Former New York Times health care business reporter Gardiner Harris spoke with Paul Goldberg of The Cancer Letter about covering the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and his book on Johnson & Johnson.
Here is an excerpt:
Gardiner Harris: What’s interesting, Paul, and you and I have been following, obviously this stuff for now 30 some odd years, and I wanna tell your listeners, I was arguably the top FDA reporter in the country. You know, I was, I covered it for the New York Times, and I, unlike some reporters at the Times in that job, I actively covered it and really tried to penetrate the agency.
And one of the people who helped me the most was Paul Goldberg who is one of the great reporters in this space of the generation. And I just want people who, I think most of your listeners already know this, but Paul and I were partners on some of the most important, you know, disclosures and news stories of the 2000s really.
You and I, you would often find out something, you would come to me I would gratefully accept the information that you provided.
I would do my own reporting. And, you know, because I had the New York Times imprimatur, I could sometimes get stuff that you didn’t, and we would often partner together and release stories at the same time. That would have profound impacts.
Read more here.
Harris became a pharmaceutical reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where his investigation of Bristol-Myers Squibb led to criminal charges against three top executives and the dismissal of its chief executive. He became the public health reporter for The New York Times, where his investigations led to the withdrawals of a multi-billion-dollar diabetes medicine and dozens of popular pediatric cough-and-cold drugs. His stories exposing secret payments from drug makers to prominent academics led to the passage of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act requiring pharmaceutical and medical device companies to report payments to physicians and teaching hospitals.
