Have to admit, you have been right on a lot of points.
Under the new assignments that the PriCara reps received this week, there are many territories that are slotted to have 3 and even 4 reps. In many cases there is currently only one PriCara (in some cases Pain and in some cases AI/GI) assigned to those territories. Do you think that come July 5th there will still be some territories with just one rep? And the Quintiles reps currently in those geographies will be laid off?
I'm 99% certain that all the Quintiles reps will be laid off. The 1% is if Quintiles can pull a rabbit out of their hat and find a new contract for everyone. I think the Pricara "vacancy management" contract is DOA in July.
Where I am at there are two positions within the "footprint." One is filled with an existing Pricara employee. The other is a new position that was posted on career connections a week or two ago. The DM told the Pricara rep that they will be ALONE in the footprint, probably until Xarelto gets its 2nd indication, Prevention of stroke in pts with AF. Since they don't even have a single approval yet, it's pure speculation as to when that will occur.
Another "footprint" has 4 slots, one being filled immediately with a Pricara rep and three contractor positions that---once again---are not slated to be filled until PSAF.
I wish the news was better. I had counted on 24 months for this gig. I did
not think it would lead to a permanent job with J&J, but it would have been nice. It pisses me off that J&J is punting us prematurely. Just more evidence that the industry hosed.
Truth be told, Pharma is still dying. The heyday was decades ago, and the boom in 1997-2002 was just that, a BOOM. Booms are always followed by busts, and this one is more than that. It's structural.
All the easy clinical stuff has already been mined. Physicians increasingly work very much like blue collar assembly-line workers in an auto plant. They punch in, work their 8.5, and punch out. Don't confuse them with new stuff, all they want to do is follow the approved Disease Management Pathway for each patient diagnosis, be patted on their head for seeing 3 more patients per day this quarter than last, and forget about work with a beer or two.
Long gone are the days when docs were scientists and businessmen. They're one step from being replaced by a computer algorithm. Woe be to us all, on that.
Pharma no longer has the legal immunity of the FDA. Now, even if a company markets its drugs exactly in conformance with FDA regs, lawyers can wring huge settlements and win big judgments...look no further than Levaquin's woes in court. Pharma used to have government in its back pocket. Those days are coming to a close.
Anyone who thinks Pharma is not headed for decline, sometimes slow, other times fast, is fooling themselves.
After 20+ years playing this (or related) games I'm damned if I know what to do for a living. Too young to retire, too old to retrain. The little purple "smiley" says it all.