There is the truth and there is propaganda. Propaganda comes from leaders in order to keep morale up. You've heard it before in the broader economy - for example - oil falling is good for the economy (not really - it means global slowdown). Or unemployment is at an all time low (again, not really if you count the number of people that have dropped out of the labor force).It goes on and on.... As far as NVS is concerned and especially the desperate to keep my job folks selling LCZ - here's a bit of "truthiness" - straight from Joe Hee-Men-ez, and David Epstein on yesterday's Earnings Conference Call to Wall Street. Because you can lie to your employees - but not to the lords who pump their clients to buy your stock so you can cash out your multi million dollar stock options: Epstein on LCZ utilization for the first year: In terms of LCZ uptick, the launches in the U.S. are such that they are impacted ultimately by how payers put products on formulary. In the case of LCZ, this is a heavy Medicare population so the patients are elderly and what that means is we will not see a lot of formulary decisions during the first six months because Medicare won’t be making a decision during the first six months. So, we would expect a relatively modest uptick with LCZ and then going into the following year, if we get the Medicare reimbursement then the other carriers will start coming on you should then see acceleration - we hope. I don't want to comment any further on our Managed Markets team in the US and the discussions they are having with the govt. Epstein on LCZ accelerated review in the US - oopsie: Now on page 48, I’d like to take a moment to just update you on LCZ696, our product that will be initially labeled through reduced ejection heart failure - this isn't what we would have liked - but we have adjusted our launch plan accordingly. What I can say here is the discussions with the regulators are going very well. The European Union as well as Swissmedic have granted an accelerated review. In the case of the EMA, this is the first time an accelerated review has been granted for cardiovascular therapy. We have a slightly different skew in the US. We submitted in mid-December in the U.S. and within 60 days of that submission, we should hear from the U.S. FDA whether or not an accelerated review is possible. We are optimistic - but I must caution there is never a guarantee. We are operating on the assumption it should go through - but we don't have a clear indication yet. Should they grant an accelerated review, one would expect a labeling decision or an approval in August of this year - but again I want to stress this is not a sure thing. So there you have it folks....straight from your leaders mouth - in all its truthiness glory. Now back to your regularly scheduled cheerleader programming in Dallas next week.
Low oil is bad? Fox news tell you that? Ga. at 1.79$ per gallon gives the American driver another 2k to spend in a year. Bad for the fat cats that raped the American customer, but good for 99% of us. If people want to leave the labor force its their choice! The fats cats dont like this because it drives up the cost of labor. You have to pay someone 12$ per hr instead of 8$ god forbid. the delay of lcz on medicare is well known. It was in the training on day 1. So yes, there are winners and losers with this stuff. But lcz is a winner.
