The Pharma comms disaster

A long and excellent story from Lloyd Burr who details how Pharmac lied to media in order to try and give an exclusive to one media outlet.

Some extracts:

During the phone call, I was told we had it wrong, they weren’t funding Trikafta from April 1st 2023 and if we went ahead with the story, we’d be breaking the hearts of cystic fibrosis sufferers. They offered me an embargoed copy of it, which I declined because I didn’t want to be bound to an embargo on a story we already had. 

I called Today FM’s Head of News Dallas Gurney who rang Rachel Smalley, and we all decided to run with our story. It was ‘100 percent watertight,” Smalley said. 

Pharmac staff lied to Burr. He didn’t have it wrong. They were just trying to give an exclusive to another media outlet.

Despite Pharmac telling us we had it all wrong, its CEO Sarah Fitt emailed Mediaworks CEO Cam Wallace saying Smalley and I “knowingly broke a very sensitive embargo around a consultation on the funding of a new medicine for cystic fibrosis”. 

She issued a ban on Mediaworks “until we feel we can trust you again”. 

Fitt also tells Vertex that Smalley has broken the embargo, even though she was never sent an embargoed copy in the first place. 

So first they claim Burr and Smalley had it wrong, and then they claim they broke the embargo, which implies they had it right.

But the fact is embargoes only apply to those who receive an embargoed copy. Burr and Smalley heard about it through other sources, and for this act of journalism a government agency banned their employer, as if they were recreating the spirit of Muldoon.