http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/08/pfizer.pharmaceuticals The world's biggest drugs company, Pfizer, is in hot water over a series of television commercials for its blockbuster anti-cholesterol drug, Lipitor.
In the ads, Lipitor is endorsed by the well-known American scientist Robert Jarvik – who invented the artificial heart. Wearing a white coat, Jarvik tells viewers that Lipitor can lower "bad" types of cholesterol by between 39% and 60%.
"I'm glad I take Lipitor, as a doctor and as a dad," he says, before a final shot shows him rowing in healthy, muscular fashion across a sunkissed mountain lake.
A few problems have surfaced with this patter. To begin with, Jarvik, 61, isn't qualified to practice medicine. He admitted this week that he wasn't actually taking Lipitor at the time the ads were shot – and finally, he doesn't know one end of a boat from another so the ad agency used a stunt double with an impressive late middle-age physique.
"He's about as much an outdoorsman as Woody Allen," a colleague, Dr O H Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute, told the New York Times. "He can't row."
I'm a bit amused by this.