Hmmm… a public relations campaign that could easily explode. The foreign press, if they picked up on this or will pick on similar cases in the future, will distort and blow up the misguided and foolish attempts to boost an exec’s year-end bonus. In light of the expanding Abramoff scandal today is a story a few months old called the Spivak Conspiracy:
A pharmaceutical consultant secretly commissions a novel about terrorists poisoning Americans with medicine from Canada, then backs out and inadvertently spawns a thriller pillorying his own industry.
This is no pulp-fiction farce. Call it bookgate, an impossible-to-make-up public-relations disaster now dogging the pharmaceutical industry.
Its real-life cast includes a deputy vice president of the country’s drug lobby, a celebrity divorce lawyer, a tell-all book publisher, and even former New York Times fabricator Jayson Blair in a cameo.
"It’s a nightmare beyond nightmares," admitted Mark A. Barondess, the consultant who initiated the book deal and now calls it a mistake.
