Pfizer's New Chief Medical Officer Once Defended Prozac Infomercial

Freda Lewis-Hall, a psychiatrist, is set to become Pfizer's new chief medical officer, putting her in charge of docs who work for the company designing clinical trials and doing marketing to other docs. Frobes.com had an interview with her yesterday. Lewis-Hall once worked at Lilly on both Prozac and on clinical trials for Cymbalta for stress urinary incontinence.

For some reason, I sensed I'd heard her name before and sure enough deep in the archives of the Net is a CBS News piece from 1999 which examines Lilly airing a 30-minute infomercial on depression (including Prozac testimonials) and Lewis-Hall defending the approach.

"'This is a phenomenal opportunity to reach people who otherwise wouldn't be reached,' says Dr. Freda Lewis-Hall of Eli Lilly & Co. 'This reaches people where they sit -- in front of the television'"....

"'This has been in the making for a while, about a year or so. It is a part of our long-term commitment to outreach and education around depression. Just kind of a next step in the process.'"

Uh huh. Anyway, she told Forbes that it was time for the pharma industry to get back to basics.

"The key to improving the drug industry's reputation, tarnished by a series of high-profile controversies and a relative paucity of new medicines, is to focus on making sure patients get the drugs they need--and that they don't get medicines they don't need.

"'The science is evolving,' she says. 'That gives us the opportunity to discover, develop and deliver new medicines and technologies. We have loads and loads of information. We need to leverage all the available information technology to get that information to patients and physicians so the right patient gets the right medicine at the right time for the right outcome.'"

That is some of the most glittering BS marketing talk I've heard in a long time. Pfizer is not a huge player in the psych med world these days--Zoloft is generic, Geodon sales are weak and Chantix sales have cratered--but I thought I'd pass it along. Maybe Lewis-Hall can dream up an infomercial for Chantix.