President Barack Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is turning out to be Big Pharma’s worse nightmare. He twice put out press releases backing the crusade of Peter Rost, the former Pfizer vp turned whistleblower, in favor of allowing drug reimportation from foreign countries to encourage price competition. (See here and here.)
On top of that, Emanuel recently suggested that drug marketers’ tax deductions for R&D expenses and advertising may be legislatively axed. According to Dick O’Brien, exec VP of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, in a meeting with the AAAA’s board of directors:
He predicted that the first order of business in the new Congress will be shoring up the economy and bringing the deficit under control. Then, out of the blue, he volunteered that this would cause our industry some pain. When pressed to elaborate, he said that, in their quest for new revenue, one likely possibility would be to go to pharma and tell them they could keep the write-off for R&D or DTC, but not both.
The news will make pharma lobbyists super-furious, because (as BNET readers already know) the drug industry increased its support to Obama’s campaign and reduced its cashflow to McCain.
It will also cause a new round of PR headaches for Pfizer, which is mostly losing its legal battle against Rost, the world’s noisiest qui tam plaintiff. A court of appeals ruled recently that his suit — which claims Pfizer and its acquisition, Pharmacia illegally sold the HGH Genotropin for off-label purposes — could proceed. The feds have showed renewed interest Rost’s side of the argument. (Backstory here.)
Rost also took credit for President Obama’s election yesterday. He has an email to “prove” it.
Photo by Flickr user Jon Person, CC.
