Pfizer: Off-Label Marketing To Whales?
1 CommentBy Ed Silverman // May 27th, 2007 // 10:59 pm
The drugmaker was probably hoping for feel-good headlines, such as “Pfizer Saves the Whales,” after issuing a press release touting its recent donation of an antibiotic to the Marine Mammal Center in Rio Vista, California, which wanted to treat two lost and injured humpback whales in the Sacramento River.
Of course, Pfizer has a large animal health unit and so company veterinarians, who note that whales and cows aren’t “that dissimilar from an evolutionary perspective,” proposed the Marine Mammal Center’s vets use Excede, a Pfizer antibiotic approved in the US for treating infections in cattle. The antibiotic is also approved for treating swine, but there’s no mention on the product web site that Excede has been approved for treating whales.
Treating whales can’t be a terribly big market, so it’s hard to imagine Pfizer making a big push. But interestingly, the Pfizer press release didn’t say whether Excede actually saved the mom and baby whales. Perhaps there were unexpected side effects?
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You can probably thank the old Warner Lambert and Upjohn organizations for these antibiotics. Both companies had a presence in the animal markets (especially Upjohn) before the Pfizer buyouts in 2000 and 2004 respectively.
I do recall that Pfizer several years ago donated a quantity of an old, generic antibiotic to countries in Africa to fight River Blindness caused by a flea or fly bite.
While not costly, these actions do engender good will, and hopefully will save lives. This sounds somewhat similar to the process of making some AIDs drugs available cheaply in sub-Saharan Africa.