“For far too long, we have heard that the pharmaceutical industry views these settlements merely as the cost of doing business,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Stuart Delery, head of Justice𠆙s civil division, said at the news conference. “That is why this administration is committed to using every available tool to defeat health care fraud.”
Delery added, “Today’s resolution seeks not only to punish wrongdoing and recover taxpayer dollars, but to ensure GSK’s future compliance with the law.” He noted that a similar recent settlement with Abbott Laboratories also included continuing compliance monitoring.
GlaxoSmithKline CEO Sir Andrew Witty expressed regret and said they have learned “from the mistakes that were made.”
“Today brings to resolution difficult, long-standing matters for GSK,” he said in a statement. “Whilst these originate in a different era for the company, they cannot and will not be ignored.”
Crimes and civil violations like those in the GlaxoSmithKline case have been widespread in the pharmaceutical industry and have produced a series of case with hefty fines. One reason some have said the industry regards the fines as simply a cost of doing business is because aggressively promoting drugs to doctors for uses not officially approved — including inducing other doctors to praise the drugs to colleagues at meetings — has quickly turned numerous drugs from mediocre sellers into blockbusters, with more than $1 billion in annual sales.
In the last few years, the Justice Department has become much more aggressive in pursuing such fraud, often in whistleblower cases taken on by a handful of U.S. attorneys focused on such fraud. Among the most active are the U.S. attorneys in Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco — all in regions with numerous pharmaceutical and biotech company operations.
The prior record-setting case involved Pfizer Inc., the world’s biggest drugmaker. Pfizer paid the government $2.3 billion in criminal and civil fines for improperly marketing 13 different drugs, including Viagra and cholesterol fighter Lipitor.
It is illegal to promote uses for a drug that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration — a practice known as off-label marketing.
Prosecutors said GlaxoSmithKline illegally promoted the drug Paxil for treating depression in children from April 1998 to August 2003, even though the FDA never approved it for anyone under age 18. The corporation also promoted the drug Wellbutrin from January 1999 to December 2003 for weight loss, the treatment of sexual dysfunction, substance addictions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, although it was only approved for treatment of major depressive disorder.
Justice Department officials also said that between 2001 and 2007 GlaxoSmithKline failed to report to the FDA on safety data from certain post-marketing studies and from two studies of the cardiovascular safety of the diabetes drug Avandia. Since 2007, the FDA has added warnings to the Avandia label to alert doctors about potential increased risk of congestive heart failure and heart attack.
