Re: Do Pharmabloggers Dream of Electric Homeopaths? (Or Rozilla vs. PeteyB)


"PeterB" <pkm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1157649673.786281.67350@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ok, I couldn't think of a subject header. What follows is an exhange
with one our resident PR grunt hacks, here to protect and defend her
corporate sponsors. Rosalind (aka cathy) works hard for her kibble, so
lets hear some applause!!! ....

[also be sure to read the article at:
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2003Q1/monger.html]




A history of marketing pharmaceuticals built on bad
logic and faulty observations. Sure, I make mistakes, but none that
undermine the premise of my arguments for natural medicine.


Since Rosalind had no argument, I became the argument. My own
positions have been documented repeatedly, either by scientific
references or by links to Merriam Webster, while she declines to
document her own positions. Instead, she now claims that she is an
editor of scientific papers. This is a dramatic change in virtual
personality from one year ago, when she was using religious imagery to
depict people burning in hell for their rejection of vaccine, or
reciting family values as a guilt device in her routine manipulations.
I began to take her (false) character apart, and the pain was palpable.

In a short time, she morphed into a very different online persona, and

that is the Rosalind (aka cathy) you see here today. If it seems
incredible that industry would be represented here in the newsgroups,
just ask yourself how powerful a medium the Internet and Usenet have
become for the corporate and political spheres of influence. In terms
of corporate marketing, you can't have success without mind share, and
you can't have that without customer loyalty. You hardly need me to
tell you that hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing through media

projects at every level of corporate and political life, and there are
no "off" days. Also see:
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2003Q1/monger.html


Rosalind has tried to have it both ways, but I'm not letting her get
away with it. Obviously, there have always been cases of overlooked
and unreported measles (we just don't know how many), but the PR grunts

working here on behalf of the drug makers, in refuting my comments
regarding vaccine bias, say it's impossible for measles to go
undiagnosed or misdiagnosed in vaccinated communities. Rosalind
stepped into it when she admitted that huge numbers of measles have
gone unreported, but somehow, magically, that no longer happens in
*vaccinated* communities. Clearly, this is exactly the situation in
which such cases, probably as mild as those *prior* to introduction of
vaccine, would be likely to occur. Vaccination status is a powerful
comfort for parents who simply shrug and say, "Johnies got a flu bug.
He's already had his shots." The point is that vaccine has been shown
to be responsible for virtually none (perhaps zero) of the reduction in

severe morbidity of infectious disease in the USA.(1)


< snip Jan-like long incoherent cut-and-paste >

Okay, I went over this for you a couple of years ago, but it's time to
explain it again.

Let's pretend that I am a advertizing/public relations executive for a major
pharmaceutical firm. The most important part of my job is to decide how to
spend my advertizing budget. It's a large budget, of course, but I want to
make every dollar of it count for the highest possible return in sales. The
most effective advertizing is that which reaches the most people and does so
repeatedly, and that's why I might be willing to spend a million dollars or
more of my budget on a commercial during the SuperBowl where I can get my
message to many millions of people. The remainder of my advertizing money
will be spread throughout various media, always with an eye to how many
people I reach and at what cost.

Now if I were to pay people to post on newsgroups, how many people could I
reach, and with what message? I obviously can't have them plug my products
directly; everybody would see through that. So the best they could do is to
counter the arguments of the anti-pharmaceutical posters, and that would
also benefit my pharm competitors at my expense. As for numbers, there are
at most a few hundred participants and lurkers in a newsgroup like mha, and
most of them are already strongly opinionated an not going to be swayed
either way. If I pay people in that newsgroup to post, and they do well,
I'll actually persuade a dozen or so at the most, not a very good return on
my money. How much money? Well, most of the posters to mha who write well
enough to be persuasive are college educated professionals, and are not
going to work for less than $30/hr or more, or, say, 50c/word if I pay them
that way. On the other hand, for far less money I can have one of my drug
reps take four or five doctors to a dinner at a nice restaurant, and
persuade them to prescribe my statin instead of my competitors'. Since each
of these doctors has several thousand patients in his practice, my return on
my investment will be much greater.

Now, Petey, considering that there are twenty or so major pharmaceutical
companies, and each of them is in the same condition of knowing better than
spending their money paying us "pharmabloggers", I would guess that you, in
your paranoid manner, are going to suggest that they have formed a
conspiracy to do so, some kind of a secret industry guild that is cutting
our paychecks for the common good. Well, there's no such thing, because it
still wouldn't make sense to pay all that money to that many posters to
(maybe) change the opinions of a dozen or so mha readers.

It just doesn't happen. Nobody here is getting paid to argue with your silly
posts.

Cathy is not Rosalind, either.
--


--Rich

Recommended websites:

http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles
http://www.acahf.org.au
http://www.quackwatch.org/
http://www.skeptic.com/
http://www.csicop.org/



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