We knew prescriptions would drop, but actually, they seem to have stopped altogether. At least that’s the implication coming from a research note issued by Deutsche Bank.

Avandia’s share of new prescriptions for oral diabetes treatments fell to about zero from 10 percent in the two days after last week’s study in The New England Journal of Medicine found patients were 43 percent more likely to have a heart attack than people taking other pills. Deutsche Bank analysts cited data from Impact Rx, a market research firm.

“This reaction is far worse than we had anticipated and suggests that there could be as much as 22 percent downside risk to Glaxo’s near-term earnings, suggesting that there is still further downside to GSK’s share price,” the analysts wrote.

Not surprisingly, Glaxo pooh-poohed the trend. “Two days of data is not enough to reach sensible conclusions on the trend for Avandia new prescriptions,” the world’s second-largest drugmaker said in a statement, MarketWatch later reported.

Source: Bloomberg News