Pharma’s pandemic-era halo is slipping. After tracking a surge in the industry’s reputation, PatientView found patient groups soured on drugmakers somewhat last year to send pharma’s standing to its lowest level since 2020.
The good news for the pharma industry is that its reputation remains at a near-record high, according to a PatientView survey that collected the views of more than 2,500 patient groups around the turn of the year. PatientView said 57% of the respondents believe the industry has a good or excellent corporate reputation. From 2014 to 2019, the figure never exceeded 46%.
Pharma’s reputation continued to improve in some countries in 2023, with the proportion of good and excellent responses from groups in the Netherlands, Denmark, Taiwan, Sweden and the U.K. increasing by more than 10 percentage points. But the gains were offset by the curdling of views elsewhere.
“The results of the 2023 survey contain early indications that pharma’s elevated reputational status may not be sustainable,” PatientView said in its report. “Respondent patient groups from Australia, a number of European and Latin-American countries, as well as patient groups from the USA, judged pharma’s corporate reputation to have declined in 2023.”
The proportion of good and excellent responses from U.S. patient groups fell by 8 percentage points in 2023, slipping from 65% to 57%. PatientView saw the biggest u-turns in Finland and Ireland, where the proportion of good and excellent responses cratered by 29% and 28%, respectively. Both countries went from having well above to well below average views of the industry’s reputation.
Such shifts caused the industry’s reputation to fall for the first time since 2018. Even during the years of rising reputation, pharma faced criticism over issues such as pricing. Many groups are still unhappy with pharma’s approach to pricing, engaging patients in R&D and access to medicines, with more than 50% of respondents saying the industry’s work in those areas is fair or poor.
The industrywide figures mask differences in how patient groups view individual companies. The three companies with the best reputations in 2023 were ViiV Healthcare, Gilead Sciences and Roche, in that order. Gilead replaced Horizon Therapeutics, which is now part of Amgen, on the podium. Limiting the analysis to Big Pharma saw Pfizer and AstraZeneca join Gilead and Roche on the leaderboard.