"Whiny Whistleblower of the Year" Responds
Terminated Pfizer Exec Nominated “Whiny Whistleblower of the Year” by Drug Industry Front Organization.
The American Council on Science and Health on December 30, 2005 announced that they had nominated former Pfizer Vice
President Peter Rost, M.D., to “Whiny Whistleblower of the Year.”
Dr. Rost has been an outspoken advocate for drug re-importation and was fired on December 1, 2005, after his False
Claims Act lawsuit against Pfizer was unsealed; that suit resulted in an ongoing criminal investigation conducted by the
U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts.
In his nomination, Gilbert Ross, M.D., Executive and Medical Director of the ACSH stated that the biggest “Whiny
Whistleblower” for 2005 was “the person who most outrageously defied his or her employer, regardless of loyalty,
science, or even common sense.” Dr. Ross concluded “I vote for ex-Pfizer V.P. Dr. Peter Rost, an inept exec but a pretty
good whistleblower. He provoked a federal investigation of his own company in 2003, alleging that Pfizer was responsible
for the improper marketing of the synthetic growth hormone Genotropin.”
Dr. Rost responds, “To be officially nominated ‘Whiny Whistleblower of the Year’ by a front organization paid by Pfizer
and Big Pharma is a great honor, even more so since I apparently competed against two real consumer heroes; Dr. David
Graham, FDA, and Dr. Eric Topol, the Cleveland Clinic. I also note that perhaps Dr. Ross isn’t a good judge of
character.” According to the magazine Mother Jones, “Ross spent all of 1996 at a federal prison camp in Schuylkill,
Pennsylvania, having being sentenced to 46 months in prison for his participation in a scheme that ultimately defrauded
New York's Medicaid program of approximately $8 million.”
The American Council on Science and Health stopped disclosing corporate donors in the early 1990s, according to
Integrity in Science. The following drug companies contributed to ACSH, according to ACSH’s 1991 annual report and ACSH
Corporate Donors 1997: Pfizer, Abbott Laboratories, American Cyanamid, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ciba-Geigy, Eli Lilly,
Hoffman-La Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Rhone-Poulenc, Sandoz, Searle, Syntex, Warner-Lambert, Upjohn, Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association.
ENDS