Sunday, October 19, 2008

Apologies to Pfizer and Readers of This Blog--Correcting the Facts

Pardon me while I wipe the egg off my face. I recently wrote about the spam comments that this blog had been attracting--that whenever I posted anything about Pfizer or certain key words, a comment would appear that seemed to be a blatant advertisement for their stop-smoking drug Chantix. I charged that the company must have a web-crawler program that was posting these comments automatically on all blogs.

An anonymous individual then appended a comment to that post, noting that the advertised website, which I had not bothered to click on, is not a Pfizer official website but actually a clever look-alike URL designed to make the viewer think it's Pfizer, but actually including a disclaimer in small print. In other words, this blog is being hacked into to advertise, but the people doing it are probably drug counterfeiters, not a legitimate drug company. "Don't you ever check facts?" asked this commentator, not unreasonably.

So I have taken down the original incorrect post and apologize to Pfizer and anyone else concerned. (I know by the way that this post will soon attract another phony "comment" from the web-crawler.)

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