At a 2004 retreat designed to prepare sales reps for the marketing launch of Abilify as a treatment for bipolar disorder, Bristol-Myers Squibb aired a video in which a patient, Andy Behrman, recounted how the drug changed his life for the better.

“Since I switched to Abilify, almost all the side effects have gone away,” he said. “In fact, all of them have gone away.”

Behrman continued to rave about Abilify through 2005. He pocketed $400,000 from BMS in return for the favor.

Now, Behrman claims he’d taken the drug for just 4 days before the video was shot, and subsequently he did experience side effects like dizziness and restless legs which forced him to discontinue the drug less than a year after he started it.

Behrman insists he informed BMS about the side effects before the end of 2005.

BMS claims it never instructed Behrman to misrepresent his experience with Abilify, and that he never raised concerns about the drug until it refused to extend his contract.

Recently, BMS released an email showing that Behrman wanted to be paid $7.5 million for the extension.

Behrman claims BMS forged the email to discredit him and that he’s speaking out now because his NDA with the company expired just recently. He says he wants people to know about the drug’s side effects, and the extensive marketing that drove its success.

Behrman says he doesn’t care what people think about his flip-flops. “I think it is normal to have had a lapse in judgment because I was handled and manipulated by so many people,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Abilify generated $2.15 billion in revenues for BMS last year.

The World Health Organization has decided to designate the H1N1 (swine) flu outbreak as a pandemic, as the number of confirmed cases raced toward 30,000 in 74 countries, killing 144. It’s the first flu pandemic since the Hong Kong flu of 1968.

As per protocol, the WHO will now ask vaccine producers to ramp up production of a vaccine against the strain. 

The declaration also automatically obligates governments to focus additional resources on virus containment.

Coincident with the WHO announcement, America’s CDC upgraded the virus to a level 6, the highest possible level. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC urged citizens to stay calm and continue implementing normal precautions.

“The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century,” WHO chief Margaret Chan told reporters. “The (H1N1 flu) virus is now unstoppable. However, we do not expect to see a sudden jump in the number of severe and fatal infections,” she added.

So far, most cases of H1N1 flu have been mild, but it remains possible the virus could mutate into something more dangerous. And since the inception of the epidemic, the virus has been unusually harsh on young, previously healthy people. Nearly half of all deaths from the virus have occurred in this demographic.

The Hong Kong flu killed about a million people, which is 2-4 times the worldwide death rate caused by flu in non-pandemic years.

Drug maker GlaxoSmithKline has indicated it plans to begin commercial production of an H1N1 vaccine in July. It will be several months after that before the company could make available large quantities of the jab.

Peter Cordingley, a WHO spokesperson based in Manila cautioned that the word pandemic was “a measure of the spread of the virus, not the severity of the virus.” The virus’s effects are moderate at the moment, he told the Wall Street Journal. “But it’s still going to infect an awful lot of people.”