"Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

Oh boy. Here's a SFW exerpt:

"Before going to bed that night, he worried about how he would transport the proto-dildo without breaking it. I offered him Styrofoam peanuts, but he shook his head, deep in creative thought. He went upstairs, muttering to himself. A few minutes later, he came rushing back down, carrying one of his white Reeboks gym shoes.

"Look!" he said excitedly. "It fits!" He tipped the shoe so that we could see. The dildo was nestled neatly inside."

Pfizer probably did not check this interview before paying Dr. Jarvik $1.3 million to be the company's spokesperson in their biggest DTC campaign, ever.

Pfizer, after pulling the Lipitor advertising with Dr. Jarvik (who is the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart), this week stated that the “way in which we presented Dr. Jarvik in these ads has, unfortunately, led to misimpressions and distractions.”

Pharmagossip, amazing work finding the full article!

"Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

Part 1: http://revver.com/video/655108
Part 2: http://revver.com/watch/682048
Part 3: http://revver.com/watch/694069
Part 4: http://revver.com/watch/694073

Thanks Pharmagossip.

"Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

I can row, I can row! he said.

He told Bloomberg news that he spent time rowing during summer vacations in high school and trained to row for the commercial shoot, but "they wouldn't let me."

Supposedly if he fell in the water he could have drowned, due to hypothermia, so for insurance reasons they had to use a more expendable individual.

He also said:

I can run, I can run!

Jarvik told the press that "I am an athletically fit man who takes care of my own health through diet and exercise, including frequent five mile runs.''

"It never occurred to me that anyone would consider this dishonest,'' Jarvik said.

"Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

Nor had he really invented that first artifical heart (note misleading title of his biography to the left), and the ads had to be changed to point out he invented the "Jarvik artificial heart" after his former colleagues complained.

Nor was Jarvik athletic enough or had the right arm coordination to enable him to row; the film crew had to use a body double.

That was enough to make Pfizer pull the commercials today and for BrandweekNRX to admit that we were wrong when we wrote "U.S. Congress: Don't mess with Dr. Jarvik!"

We admit, we were so, so wrong in defending Pfizer, since we now know that Pfizer misrepresented Jarvik's role as the inventor of the artificial heart, since Pfizer misrepresented Jarvik's role as an athletic rower, and since Pfizer misrepresented Jarvik's ability to prescribe Lipitor, and we also now know that Pfizer paid Jarvik over a million bucks to allow them to do all these misrepresentations.

You'd think when we for once write something postitive about Pfizer, they wouldn't immediately disprove us by demonstrating how crooked they really are, but they did.

"Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

“U.S. consumers who want access to prescription drugs at fair, affordable prices have long had the odds stacked against them,” said Cary Byrd, president and founder of eDrugSearch.com. “We started eDrugSearch.com to level the playing field, giving consumers a safe way to find low-cost prescription drugs online from Canadian and other non-U.S. pharmacies.

“Now, by creating the eDrugSearch.com Community, we are moving beyond specialized search to enable our members to share information about their experiences, both with online prescriptions and online pharmacies. Our Health 2.0 community will empower members to make better decisions for themselves and for their families.”

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

And the number is probably even higher today. More and more people quit smoking, since it is no longer socially acceptable. Currently only 20% of US adults smoke, down from about 50% in the 50s and 60s.

People who have mental illnesses smoke at a rate of 50 to 80 percent, compared with less than 20 percent of the general population. These high-risk people also smoke many more cigarettes a day than a regular smoker -- often three packs. Furthermore, smokers with mental illness are much more likely to smoke their cigarettes right down to the filters.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

More over at the Drudge Report.

If he didn't want the picture, why did he put on the dress?

BrandweekNRX wonders.

And, just maybe Hillary forgot that she wore this?

And we love Crooked Brains.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

He announced his 2008 bid for the White House on “Meet the Press” and said: “All, all the candidates — McCain, Obama and Clinton — are against single-payer health insurance, full Medicare for all. I’m for it, as well as millions of Americans and 59% of physicians in a forthcoming poll this April.”

Nader has said if he had it his way, health care in the U.S. would “look like full Medicare for everybody, whereby the government is the payer.”

More.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

He has been in the advertising business for most of the past 20 years, including a fun stint with Gannett's USA Weekend. The reason he is sponsoring us is in his own words (from his first email to us) that the BrandweekNRx blog is "excellent, informative, important and even fun, all at the same time. It's a great blog."

Of course that is not the only reason he picked Brandweek NRx; he also has something to sell; the tagline "Where Good Health is a Click Away." This is a federally registered tagline that Bob created and registered with the USPTO nearly two years ago.

The tagline is for sale, to the highest bidder of course, and is currently being advertised on this BrandweekNRx blog, as you may have already noticed.

The tagline is right now attached to a website, GoodHealthUS.com, that Bob also created, in a valiant attempt to escape the world of employment.

You can guarantee that escape forever by purchasing and becoming the new owner of this Superbowl/World Series quality tagline.

"Where Good Health is a Click Away" is an exceptionally solid, timeless, powerful and elegant tagline. If you are a worthy individual or company, a true fit for this tagline and have the big bucks to buy it, then don't delay!

You can reach Bob via email at: bob@goodhealthus.com or by phone at 207-831-5929. Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

Science in an editorial writes, "For example, the motion states: “The public has no interest in protecting the editorial process of a scientific journal …” Say what? Doesn’t the public want access to credible biomedical science? If not, what was the open-access movement all about? Do medical advocacy groups really have no use for knowledge that might help their members?"

Hat tip Pharmagossip.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

The firm apparently suspects that Schering-Plough issued a series of material misrepresentations in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and press releases which artificially inflated the value of Schering-Plough shares. They also suspect that Schering-Plough misled investors regarding the increased efficacy of Vytorin, a combination of Zetia and Zocor, over the cheaper generic form of Zocor (simvastatin), alone, and delayed disclosing results of the ENHANCE study demonstrating that Vytorin was not more effective than Zocor.

On January 14, 2008, investors learned there were severe safety and efficacy issues related to the Schering-Plough’s sale of Vyotorin and Girard Gibbs claims that Schering-Plough may have purposefully delayed the publication of a study showing that Vytorin was neither safe nor effective.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

ENHANCE trial - mystery solved: CEO sees outcome in piece of toast

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

You may remember the Danish Muhammad cartoon outrage from 2005. More recently, over 100,000 people have signed an online petition to force Wikipedia to take down what is considered an offensive image of the founder of Islam.

Below is a drawing I found on the Copyranter, who found it on a NYC Auxiliary Police Program placard hanging outside an A train subway station elevator in the Heights.

Bring it on all fundamentalists!

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

I knew all the various sources I used to pull together my information, and it appeared almost too much of a coincidence that the New York Times would have gone to exactly the same places. At a minimum, it sure looks like the New York Times was "inspired" by what I had written.

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

BrandweekNRX, Feb 18	New York Times, Feb 20 (order of paragraphs rearranged to permit comparison)
U. S. Court tries to shut down whistleblower site Wikileaks and fails.	Judge Shuts Down Web Site Specializing in Leaks
Wikileaks, a website designed to let whistleblowers publish sensitive documents has been ordered shut down by a US federal judge at the request of a Swiss bank and its Cayman Islands subsidiary.	In a move that legal experts said could present a major test of First Amendment rights in the Internet era, a federal judge in San Francisco on Friday ordered the disabling of a Web site devoted to disclosing confidential information. The site, Wikileaks.org, invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging “unethical behavior” by corporations and governments. It has posted documents said to show the rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq, a military manual for the operation of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other evidence of what it has called corporate waste and wrongdoing.
But the the court has failed to shut down the site, because the order is to remove the DNS hosting records, so that even though this prevents the www.wikileaks.org link from working, it doesn't actually take down the site: everything is up and running at 88.80.13.160 and this information is now spreading like wildfire on the Internet.	The site itself could still be accessed at its Internet Protocol address (http://88.80.13.160/) — the unique number that specifies a Web site’s location on the Internet.
	Fans of the site and its mission rushed to publicize those alternate addresses this week. They have also distributed copies of the bank information on their own sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
Some pundits have stated that "taking something off the Internet is like taking pee out of a pool," and this latest, extraordinary, attack on free speech in the U.S. (by ordering deletion of an entire site to stop circulation of a few documents) is giving Wikileaks a PR boost the Cayman Island bank lawyers clearly had not expected.	The feebleness of the action suggests that the bank, and the judge, did not understand how the domain system works, or how quickly Web communities will move to counter actions they see as hostile to free speech online. Judge White’s order disabling the entire site “is clearly not constitutional,” said David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School. “There is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site.”
To find an injunction similar to the Cayman's case, we need to go back to Monday June 15, 1971 when the New York Times published excepts of of Daniel Ellsberg's leaked "Pentagon Papers" and found itself enjoined the following day. The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing the Times' printers to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press power. The supreme court found the Times censorship injunction unconstitutional in a 6-3 decision.	In a statement on its site, Wikileaks compared Judge White’s orders to ones eventually overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. In that case, the federal government sought to enjoin publication by The New York Times and The Washington Post of a secret history of the Vietnam War. “The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing The Times’s printers to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press power,” the site said, referring to the order that sought to disable the entire site.
The order was written by Cayman Island's Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion. The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former Vice President the Cayman Island's operation, Rudolf Elmer.	The case in San Francisco was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust. In court papers, the bank said that “a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign” provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws. According to Wikileaks, “the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.”
Unable to lawfully attack Wikileaks servers which are based in several countries, the order was served on the intermediary Wikileaks purchased the 'Wikileaks.org' name through -- California registrar Dynadot, who then used its access to the internet website name registration system to delete the records for 'Wikileaks.org'.	On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name. The order had the effect of locking the front door to the site — a largely ineffectual action that kept back doors to the site, and several copies of it, available to sophisticated Web users who knew where to look.
Judge White ordered the California web hosting company Dynadot to "immediately clear and remove" records from Wikileaks and "prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank page," until the court can review the case further.	Domain registrars like Dynadot, Register.com and GoDaddy .com provide domain names — the Web addresses users type into browsers — to Web site operators for a monthly fee. Judge White ordered Dynadot to disable the Wikileaks.org address and “lock” it to prevent the organization from transferring the name to another registrar.
Wikileaks was launched in early 2007 with the help of Chinese dissidents to help whistleblowers in authoritarian countries post sensitive documents on the Internet without being traced. It was aimed at "oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East," but also was being used to post "unethical" behavior in Western countries.	The site said it was founded by dissidents in China and journalists, mathematicians and computer specialists in the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Its goal, it said, is to develop “an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.”
Despite the injunction, Wikileaks states that it will "keep on publishing, in fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."	Lawyers for the bank and Dynadot did not respond to requests for comment. Judge White has scheduled a hearing in the case for Feb. 29.
Wikileaks is still publishing in Belgium and, Christmas Island - the latter offering its many "cover names".	Wikileaks also maintained “mirror sites,” or copies usually produced to ensure against failures and this kind of legal action. Some sites were registered in Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany(http://wikileaks.de) and the Christmas Islands(http://wikileaks.cx) through domain registrars other than Dynadot, and so were not affected by the injunction.
	In a separate order, also issued on Friday, Judge White ordered Wikileaks to stop distributing the bank documents. The second order, which the judge called an amended temporary restraining order, did not refer to the permanent injunction but may have been an effort to narrow it. The narrower order, forbidding the dissemination of the disputed documents, is a more classic prior restraint on publication. Such orders are disfavored under the First Amendment and almost never survive appellate scrutiny.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

And if you want the inside scoop on a troubled company with a wacko trial that went all wrong, you can find that too!

If anyone is crying, there is help. Especially with cash and Carrie.

PharmaGiles has established himself as the funniest healthcare blogger, ever.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower. 

"This definitely tarnished his image," said Ben Halliburton, chief investment officer of Tradition Capital Management, to Reuters on February 6. TCM holds 454,000 Schering-Plough shares. "This was the worst PR disaster I think I ever recall and he's got to take part of the blame."

"If they can keep moving more aggressively in fixing the PR problem and not letting the prescription decline become a permanent issue, that would help his image and solidify his staying as CEO of Schering-Plough," Halliburton said.

It sure doesn't look as if that is going to happen: Vytorin prescriptions for the week ended February 15 were off 7% to 327,698 compared with the previous week, according to data provided by Verispan. And the prescriptions were down nearly 18% from the week preceding the release of the study results on January 14. Zetia prescriptions declined 8% to 237,797 last week compared with the week before, and were off 19% from pre-Enhance levels.

More info at the WSJ Health Blog.

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.

Thanks Insider for the tip!

Dr. Rost is a pharma litigation consultant and pharmaceutical marketing expert. He is also the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.