Rush Limbaugh used to endorse Cold-Eeze
"Howard Stern raves about Cold-Eeze on the air, as does
Rush LIMBAUGH-- it's about the only thing the two agree on."
Cold-Eeze History - 1999 Philadelphia Magazine
Philadelphia Magazine
> 3/3/99
>
> THE ZINC PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN
>
> Guy Quigley's Cold-Eeze
> lozenges have been shown to beat
> back the common cold (well, in some
> studies). So why is his stock trading
> at only five bucks?
>
> BY BILL GIFFORD
>
> When the fellow with the cure for the
> common cold showed up at his office seven
> years ago, Guy J. Quigley quite naturally blew
> him off. He'd heard the pitch before-- on a
> different morning, from a different guy, for a
> different but equally "miraculous" product. To
> this day, he's thankful that he did it politely.
>
> The graying, professorial-looking fellow across
> the desk from him was John Godfrey, a former
> organic chemist for Rorer. His alleged cold cure
> took the form of homemade zinc lozenges that
> tasted, Quigley remembers, "like a ball of
> sawdust." No matter how good you are, Quigley
> told himself, you can't sell this. But Godfrey
> persisted: He'd done a study that showed the
> lozenges worked, cutting back the severity and
> duration of common colds. Get it published,
> Quigley told him, and then we'll talk.
>
> Six months later, John Godfrey returned to the
> tiny Bucks County offices of the Quigley
> Corporation, which at the time consisted of Guy
> J. Quigley; his partner, Charles A. "Chuck"
> Phillips; and a couple of other employees.
> Quigley had forgotten him completely; he was
> too busy trying-- and failing-- to push an energy
> food for athletes to compete with PowerBar. The
> study is going to be published, Godfrey said,
> dumping a stack of papers on Quigley's desk.
> Call me when you've read this.
>
> Over the weekend, Quigley and Phillips waded
> through the pile of documents, pausing to look up
> arcane medical terms and becoming more and
> more excited. They weren't medical or scientific
> people-- they were marketing guys-- but it
> seemed the professor was right: The stuff cured
> the cold. The next week, Quigley drew up a
> makeshift contract (he couldn't afford a lawyer)
> for the rights to a product that tasted terrible and
> had only ever been manufactured in the Godfrey
> kitchen.
>
> The little zinc lozenges would forever change the
> market for cold remedies in the United States. In
> the 12 months ending last January 3rd,
> Americans bought $56 million worth of Quigley's
> Cold-Eeze, which sells for about four to six
> bucks for a bag of 18 and comes in menthol,
> cherry, citrus and lemon-- lime flavors. It's also
> available as a bubble gum, for children. Howard
> Stern raves about Cold-Eeze on the air, as does
> Rush LIMBAUGH-- it's about the only thing the two
> agree on.
>
> Cold-Eeze ranks ninth out of all nonprescription
> cough and cold products, competitive with
> Tylenol Cold and Theraflu Cold & Sinus. In the
> cough-drop category, it runs second only to
> Hall's-- an impressive achievement, given that in
> 1995 the Quigley Corporation sold barely
> $500,000 worth of Cold-Eeze, mostly by mail
> order.
>
> That was before a study at the respected
> Cleveland Clinic showed Cold-Eeze actually
> reduces the duration of common cold symptoms
> by more than 40 percent. Overnight, sales
> soared. "It was like a supernova," says Phillips.
> Now, Quigley's lozenge packets bear two words
> not found on any other popular cold remedy:
> clinically proven.
>
> Seriously debatable might be equally accurate,
> since a number of studies have shown zinc has
> no such effect. But thanks to a combination of
> weird science, media hype and word of mouth,
> Cold-Eeze is competing with the big boys. "We're
> a kind of renegade, a thorn in the side of some of
> these large institutions," Guy Quigley says. And
> while his success was long-awaited and
> hard-fought, the ensuing havoc calls to mind the
> old curse: May you get what you desire.
>
> If any representatives of Bristol-Myers
> Squibb or Warner-Lambert were to drop by the
> offices of the Quigley Corporation, in the
> basement of a church in Doylestown, they would
> probably die laughing. The waiting area of their
> competitor consists of a ratty love seat and an
> ottoman strewn with magazines. Visitors can help
> themselves from a display of Cold-Eeze and
> watch vice president Chuck Phillips, who earned
> about $1 million in salary and royalties last year,
> wrestle with the photocopier. Guy Quigley's
> office does have a window, as befits his position
> as chairman and CEO, commanding a view of a
> window well. The scene looks small potatoes
> indeed.
>
> In fact, it's almost amazing that the Quigley
> Corporation is still around. In the past two years,
> it has survived a Barron's hatchet job, a smear
> campaign by stock market short-sellers, some
> major production and distribution snafus, and a
> spate of contradictory studies that sent its stock
> spiraling skyward and then dripping back down
> like a nose-load of wet phlegm. Before that, it
> suffered through seven lean years in which it
> resorted to issuing stock to pay the bills. Now
> Quigley is selling a magic bullet for the common
> cold-- and its shares trade for five bucks? What's
> wrong with this picture?
>
> Guy Quigley wishes he knew. It's a mild January
> afternoon, two years to the day after 20/20
> devoted a lengthy segment to the common cold in
> which it declared Cold-Eeze the only product that
> did sufferers a bit of good. The week before the
> show aired, Quigley stock hit $37 a share,
> meaning Guy Quigley was worth, for a short
> time, somewhere in excess of $75 million.
>
> The day after the 20/20 report, however, a
> Barron's cover story asserted that some of the
> people involved in promoting Quigley stock were
> shady at best and mob-linked at worst. The stock
> fell to the teens. (The company's connections
> with those people were tenuous and have since
> been severed.) Then somebody put out a
> damaging press release, on fake Quigley
> letterhead, and it actually ran on the Bloomberg
> wires, whacking the stock down even farther.
> "Someone," Guy Quigley warned darkly at the
> time, "is bent on the destruction of this
> company."
>
> But none of that really bothers him today. "What
> I have a problem dealing with," the 57-year-old
> says in his faint Irish brogue, "is the analysts in
> the stock market. They've gotta be the worst.
> They don't think about the fact that before we
> entered the market, there was no such thing as
> Cold-Eeze. There was no such thing as the zinc
> lozenge common cold market. We created it."
> Quigley, by the way, owns some 3.8 million
> shares, representing 26 percent of his company's
> common stock. He also gets a 3.75 percent
> founder's royalty on gross sales.
>
> Quigley goes on: "If we had been allowed to
> evolve, from $1 million to $5 million to maybe
> $30 million, we'd probably have a 30-dollar
> stock." But in the world of late-'90s stock mania,
> the market is in love with companies like
> Amazon.com, and nobody is allowed to "evolve."
> If your buzz is hot, then so is your stock-- until
> the first faint whiff of bad news. There are no
> second acts on Wall Street.com.
>
> When a desperate John Godfrey walked into
> his office in 1991, Guy Quigley was at loose ends
> himself and due for a run of better luck.
>
> Born in Ireland to a show-business family-- Dad
> a concert violinist, Mom a London actress--
> Quigley dabbled in the family trades before
> concluding that the world really didn't need
> "another bad actor." He applied his dramatic
> skills to a career selling windows, which netted
> him a posh London flat and a Triumph sports
> car. Then he met a nice girl on Majorca and
> proposed to her after two weeks. It was a rare
> opportunity, he told her-- a true salesman's line,
> but she said yes. She happened to be the sole
> heiress to a 100,000-acre cattle ranch in Northern
> Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) that had been
> founded by her grandfather, an American from
> Oklahoma. Six months later, Quigley moved to
> Africa and got married, just in time for the wave
> of independence movements that swept the
> continent in the 1960s and '70s.
>
> He and his wife, Wendy, ran a smaller,
> 40,000-acre spread adjacent to the main ranch.
> Their life was straight from the movie Out of
> Africa, with a lot of flying around in bush planes,
> tea in the old colonial clubs and big-game hunting
> expeditions, but they'd come to it too late.
> Neighboring Zambia had already become
> independent, and Rhodesia was violently on its
> way to becoming Zimbabwe. In fact,
> Zimbabwean guerrillas had taken up residence on
> the ranch.
>
> For a while, Quigley had a side business selling
> the real estate of fleeing whites. After getting
> caught up in urban rioting for the second time,
> Quigley kept plane tickets to San Francisco for
> himself and his wife and kids, so they'd be able
> to escape if need be. They left Africa for England
> a couple of years later, and learned not long after
> that Wendy had been maneuvered out of her
> inheritance by a new stepmother. "We left behind
> millions of dollars," he says. "It's like a chapter,
> you know? You go-- boom!" He pantomimes
> closing a book.
>
> After Wendy concluded that she didn't much like
> the English, they closed yet another chapter,
> finally winding up in Doylestown, where the
> entrepreneurial Quigley began marketing so-called
> "resemblance perfumes"-- essentially copies of
> established brands. In the late 1980s, he switched
> to the budding energy-bar business with
> something called the GQ Alpha I bar, but that
> went nowhere.
>
> With almost zero earnings, Quigley was slowly
> going broke, draining the European bank
> accounts he'd loaded up with cattle profits. He
> had to sell both his Rolls-Royces, including a
> 1969 Corniche, to keep the business going.
> Wendy thrice talked him out of "throwing in the
> towel," he says. In 1996, he managed to sell $1
> million worth of Godfrey's zinc lozenges. The
> following year, sales topped $70 million.
>
> Quigley was not even remotely prepared for the
> Cold-Eeze "supernova." In the fall of 1996, as
> the company scrambled to increase production at
> its Lebanon, Pennsylvania, manufacturer, a
> terrible problem arose. The lozenge-making
> machinery lacked the metal dies that stamp a "Q"
> onto each oval disk. They came from Italy and
> were a couple of months late.
>
> Under FDA rules, the lozenges couldn't be sold
> without the identifying mark. As newspapers and
> TV shows touted the new miracle cold cure,
> there was almost no Cold-Eeze on the market.
> The company racked up $12 million in orders
> that it could't fill. Drugstores kept waiting lists;
> Internet sites alerted the faithful to shipments
> leaving the factory. Newscasts featured shots of
> empty shelves-- which sent the stocks soaring
> ever higher.
>
> The problems were finally sorted out in the
> spring of 1997, just in time for the end of cold
> season. Last winter was relatively mild,
> depressing sales further. Meanwhile, analysts
> expected a $100 million year, not realizing that
> $30 million worth of Cold-Eeze was already
> sitting on drugstore shelves. The Cold-Eeze
> shortage had turned into something even worse: a
> glut.
>
> Left untreated, the doctors' saying goes, a
> common cold will last at least a week--but modern
> medical science can get rid of it in as little as seven
> days. There's a very good reason why "modern
> medical science" can't cure the common cold:
> It's really not worthwhile to do so.
>
> What we call a "cold" can be caused by more
> than 200 different viruses, all of which are
> extremely difficult to isolate and target. Antiviral
> drugs are too powerful for such a minor ailment
> that resolves itself within a week anyway. On the
> other hand, almost everyone gets colds, so the
> market for a cold treatment is infinite.
>
> Zinc would seem an unlikely candidate. Other
> than zinc oxide, which anxious parents rub on
> their kids' noses at the beach, its medical
> applications are limited. In 1979, George Eby of
> Austin, Texas, was nursing his daughter through
> a case of leukemia that left her weak and
> susceptible to illness. Eby plied her with vitamins
> and minerals. One night, the story goes, she was
> coming down with a cold and was too weak to
> swallow a zinc pill, so she let it dissolve in her
> mouth. The next day, her cold was gone.
> (Today, she is a healthy 23-year-old college
> student.)
>
> Eby was curious. Although an urban planner by
> profession, he mounted a clinical trial of zinc
> gluconate as a cold treatment and managed to get
> the results published in a prestigious journal in
> 1984. That much-criticized study found that
> volunteers taking zinc overcame their colds 64
> percent quicker than those on placebos.
>
> To date, five scientific studies have shown that
> zinc helps shorten the duration of cold
> symptoms. Then again, six studies have found no
> such effect. The world of cold research is divided
> into pro- and anti-zinc camps. "There's always
> some fad for cold treatments," scoffs Dr. Jack
> Gwaltney of the University of Virginia, who
> conducted a negative study for Bristol-Myers
> Squibb in the 1980s. "It's the same as cancer."
> (Curiously, Gwaltney himself holds patents for a
> method of cold treatment by various agents,
> including "zinc salts.")
>
> How does zinc work-- if it works? There's no
> scientific consensus, but Godfrey believes zinc
> ions bond with cold virus particles, making them
> less likely to find a home in nasal mucus
> membranes. To work at all, the zinc has to be
> released in the mouth; hence, the lozenge is the
> best delivery vehicle.
>
> More than anyone else, perhaps, Godfrey is
> responsible for the zinc "fad." He noticed Eby's
> study and started playing around in his home
> laboratory, testing various recipes for zinc
> gluconate lozenges. (His bosses at Revlon
> Healthcare weren't interested in the project.)
> When his wife, Nancy, came down with a cold,
> he fed her some from an early batch. She taught
> him one drawback of zinc: In too-large doses, it's
> a powerful emetic. "I barfed my head off," she
> recalls.
>
> Even sweetened, zinc has a metallic taste. Most
> studies on zinc's efficacy employed typical candy
> sweeteners like sorbitol, mannitol and citric acid
> to mask the flavor. Godfrey postulated that the
> sweeteners might inactivate the zinc by binding
> up the ions.
>
> To test this theory, the Godfreys held a "party"
> that could only be described as bizarre: Guests
> were required to suck on zinc lozenges, then spit
> into paper cups. The Godfreys analyzed the
> collected spittle and found it contained no zinc;
> the sweeteners kept it from dissolving in saliva.
> John had to find a way to get people to keep the
> awful-tasting stuff in their mouths long enough
> for the zinc to be released there.
>
> After much grinding, stirring and mixing, Godfrey
> finally solved the taste problem with glycine, a
> basic amino acid responsible for the sweetness of
> certain meats. It wasn't great, but it didn't make
> anyone throw up. The Godfreys patented zinc
> gluconate glycine in 1987. Three years later, they
> mounted their first clinical trial, at Dartmouth
> College in frosty New Hampshire. Students
> taking zinc within a day of catching a cold
> experienced a 42 percent reduction in the severity
> of symptoms. A year later, Dartmouth students
> were still trooping to the clinic asking for "those
> grim cough drops."
>
> Yet the Godfreys had gotten nowhere with the
> pharmaceutical firms, who tended to flee when
> the couple demanded a "performance clause"-- a
> requirement that the company actually produce a
> zinc product and not shelve their idea. Nancy
> Godfrey believes the pharmaceutical companies
> were "not really interested in seeing a product get
> on the market," as that would threaten their $3
> billion business in cold palliatives-- stuff that
> relieves symptoms temporarily.
>
> There was another, personal obstacle: George
> Eby, the original prophet of zinc. Eby had
> patented the use of zinc as a cold treatment,
> while the Godfreys had rights to the only
> palatable zinc formula. Anyone who wanted to
> capitalize on the promise of zinc had to deal with
> them both. "They're like oil and water," says Guy
> Quigley, who finally managed to bring them
> together.
>
> He did it by keeping them apart. He offered the
> Godfreys a five percent royalty on their
> invention-- and set aside a similar amount for
> George Eby, if and when he sued. (He eventually
> did, and settled in 12 days, for a three percent
> royalty.) Every month, the Quigley Corporation
> mails out royalty checks to the Godfreys in
> Huntingdon Valley and George Eby in Austin,
> and everyone is more or less happy.
>
> Guy Quigley wanted further proof that zinc
> could work at a better-tasting lower dose, so he
> indirectly approached Dr. Michael Macknin, head
> of pediatrics at the Cleveland Clinic. Macknin
> was intrigued and agreed to do a study for free.
> He had already debunked one fanciful cold
> treatment-- an Israeli-made inhaler that dispersed
> heated water vapor into the nostrils-- and has said
> that he expected Cold-Eeze to fail as well.
>
> It didn't. In a double-blind study, Macknin found
> that Cold-Eeze reduced the duration of cold
> symptoms by 42 percent over a placebo, almost
> exactly duplicating Godfrey's results. The day the
> study came out, a CNN crew visited Macknin's
> clinic. He dutifully held up a box of Cold-Eeze on
> camera. "When we broke the code" and learned
> the results, he told 20/20, "I got chills."
>
> Three weeks later, a cold wind blew his way:
> The papers reported that Macknin owned a
> substantial amount of Quigley stock, which had
> shot from less than a dollar in July 1996 to more
> than $30 six months later-- riding the zinc craze
> his study had helped to ignite. That was
> embarrassing enough, although the clinic says the
> transaction had been cleared with its lawyers.
> Then, in September 1996, as Macknin was
> beginning a second study of Cold-Eeze in
> children, the Cleveland Clinic sent a draft royalty
> agreement to the Quigley Corporation, seeking a
> percentage of Cold-Eeze sales. Quigley says he
> rejected the idea as a blatant conflict of interest
> that would taint Cleveland's research. "Once that
> comes out, you've got no study, in my opinion,"
> he notes.
>
> A Cleveland Clinic spokesman says he can't
> recall who initiated royalty discussions, Cleveland
> or Quigley, but adds, "Such an agreement would
> never have survived institutional review. We
> don't do that." The document was generated, he
> explains, at a lower level of the organization.
> "Researchers should not have a vested interest in
> the outcome of their studies," says Penn
> bioethicist Arthur Caplan. However, he notes,
> money is "a driving force in biomedical research,"
> and such arrangements are by no means rare.
>
> To everyone's shock, this second study came out
> negative: Zinc had no effect on colds in children.
> Only then, Quigley says, did he realize the study
> hadn't been carried out properly: Many of the
> patients had asthma, bronchitis or allergies, and
> several were taking other medications. Under the
> agreed-on protocol, he argues, 83 of the 249
> study subjects should have been withdrawn from
> the analysis, leaving only those who suffered
> from bona fide common colds and had been
> properly treated with zinc alone. (In fact, the first
> study had included anyone with cold symptoms.)
>
> A spokesman for the Cleveland Clinic counters
> that Quigley sought to change the protocol after
> the study was underway. The disagreement led to
> a showdown in Pittsburgh between Quigley
> Corporation lawyers and Cleveland Clinic
> lawyers that Quigley lost: The study was
> published in JAMA on June 24th, sending the
> stock plummeting.
>
> "We know it works," Guy Quigley huffs. And
> with two positive studies in the bank, he can keep
> labeling Cold-Eeze "clinically proven."
>
> The company is conducting a full-fledged trial in
> the United Kingdom, where it must show zinc's
> effectiveness before marketing Cold-Eeze as a
> cold remedy. UK approval would in turn open
> the rest of the damp, dismal European market to
> Cold-Eeze-- and boost the product's credibility
> substantially.
>
> An independent study of zinc lozenges has
> recently been completed at the Medical
> University of South Carolina. The results haven't
> yet been published, but will they even matter?
> The zinc craze has hardly slowed down in more
> than two years; rather, Cold-Eeze and its
> imitators, as well as echinacea and a pack of
> other "alternative" remedies, seem to be
> supplanting conventional treatments.
>
> "People try all sorts of things," says Dr. Ron
> Turner, a professor at the Medical University of
> South Carolina, "and with the common cold, it's
> easy to convince yourself that you're seeing an
> effect."
>
> Even with the bad publicity, Cold-Eeze sales
> have held steady from last winter to this winter.
> "This is really our cornerstone," Guy Quigley
> says. "I consider this our first year. We're going
> to build from our sales this year to next year, to
> the next year."
>
> Yet Quigley stock drifts ever downward, a
> fraction of a point at a time, stubbornly refusing
> to rise even after the company established an
> on-line sales site in January.
>
> This winter, in an effort to diversify, the Quigley
> Corporation rolled out its latest product, a
> weight-loss lozenge called Bodymate. Its active
> ingredient, derived from Indian tamarinds, is
> already used in several diet aids; it is supposed to
> keep the body from turning food energy into fat.
> It also has one thing in common with the zinc
> gluconate used in Cold-Eeze: According to a
> study published recently in JAMA (which the
> company disputes), it doesn't work.
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