ClinPage Corrects Its Story On Pfizer Site Recruitment Strategy

On June 29th, I discussed a story originally published in ClinPage that Pfizer Inc. (PFE) was signing investigators to exclusive contracts.

The story was picked up by several blogs, and had the potential to become mainstream news (but didn’t). After that post, I received a confidential note from a Pfizer employee indicating that the story was flawed; that, in fact, Pfizer was NOT asking clinical investigators to sign exclusive contracts. I didn’t report on this email, as its sender asked me not to for some reason. ClinPage has now “clarified” its coverage of the presentation made by Andy Lee of Pfizer at DIA (see Pfizer Site Strategy). As they are now reporting, Pfizer did not attempt to get investigators to sign exclusive sponsor contracts, but rather asked investigators who were not recruiting for a particular study to serve the study or the project otherwise (as an advisor, for instance).

A couple thoughts. First, I’m glad for the industry that Pfizer is not using a risky sponsor-exclusivity arrangement to improve recruitment. This aggressive strategy would have made them, and by way of association, the entire industry, look mean and greedy–you know, like they look now, only more so. Still…now that the idea has been floated publicly without making headlines, I wouldn’t be surprised to see another sponsor actually try it, particularly in a niche therapeutic area crowded with several sponsors.

The other thought is that we who blog, including this part of we, need to be careful how we write our stories that rely on second-hand reporting. I wasn’t at the DIA to hear Andy Lee’s talk. I relied on what someone else had heard, and I didn’t properly caution readers to be skeptical of the controversial story’s accuracy. My analysis of the recruitment strategy would have been the same, but the impetus for my analysis wasn’t accurate, and it’s doubtful that I would have ever written the analysis had the story not appeared.

In the future, I’ll wait for independent confirmation before propagating any first-person information coming from ClinPage. I’ll likewise raise doubts about the accuracy of any story, from any source, whose subject matter is controversial and not independently confirmed. I don’t hold myself out as a source of news, but I do want my readers to trust that my analyses are based on accurate descriptions of the state of affairs about which I’m opining.