'Round the Sphere: Rost Rocks, AZ PR Meltdown, New Name Exposed

Does Peter Rost (Question Authority) rock your world or wreck it?

If your world is the pharmaceutical industry and the AstraZeneca corner of it in particular, you probably would say that he is wrecking your world.

To us bloggers in the Pharma Blogosphere^TM, however, Rost Rocks!

Think of Rost in his best "deep throat" outfit sitting on a park bench in Wilmington, DE (US headquarters of AstraZeneca). Mysterious people stop by and sit next to him for a few minutes and then leave. Rost throws some crumbs on the ground and immediately a flock of pigeons swoops in and gobbles them up!

But Rost doesn't have to go anywhere to "scoop" the likes of journalist bloggers like Ed Silverman (Pharmalot) and Jim Edwards (BrandweekNRX). He merely has to sit in fromt of his computer in NJ somewhere and groups of seven come to him with incriminating evidence.

From time to time I too have been a pigeon feasting on Rost's crumbs. It certainly has been fun.

The latest crumb is the Powerpoint presentation "smoking gun" and "proof of questionable promotional practices in connection with selling of AstraZeneca’s cancer drug ARIMIDEX ® (anastrozole)", according to Rost (see "The AstraZeneca Controversy Increases with More Proof of Questionable Practices").

Rost won't reveal who at AZ created this PPT. He quotes an internal AZ memo:

"Below you'll find the updated BIG 1-98 presentation put together by [name redacted] and myself for your background use. Please make sure that you study this information thoroughly. Hopefully it will make understanding the benefits of Arimidex over letrozole a little easier for all of us. We really worked on simplifying all of the data for your use."

If you dig a little deeper in this dirt, you may be able to find out who created the slides. All you have to do is ... and you will find this person's name, which is...[find it here in the comments section].

P.S. Sorry! Upon special request from a person of interest, the comment referred to above, which revealed the name of the person who may have prepared the smoking gun slide deck has be temporarily deleted.