Big Pharma paga "influencers"...

 

Physician influencers are getting paid quite well by Big Pharma companies for their social media posts.

More than 90% of physicians who posted an endorsement of a drug or medical device on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, received payments from pharma companies, according to a recent analysis published in JAMA.

The study found that industry payments to doctors totaled up to $2.46 billion in 2022.

Among the 28 doctors included in the study, 26 of them received payments from pharma companies for a variety of reasons — most often marked as food and beverages, speaking or consulting fees.

The average payment to doctors from drugmakers was around $27,400.

However, most of Big Pharma’s payments to doctors went toward “speaking,” with some $377,000 paid to 18 physicians for speaking activities.

The researchers also pinpointed 24 times in which physicians received payments that were linked to them mentioning a specific drug or medical device on X.

Half of the doctors who endorsed drugs on X had no research publications related to the products and almost half of the physicians did not disclose that they were being paid by the drugmakers.

The companies that paid physicians surveyed in the study included Pfizer, GSK, Eisai, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Exelixis and Boston Scientific.

The results of the study bring up questions about the validity of physician endorsements on social media — especially if the doctors in question don’t disclose the compensation they receive from companies, the authors argued.

“[T]he conflict of interest… may not be apparent to the general social media audience,” the authors wrote.

“These payments can represent scientific collaboration but may involve marketing efforts without scientific benefits, raising concerns regarding their influence on clinical decision-making,” they continued. “[P]articipation in industry marketing raises questions regarding professionalism and their responsibilities as patient advocates.”

The role of physicians in marketing a drugmaker’s product for compensation has been a long debated topic, even drawing scrutiny in Congress over the past decade.

In 2014, lawmakers included a rule in the Affordable Care Act which required pharma companies to report their payments to physicians.

Under that bill, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched the Open Payments database, which tracks the financial relationships between doctors and drugmakers and makes payments more transparent.

Still, research suggests that the launch of Open Payments hasn’t deterred physicians from accepting Big Pharma payments too much.

One 2020 study found that 45% of doctors accepted at least one payment from industry in 2018, compared to 52% of doctors in 2014.

Ver