Provide names of other journalists involved.
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List date(s) this work was published or aired.
1/31/2011, 4/14/2011, 10/17/2011, 10/31/2011, 12/8/2011
Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
1/31/2011 Jennifer Corbett Dooren first reported on shortages of chemotherapy treatments, antibiotics and key nutritional supplements in hospitals nationwide. In this story she broke the news there was a shortage of injectable generic drugs for cancer and other serious diseases. This article prompted Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) to introduce legislation to deal with the emerging crisis. And Jennifer’s exclusive foreshadowed a major national health concern, resulting in President Barack Obama signing an executive order Nov. 1 aimed at rectifying the shortage. Our story was later matched by national media.
4/14/2011 In this story, Jennifer disclosed a shortage of a key leukemia drug that started last year has worsened, causing many major cancer centers such as the Johns Hopkins Hospital to start rationing the drug and others to turn away patients from community hospitals that have run out of the medication. The three companies that make the drug, called cytarabine, have all suffered production difficulties in the past year. At the time of the story, only one of them, Hospira Inc., was shipping the drug, but only in limited quantities that were not nearly enough to meet demand.
10/17/2011 In this article, Peter Loftus went behind the scenes and exposed the deficiencies at Ben Venue Laboratories outsourced company manufacturing a key cancer treatment drug -Doxil- for Johnson & Johnson. He was tenacious in reporting this story.
10/31/2011 Peter then looked at the fallout from the Doxil shortages and disclosed that a number of cancer studies had been halted or faced delays. 12/8/2011 Peter continued to dig into this story and unearthed more undisclosed details of the problems at Ben Venue, which is a unit of German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, tying the problem into the broader issue of big pharma companies outsourcing production of their drugs.
Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
For the Doxil story, Peter Loftus filed two FOIA requests with the Food and Drug Administration to obtain copies of inspection reports for the Ben Venue Labs manufacturing plant that was at the root of the Doxil shortage. This helped immensely because it provided information about the deficient conditions at the plant, much of which wasn’t being provided voluntarily by J&J, Ben Venue or the FDA. He also used online resources including: official websites of the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency; as well as J&J’s Doxil product website, which posted periodic updates on the supply status. The initial story breaking the news of the Doxil shortage came from a regular check of a third-party wholesale distributor’s website. Jennifer Corbett Dooren noticed an increasing number of drug shortages listed on FDA’s website in the fall of 2010– most of the drugs were generic medications she had not heard of. It wasn’t clear that it mattered if any of these drugs being in short supply mattered– ie if drug A is short but you can sub drug B there isn’t a problem for patients and hospitals. She then just cut deeper and more broadly into the story to get the answers.
Explain types of human sources used.
Peter interviewed numerous doctors and patients who were directly affected by the Doxil shortage. He also interviewed researchers running clinical trials that were being held up by the Doxil shortage. He also dealt with spokespeople for J&J, Ben Venue and the FDA, though in January 2012 He had an opportunity to interview the J&J CEO and elicited some comments on the Doxil shortage. Jennifer talked with doctors who were spokespeople for medical professional societies about the shortages. At first, they only had anecdotal information about the shortages. Finally she was able to get a couple of pharmacists to go on the record to discuss how their hospitals were dealing with shortages and she found a patient for the Feb. 1 story who was willing to talk about her experience (her doctors were afraid to be named) . For the April 14 story on the leukemia drug cytarabine (this drug has no substitutes unlike some of the other cancer drugs in short supply), a doctor from MD Anderson cancer center in Houston told her he was worried about this shortage even though his institution was fine. She told him she needed people to go on the record, and later that day she had at least 5 doctors, including a prominent one at Johns Hopkins, go on the record saying they were rationing the drug. We were the first to report the news of this particular drug shortage and the impact.
Results:
The late January news Jennifer broke about a shortage of injectable generic drugs for cancer and other serious diseases prompted Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) to introduce legislation to deal with the emerging crisis. Jennifer’s exclusive foreshadowed a major national health concern, resulting in President Barack Obama signing an executive order Nov. 1 aimed at rectifying the shortage. Specifically on Doxil, NJ Rep., Bill Pascrell, sent a letter to the US Secretary of Health and Human Services in November asking for help in resolving the Doxil shortage. The FDA issued a statement later in the month saying it was exploring all options to help resolve the shortage.
Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
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Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
From Jennifer: If you notice something usual on your beat, follow up on it. (ie I noticed an usual number of drug shortage notices on FDA’s website). From Peter: Be persistent even if you are not getting sufficient responses from companies you follow. Keep asking follow-up questions to vague responses. Take some time to think about other sources of useful information. Exploit online resources. Make clear to the companies that you are very interested in ongoing coverage of the topic. Even if they are not so enthusiastic about the coverage, they may come to you first with new updates on the story, as happened with my Doxil coverage.