He paused a moment. "I hate that he's suffering, and now this worrying about having to come up with twenty thousand dollars when the Culovort runs out. It's breaking his will. I don't want him to die like this." He looked down at his tasseled loafers, his shoulders bowed, like a man who's gone up against the giant and gotten smashed. Erin wanted to weep.
He said quietly, "Do you know that in the U.S., about one hundred and fifty thousand people are diagnosed with colon cancer every year? I've written letters, sent e-mails, made phone calls to my elected representatives, to the FDA, until all I wanted was to shoot myself. No one seems to care except for the oncologists, the patients, and their beleaguered families, and they're powerless. I don't really know why I'm here. I knew you'd understand, Erin, but what can you do? What can anyone do to force the drug company to start up Culovort to full production again?"
"What we need," Erin said, drumming her fingertips on the little banged-up desk she'd bought from Goodwill in her sophomore year at Boston College, "is to get hold of solid proof they know damned well what they're doing, and that they are profiting from it. Then the media will sit up and pay attention. They love drug company scandals, but they like them much more when they're presented on a nice big platter complete with fines of hundreds of million dollars."
She rose, took both his hands in hers. "I don't know yet what I'm going to do, sir, but I do know that I'm going to try my best to find something that will help. Let me think about this, all right?"
She knew he'd left without much hope, but she was fired up, her brain cooking. She spent three hours that evening on the Internet searching out everything on the Culovort shortage, but found little more than Dr. Kender had already told her. Everywhere the same thing, in other words, the company line: Production line problems, overexpansion, it was being worked on, but it would take time. It was when she read about how the oncology departments at major university medical schools were beginning to ration Culovort that she kicked her desk.
Why didn't someone in power question what the drug company said? Didn't any of these vaunted medical reporters remember the drug companies' record of gross misconduct-hiding negative data from the FDA, practically bribing physicians, failing to publish negative results, ghostwriting journal articles-and start waving red flags immediately, when it might make a difference? Didn't they remember the Vioxx scandal? How many people had died before Merck was forced to pull that drug?
Was this simply the way all drug companies operated worldwide? Come to think of it, was this the way politicians operated? Was self-interest the only driving force?
She was depressing herself.
What she needed was rock-solid proof that Schiffer Hartwin was doing this knowingly, and for profit. By midnight, she'd decided her old lock picks were her best shot at getting proof and forcing the Culovort production line to get up-and-running again.
3
STONE BRIDGE, CONNECTICUT
Monday morning
As Erin chewed on her English muffin, she reread the nineteen pages she'd photocopied from the Project A file. There was plenty there, even explanations the PR people were to give for the breakdown in Culovort production they knew would impact cancer patients. Caskie Royal had been wonderfully thorough in his To Do list, including one bulleted sentence that summed it all up: Given current worldwide Culovort supplies and current production levels at our facility in Spain, we estimate it will require four months for Culovort shortages to develop in the U.S. Shortages will force many oncologists to switch to Eloxium.
And then they shut down production in Spain!
Erin frowned. She realized all of this would make much more sense if Schiffer Hartwin also owned the patent for the enormously expensive oral drug Eloxium.
But they didn't. A French pharmaceutical company, Laboratoires Ancondor, produced Eloxium. Dr. Kender had told her one hundred and fifty thousand people in the U.S. were diagnosed with colon cancer each year. The income from Eloxium would end in more zeros than she could count.
But why would a German pharmaceutical cut way back on its Culovort production in its U.S. and Spanish facilities so a French pharmaceutical company could reap the profits?
Clearly, antitrust laws wouldn't allow them to profit directly. Was there some other way they were scratching each other's backs? Were there payoffs involved? Swiss bank accounts? Or were they so arrogant as to believe there would be no legal action if they violated the antitrust laws?
Erin smeared more crunchy peanut butter on her English muffin as she read about Serono, a Swiss biopharmaceutical company, that had tried to bring an AIDS drug to market "by concocting a dubious medical test," U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales had alleged. The company "put its desire to sell the drug above the interests of patients." Serono had even offered doctors an all-expenses-paid trip to France to prescribe the drug.