For more than a year, Hospira has made headlines thanks to a spate of ongoing, serious and systemic manufacturing problems that have led to numerous FDA inspections and warning letters. The situation has grown so worrisome that some speculate a consent decree is likely. In hopes of making the intractable somehow manageable, the drugmaker last year hired John Elliott, who had run Cherokee Pharmaceuticals and spent more than a quarter of a century overseeing operations at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). At the time, he was described as “a seasoned global leader” with loads of manufacturing experience and “specific expertise in injectable pharmaceuticals”
