Is Pfizer the Compaq of Big Pharma?

Can You Kill A Terminal Company?

My former neighbor has an interesting Letter to the Editor in today's paper. Apparently Pfizer's decision to shutter its Ann Arbor Campus and layoff or transfer 2100 employees is the result of Democratic malfeasance.

Yesterday a similar letter was printed concerning Pfizer from a Jerry Lovett of Brighton who thinks the displaced Pfizer employees got what they deserved because they were a bunch of elitist foreign car owners.

I owned a bit of stock in Pfizer for awhile, sold it, lost a bunch of money on it, and am damn glad to be rid of it. I've continued to follow the company since then and can't see it surviving without a merger with another big pharma corporation. And I'm not the only genius of this opinion.

Some say the management team is a marketing team, not a bio-science team.
Some say Pfizer doesn't have a workable fresh "block buster" in the pipeline and their best-selling drugs have patents about to expire.

And then there's the opinion that the managers are simply a bunch of mean spirited pricks insensitive to the lives in the third world.

Blaming Michigan government for this move seems to be a real leap (although it's been a Republican legislature for so long I'd love to nail it on their door.) A whole bunch of American companies from Polaroid to Sunbeam and Sylvania are now just corporate shells trading on names but employing very few Americans.

And if it's all about taxes someone needs to explain why Manhattan seems to attract so much business so effortlessly.

As for kissing big pharma's ass? It appears Michigan is the only state in the Union to offer lawsuit protection for pharmaceutical companies if their drug was FDA approved and it met the quality and dosage standards that the approval was based on.
But Dunny may be right that the Democrats are somewhat to blame for this downsizing and subsequent move. You see part of the 100 Hour agenda that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Dems pushed through was a repudiation of Bush's "no negotiation" purchasing policy for Medicare prescription drugs. It's not like it's un-American...the VA Hospitals save millions buying in massive quantities at negotiated prices.
Folks like pinning the blame for these flame-outs on the unions and the government. But Delphi and Visteon were management accidents waiting to happen. Funny that the Chinese manufacturer looking to buy some of their divisions claims not to be interested in moving the work off-shore.
Republicans can't believe there are bad CEOs who can take down a business. It must be someone elses fault.
Well, consider K-Mart, Enron and Global Crossing.