The drugmaker was in overdrive this week after one of its own execs was quoted in The Times of London as saying that manufacturing will be outsourced over the next decade, primarily to India and China. Like others, we carried an item. But then yesterday, AstraZeneca was in a titter and e-mailed select media to denounce the report. Curiously, the publicity team never insisted that its own David Smith, exec vp of operations (to the right in the picture), was misquoted. Rather, they alluded to a misunderstanding.

An AZ spokeswoman wrote us that the strategy doesn’t include outsourcing “supply and manufacturing activities,” but the drugmaker is “exploring the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients.” What’s the difference? Making the API is crucial, which is where things can get dicey. The last step - making a finished drug - involves crunching the stuff into pill form and packaging. But with fewer tax advantages, more drugmakers are contracting out these activities as well.

So we questioned that explanation, given public sensitivity to all things made in China. Now, we have come across an interesting article that ran this past July in Chemical & Engineering News in which AstraZeneca execs discuss plans to outsource manufacturing. As the mag noted: AZ has initiated a strategy to phase out internal manufacturing altogether. Here’s more of what C&E News was told…

Iin the next three to five years, C&E News wrote, AstraZeneca will stop launching any new APIs from its own sites. And over the next five to 10 years, the company plans to have exited API production entirely. As AstraZeneca moves out of manufacturing, it is looking to chemical production partners in China and India. “Our plans in China and India are embryonic, but we see this as the way forward,” Marc Jones, AZ’s vp of global external sourcing, told the mag.

By 2010, AZ plans to make up to $100 million in purchases from China, four times its 2006 spending there. These purchases will include non-manufactured products and services, and Steve Fishwick, AZ’s director of Asia sourcing (to the left in the picture), stresses the Shanghai staffers will do more than seek out chemical synthesis partners. They will look for “anything that AstraZeneca feels we could source from those areas,” he confessed, ranging from raw materials to contract research to packaging to information technology.

At the end of the day, the AZ effort to disavow Smith’s remarks appears disingenuous and resembles the worst kind of lawyerly parsing. We understand the AZ need to avoid a loss of confidence in its drugs when the rest of the world is scared to buy pet food, toys, medicines and all manner of finished goods from a country that apparently adheres to the lowest standards possible. But the AZ publicity machine protested too loudly. If AZ wants public trust in its products, the drugmaker must also instill trust in its words.