What were Novartis's "sham" speaker programmes?
The government alleged tens of thousands of speaker events from 2002 to 2011 were really just entertainment — fishing trips, meals at Hooters, restaurant bills of $3,000 for two — with the same doctors rotating who spoke and who collected the fee.
In July 2020 Novartis agreed to pay $678 million to resolve a whistleblower lawsuit, joined by the government, over its speaker programmes. According to BioPharma Dive, between 2002 and 2011 Novartis sales representatives hosted tens of thousands of speaker programmes and roundtables, supposedly to share medical information, but many were held at expensive restaurants and focused on entertaining high-prescribing doctors. The government cited fishing trips, meals at Hooters and restaurant bills of $3,000 for two people.
A legal analysis noted that the same doctors were often paid to attend each other's dinners repeatedly, rotating who spoke and collected the fee. Unusually, Novartis made extensive factual admissions and accepted strict limits on future speaker programmes, which must now be virtual and cannot be held at restaurants or serve alcohol.