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Peter Rost (doctor)

Peter Rost is an American former drug marketing executive who is most known for taking public stances critical of the pharmaceutical industry as an "insider" and whistleblower. He sued his last two pharmaceutical employers, Wyeth and Pfizer, the latter of which fired him in 2005. At Wyeth, he uncovered tax evasion practices, and after informing senior company executives, was transferred from Sweden to a post in New Jersey. Rost sued the company, saying that the transfer was a retaliatory demotion, though the company said it was a promotion. Rost settled with Wyeth for an undisclosed amount in 2003. At Pfizer, Rost filed a qui tam suit disclosing off-label marketing of Genotropin at Pharmacia prior to its purchase by Pfizer. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to join in Rost's suit as the marketing violations had already been disclosed to the Department by Pfizer. Rost was eventually fired by Pfizer, and sued for wrongful dismissal. In 2013 Pfizer, the Department of Justice, and Rost settled on undisclosed terms. Rost then worked as a public speaker, author, and litigation consultant.

Biography
Rost worked at medical advertising agencies prior to working for pharmaceutical companies. Rost started working at Wyeth in approximately 1992; seven years after joining Wyeth, he was promoted to head of Wyeth-Lederle Nordiska, Wyeth's Scandinavian subsidiary. Rost has said that he doubled sales during his tenure. He became concerned about Wyeth's accounting practices and informed upper management of his concerns. Shortly thereafter, he was transferred from Sweden to New Jersey, a move he characterized as a retaliatory demotion. He filed a lawsuit against Wyeth, which was settled out of court for undisclosed terms. Rost left Wyeth for Pharmacia in June 2001 and took a role leading its endocrinology division, and said that he soon began to be concerned from a business perspective about sales of Genotropin, Pfizer's human growth hormone drug, which had plateaued; Pharmacia's decision to pour money into off-label marketing to adults was not paying off, due to the low doses that adults took. In the next year, Rost became aware that the strategy was not only unwise, but was probably illegal, and began raising objections internally to try to get the company to change course. The review was noticed by a reporter at USA Today, which interviewed him for an article on the drug industry. The public spotlight from the USA Today article "changed Rost's life" and launched his new career as an insider critical of the drug industry. In September 2004, Rost testified at a Congressional hearing over the reimportation of drugs, in which he stated that "Holding up a vote on importation, stopping good importation bills has a high, high cost not just in money, but in American lives. Every day we delay, Americans die because they cannot afford life-saving drugs." Pfizer responded by sending a letter to Congress that said, "Dr. Rost has no qualifications to speak on importation, no responsibilities in this area at Pfizer, no knowledge of the information and analysis Pfizer has provided to the government on this issue, and no substantive grasp of how importation may impact the safety of this nation's drug supply." Rost followed up that testimony with an opinion piece published by The New York Times. In mid-2005, Rost appeared on a 60 Minutes segment about drug pricing. In late 2005, Rost's lawsuit against Pfizer under the False Claims Act was unsealed (see below) and in December 2005, Pfizer fired him. At Pfizer, Rost had made $600,000 per year for "by his own account, doing essentially no work". In September 2006, Rost's book, The Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman, was published, which described his tenure at Pharmacia and Pfizer and his efforts to deal with the marketing of Genotropin. and a column for Realtid, a Swedish online business newspaper. Later in 2007, Rost announced his new business venture, as a Pharmaceutical Marketing Expert Witness. Rost was featured in the award-winning documentary film Fire in the Blood in 2013. ==Litigation==
Litigation
In January 2003, The New York Times published an article describing a whistleblowing lawsuit Rost had filed against Wyeth, claiming that Wyeth had practiced tax and compensation fraud worldwide, and describing Rost's separate lawsuit against Wyeth for removing him from heading a staff of 125 Wyeth-Lederle Nordiska to heading a group of eight people in New Jersey, which Rost described as a retaliatory demotion and Wyeth described as a promotion. Later in 2003, Wyeth settled the whistleblowing lawsuit for an undisclosed amount. Pfizer also said that they had informed the FDA of Pharmacia's marketing and kickback practices two weeks prior to Rost filing his FCA lawsuit and that they could not do so earlier due to securities laws related to the Pharmacia merger; On April 2, 2007, Pfizer and the Department of Justice, which had been conducting its own investigations focused on kickbacks and illegal off-label marketing (not fraud), announced that two Pharmacia subsidiaries had pleaded guilty and agreed to pay at total of $34.7 million in civil and criminal penalties for kickbacks and illegally promoting its human growth hormone drug, Genotropin. One subsidiary had offered to overpay a subsidiary of a pharmacy benefit manager, Express Scripts, In November 2007, Rost won his appeal of his FCA case, and the case was sent back to district court, where in September 2010 the judge again dismissed his claims as not proving fraud against the federal government. Rost appealed again, but withdrew his appeal in August 2013 when Pfizer, the Department of Justice, and Rost settled on undisclosed terms. ==Notes==
Source: Wikipedia ↗
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