Pfizer to pay nearly $60M over kickbacks for migraine drug once promoted by Lady Gaga
Pfizer chairman and CEO Albert Bourla breaks down the companys revenue on The Claman Countdown.
The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will pay nearly $60 million to resolve charges that a company it acquired paid kickbacks so that physicians would prescribe a specific migraine drug to patients, thereby defrauding Medicare and other federal health care programs.
The Justice Department announced Friday that Biohaven paid improper remuneration, including in the form of speaker honoraria and meals at high-end restaurants, to healthcare professionals to induce them to prescribe the migraine medication Nurtec ODT more often in violation of the anti-kickback statute.
The scheme took place from March 1, 2020, through Sept. 30, 2022. Pfizer bought Biohaven in October 2022.
The Pfizer Inc. logo is seen on the lab coat of an employee at the company's research and development facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Pfizer will pay nearly $60 million to resolve charges that a company it acquired paid kickbacks. ( Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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Prosecutors said that certain prescribers who attended multiple speaker programs on the same topic received no educational benefit from attending repeat programs and that certain Biohaven speaker programs were attended by individuals with no educational need to attend, such as the speakers’ spouses, family members, or friends, or colleagues from the speakers’ own medical practice.
Pfizer ended the Nurtec speaker programs after paying $11.5 billion to buy Biohaven.
«Patients deserve to know that their doctor is prescribing medications based on their doctor’s medical judgment, and not as a result of
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