Thursday, April 12, 2007

Group of 7 (code name "whiskey") Reports Unethical AZ Behavior to OIG

This just in from Peter Rost (personal communication):
We are a group of 7 honest AstraZeneca employees scattered around headquarters and field sales.

Our goal is for AstraZeneca to once again become an ethical pharmaceutical company.

We have been reporting unethical behavior to the Code of Conduct hotline 888 244-1769) for years. However, the company continues to violate policies developed under the HHS OIG Corporate Integrity Agreement. We are afraid that AZ is not properly notifying OIG of these reports, and have begun to copy OIG (800-447-8477)on everything we submit.

For the most part, the policy violations that we see come from management, and resistance from underlings is met with swift retaliation. Anonymity is essential.

Our main concern with the Mid-Atlantic Oncology Newsletter was actually
its directive to misbrand anastrozole by "selling against letrozole" without approved material, head to head studies or data in our prescribing information. The RSD's statements were crude, but not illegal.

We would like to encourage all workers to stand up and report unethical behavior by managers to the Code of Conduct hotline. One of the first directives in our compliance policy is that you have a "duty to report" illegal activity.
File this under further fallout from the "Zubillaga Affair." I'm looking forward to the AZ Group of Seven Blog!

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:29 PM

    Astra Zeneca routinely buys competitive intelligence from a company that pretexts pharma employees of competing companies via the monster database - company is called Pharmaforce or Strategic Reports- completely unethical and in light of recent HP case illegal

    ReplyDelete
  2. Astra and other pharma are also completely unethical in their way to communicate to patients. See the post on http://marketingandfear.blogspot.com/ about the FDA guidelines.

    ReplyDelete

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