In these ethically challenging times, which drugmaker has its act together?

Covalence, a research group based in Geneva that tracks ethical reputations, recently released its quarterly update in which various industrial sectors were examined. The firm compiles its rankings and charts by collecting reports - both positive and negative recent news - from the Internet and an ‘open network of correspondents’ among various civil-society groups, researchers, consultants and the like. The data is then coded, quantified and synthetized into curves and volumes.

The rankings are, of course, relative. They merely compare drugmakers to one another and don’t examine ethics in absolute terms. In other words, company A is perceived as more ethical than company B, but that’s not the same thing as saying one or both companies are, or aren’t, particularly adept at adopting and exercising ethical practices.

Here’s how big drugmakers were ranked in the first quarter of 2007:

1 - Glaxo
2 - Bristol-Myers Squibb
3 -Johnson & Johnson
4 - Pfizer
5 - Novartis
6 - Roche
7 - Abbott Laboratories
8 - Boehringer-Ingelheim
9 - Merck
10 - Sanofi-Aventis

For last year’s ranking, keep reading…

The results, of course, are subject to change each quarter. Abbott, for instance, got beaten up in some quarters over its patent row with Thailand, and Glaxo has more recently been tarred and feathered over Avandia. Such episodes may very well alter the rankings next time around. Only Glaxo, by the way, managed to make the Top 10 among all multinationals measured.

As you can see, there wasn’t much change from 2006:

1 - Glaxo
2 - Bristol-Myers Squibb
3 - Johnson & Johnson
4 - Novartis
5 - Pfizer
6 - Roche
7 - Abbott
8 - Boehringer-Ingelheim
9 - Merck
10 - Eli Lilly

Not sure if the absence of Wyeth and Schering-Plough, and the consistent presence of Boehringer-Ingelheim, should be interpreted as anything more than a European slant. For more, look here.