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Biotech / Medical : PFE (Pfizer) How high will it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hunter Vann who wrote (3729)	6/25/1998 10:04:00 PM
From: Jim Lamb	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9523

We could be in for a bumpy ride tomorrow,some confirmation here to the last Rx. numbers for Viagra posted by BigK. Thursday June 25, 8:53 pm Eastern Time Pfizer 's Viagra sales slowing-Business Week NEW YORK, June 25 (Reuters) - Sales of Pfizer Inc.'s Viagra are starting to fall off after a phenomenal start, with some insurance companies reluctant to pay for the impotence drug, Business Week reported in its July 6 issue. ''The pent-up demand is drying up, and we're already seeing a drop-off in new prescriptions,'' Arvind Desai, a partner at researcher OrbiMed Advisors in New York, told the magazine.'' Obviously a good bit of this was experimentation.'' Desai has trimmed his estimate of annual sales on the drug -- approved in late March -- to $700 million from an earlier $850 million. In April, patients obtained 570,000 new prescriptions for Viagra, the most ever written for a drug in its first month on the U.S. market, according to the Scott-Levin prescription drug audit. Decisions by Kaiser Permanente and Aetna U.S. Healthcare not to cover the erectile dysfunction treatment will not show up in figures for a few weeks, Business Week said. ''Our sense was that Viagra was pushing the limits of common sense of what should be covered by a medical policy and therefore paid by everybody,'' said Dr. Francis Crosson, executive director of the Permanente Federation. The Business Week story said the slowdown in sales may be just a blip on the screen as the drug gains approval in Europe and elsewhere. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hope people pay attention to the last sentence.