli Lilly's Lechleiter Does Shameless U-turn on Payments to Doctors

Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter has done a spectacular about-face on the issue of disclosing the drug company’s payments to doctors. Last week he was against it. Today he’s suddenly in favor of it.

Let’s be clear, Lechleiter is doing the right thing by creating “an online registry of physician payments in 2009″ that will disclose which docs are taking money from the company. Plaudits for that.

But Leichleiter’s recent behavior on this issue has been thisclose to outright hypocrisy. I noted that last week he said this about disclosing such payments in Massachusetts:

Life sciences investment will be scared away … [the law has the potential to] subject doctors, hospitals and academic institutions to complex financial disclosure requirements about payments for clinical research. … Such work is the backbone of research and development in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals … And it’s about to get a whole lot more difficult in this state, which almost certainly means that less of this important work will take place here in the future.

Today, he’s taking the exact opposite stance. He told the AP:

We’ve learned that letting people see for themselves what we’re doing is a good way to restore trust.

And he said in a statement:

Being more transparent by opening up our business to the public is an important step to building trust and confidence.

So what changed Lechleiter’s mind? Ed Silverman at Pharmalot suggests in his comments section that Lechleiter’s specific objection to the Massachusetts law is more about disclosing payments for clinical trial work than it is about marketing gifts. The latter type was stripped from the final law, but all payments of more than $50 must still be disclosed, marketing or otherwise.

I disagree with Ed. Clinical trial work and marketing are often two sides of a spinning coin, as demonstrated by Merck’s seeding study for Vioxx. Post-marketing studies in particular are often regarded as being more about getting doctors into the habit of writing scrips than they are about monitoring for adverse events.

The other mystery is why Lechleiter targeted Massachusetts and not Vermont, the District of Columbia, West Virginia or Maine, which all have disclosure laws. The explanation, I suspect, is that Lilly is trying to squeeze some breaks out of the Bay State in order to build a new research facility on the cheap. Check out the second to last paragraph of the Boston Business Journal’s story:

Lechleiter has said that the law will impact where the company locates its next major facility. Massachusetts is a possible site, he has said, though Eli Lilly is looking at a number of different options.

Translation: Do not incur my wrath or I will take these jobs elsewhere!