Day 1 of pharma social media hearings, after the morning

November 12, 2009 – 12:48 pm by Chris

It was a tense countdown to the FDA social media hearings, but the first half of the first day proceeded relatively smoothly. The mainstream media did some coverage: here’s AP’s story, Forbes‘ Laurie Burkitt said FDA will likely squash the drug industry’s social life on the Web, and Scott Hensley of the NPR Health Blog looks at the hearings here (with a nice photo of Mark Senak, a Fleishman Hillard executive who blogs at Eye on FDA). CNBC’s Mike Huckman expressed perturbation that a CNBC film crew couldn’t get into what is a public hearing. He did get to interview consultant Sally Church, of Icarus Consultants (Ms. Church is @maverickNY on Twitter and blogs here).

Rohit Barghava, of Ogilvy 360, presented and shares his presentation and three key takeaways. Some notable statistics from WEGO Health, who surveyed the health activists on WEGO sites and found they would actually welcome some interaction with pharma, can be found here.

Peter Pitts of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (who blogs at DrugWonks.com) managed to get the first laughs out of the audience with a presentation that referenced, among other things, Buffalo Springfield. Here is his roundup of the day, and you can download his testimony here.

John Mack of the Pharma Marketing Blog presented the results of his informal survey, and made an impassioned (and oft-retweeted) statement about Sidewiki: “Google, tear down this Sidewiki!” Here are his key takeaways.

The last presentation before lunch came from Dr. Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families. Dr. Zuckerman expressed adamant disapproval of pharmaceutical and other healthcare companies doing any sort of promotion via social media at all, and stated that the one-click rule was one click too many for consumers. The spluttering from industry folks on the #FDAsm channel on Twitter was profound, especially about her comments that pharma companies should not be involved in social media and that FDA should be monitoring Wikipedia for overly promotional product posts.

Dr. Zuckerman particularly focused on the promotional nature of Wikipedia articles for breast implants and a device called NeuroStar, which is used to treat depression.

She notes that about the breast implants entry, “when researchers attempted to add warning information from published peer-reviewed articles or the FDA Website, it was immediately deleted by a man who said on a Wikipedia discussion page that he was a plastic surgeon and knew more than the FDA or others who disagreed with him. I don’t know if the man really was a plastic surgeon, I don’t know if he was paid by an implant company, but I can tell you that he spent hours each day fixing that Wikipedia article by deleting risk information and adding promotional information. That would be a very unusual activity for a physician.”

Dr. Zuckerman’s full testimony can be found here.

(Edit: At 3 PM Nov. 12, the entire office’s external Internet connection collapsed. I’ll follow up with the rest of the day and part two of the hearing in another post.)

Tags: FDA, Social media