(MyFoxBoston.com) – A New England Compounding Center insider is breaking his silence, revealing some disturbing allegations about the Framingham pharmacy at the center of a deadly meningitis outbreak.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, a former salesman for NECC says the firm filled prescriptions for people that didn't exist. The pharmacy allegedly used fake names like Bart Simpson and Jane Doe to illegally mass produce compounding drugs.
Clinics would provide those fake names so they could purchase large amounts of drugs cheaper. He says those drugs were shipped to 3,000 hospitals and clinics nationwide.
Forty-eight people have died from fungal meningitis and another 720 people are infected because of tainted drugs manufactured at NECC.
The company had no response to the 60 Minutes report.
Statement from the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists:
The recent reporting by CBS, on the "CBS Evening News" on March 7 and 8, 2013, and most recently this evening on "60 Minutes," concerning the circumstances surrounding the tragic meningitis outbreak, deaths, and sickness associated with the products of New England Compounding Center in Framingham, MA, is important, and the findings are deeply troubling. These news accounts are consistent with our long-held belief that NECC acted illegally and outside of its license as a pharmacy.
Both the state board and the FDA in fact possessed the authority to close NECC, and both had been notified of issues and potential problems with that company before this series of tragic events occurred. Massachusetts and the FDA inspected NECC repeatedly as far back as 2004 over concerns about their sterile compounding practices. Only after the tragedy began did the Massachusetts regulatory authorities deem NECC's actions as manufacturing rather than compounding pharmacy practice.
IACP has worked and will continue to work with state and federal policy makers to do what is necessary to see that nothing like this ever happens again while assuring that physicians, pharmacists and patients can still work together so that patients can have access to customized medicines that are not available from manufacturers. Compounding pharmacists perform a vital function that must be preserved.