Wyeth Is As Contrite As AIG

Like Wall Street firms bestowing bonuses weeks after government bailouts, Premarin and Prempro maker Wyeth, recently merged with Pfizer, is unbowed.

Months after a Sen. Charles Grassley-led investigation into its ghostwriting and the unretracted falsified science it planted in medical journals--1,500 documents are found on UCSF's Drug Industry Document Archive http://dida.library.ucsf.edu/ detail the con--the hormone giant is behind new articles in the Journal of Women's Health and Menopause.

And even after the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) found in 2002 that hormone therapy (HT) increases breast cancer by 26 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 percent and doubles the risk of blood clots and dementia, Wyeth still thinks it's a neat idea. (see: Iran-Contra scandal; Oliver North.)

Women "who are reluctant to take combination hormone therapies because of the publicity after WHI," writes Michelle P Warren, MD in the journal Menopause (Volume 16, Number 6) as if cancer were a PR problem, might find "improvement in their quality-of-life scores, including that for sleep" by adding another Wyeth drug, bazedoxifene which just happens to be up for FDA approval. The selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM), says the Wyeth speaker and "advisory board member" according to the journal, would replace the "bad guy" progestin which is causing all the problems in hormone therapy. And replace revenues.

In fact bazedoxifene is such a potential pipeline saver, JoAnn V. Pinkerton, MD, also a Wyeth advisory board member according to Medscape, wrote three articles about it this fall and is "teaching" a Continuing Medical Education (CME) course on it called Controversies in Menopausal Hormone Therapy: Evaluating the Evidence with other pharma-funded doctors on Medscape.

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