As I type this I'm listening to the AZ training tapes that Peter Rost just posted (new readers start here). If confirmed, these tapes (here and here) seem to be yet another piece of evidence indicating that inside AZ there was a strategy of comparing Arimidex to Femera (letrozole), which would be against AZ's code of conduct and therefore its agreement with the federal government.
Two thoughts spring to mind:
When Rost first posted these, I was hoping they would be awesome wiretaps of villanous sales reps conspiring to screw Medicare for cancer money. But no, they are corporate role-playing tapes in which one bad actor pretends to be a drug rep and another bad actor pretends to be a doctor who prefers letrozole. Lo and behold, the rep manages to persuade the doctor to go back to Arimidex by the sheer Socratic power of her logic! The dialog in these tapes make the drug-rep-training scenes in Side Effects look like Casablanca.
More seriously, if the authenticity of the tapes is confirmed it means that it was more than just Mike Zubillaga at AZ involved in the Arimidex vs. Femara promotion, and that such a promotion was a more systematic corporate policy.
Again, it will be interesting to see how AZ and the OIG explain all this when they get done with their investigations.
Seemed like a professionally produced tape with AZ personnel playing rep and doc, to save money.
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