Qui Tam whistleblower gets $51.5M from Pfizer
In 2003, John Kopchinski was earning $125,000 a year selling the drug Bextra for Pfizer. He had a baby son, and his wife was pregnant with twins. The Gulf War veteran says that, "In the Army, I was expected to protect people at all costs." At Pfizer, though, he was expected to sell Bextra, even though it raised the risk of heart attacks and strokes. After Kopchinski expressed his concerns about Bextra's safety, Pfizer fired him. He eventually got a new job paying $40,000 a year.
Kopchinski hired attorney Erika Kelton of Phillips & Cohen. In 2005, Pfizer withdrew Bextra from the market. Now Pfizer is pleading guilty to felony charges of promoting Bextra for unapproved uses. Pfizer will pay penalties of $2.3 billion, and Kopchinski will get a $51.5 million share for filing the "qui tam" lawsuit under the False Claims Act (FCA) that helped the government collect these penalties. Kopchinski is one of five whistleblowers sharing in the settlement. He says that he does not expect his life to change much now, according to a news account of this settlement available from Reuters.
Attorney Dean Zerbe, senior counsel to the National Whistleblowers Center, told Reuters and the ABA Journal that he hopes publicity of this settlement will encourage other whistleblowers to come forward with information about fraudulent marketing. "The use of whistleblowers has really opened up the keys to the kingdom in terms of what's going on in these companies," said Zerbe, who is also a partner at the law firm of Zerbe, Fingeret, Frank and Jadav in Washington. "You'd never find out what's happening without this kind of reward structure."
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Tampa Bay On-Line reports that the State of Florida has decided that $1 million of the Pfizer false claims settlement will go to a new state program to reward whistleblowers who report information that leads to civil or criminal charges. Of the $2.3 billion settlement, $58 million is going to the State of Florida. Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum decided that $1 million would be applied to the state's new whistleblower reward program. The State Legislature created the program earlier this year at the urging of state Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Destin. "We expect to recover many millions of dollars in overpaid claims and fraudulent and abusive practices in Medicaid because of those who want to drop a dime on bad actors," Gaetz said. Florida's fraud hotline is (866) 966-7226 or (850) 414-3990. The article is at:
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/sep/17/pfizer-millions-fund-states-new-medicaid-whistlebl/news-breaking/
Jim Edwards reports about the fate of two Pfizer whistleblowers in his bNet blog:
http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10004433/fired-whistleblower-reps-make-similar-claim-pfizer-said-they-lacked-integrity/
Edwards quotes from their now unsealed complaint to detail their claims that they were fired shortly after objecting to Pfizer's off-label marketing. Edwards also provides Pfizer's now-modified denial (denying all the allegations, except the two they settled). Hopefully, their $51 million share of the settlement will be enough to compensate these whistleblowers for losing their jobs. They stood up for the taxpayers and for the medical customers, and they deserve to be made whole for that.