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Corporations, Foundations & Organizations
Fiscal Year 2018 Report to Contributors
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Why you can't trust Facebook's "fact checkers"
Forced to admit in court they're not facts, but are actually "opinions" and no factual claims are made, this did not sit well with thre British Medical Journal (BMJ) who wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerburg when Facebooks's "fact checkers" incorrectly trashed a scholarly peer reviewed medical journal article.
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Merck has been so naughty they get their own category.
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Numbers associated with the problem.
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Missing clinical trial data must be made public, federal judge says
Feb 2020
Drug companies, device manufacturers, and universities must turn over missing data from hundreds of clinical trials conducted in the United States from 2007–17, a federal judge ruled this week. The ruling from the Southern District of New York says government agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for years misinterpreted a law requiring them to collect and post data to ClinicalTrials.gov, a publicly accessible government database.
If it is upheld, the ruling would make it harder for drug companies to keep unfavorable results from the public, and it could offer vital information for patients and doctors, STAT reports. Still unclear is how quickly the agencies might move to fill in the 10-year gap in compliance—and what the consequences would be for clinical trial sponsors that don’t comply.
A 2015 STAT investigation found that research universities vary widely on how or whether they post clinical trial results. Further reporting by Science found that FDA has never imposed a fine on a clinical trial’s sponsor for not complying with federal regulations. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Peter Lurie, a former associate FDA commissioner, and Charles Seife, a New York University professor and a writer for multiple outlets, including Science.
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Industry sponsorship and research outcome
Published: 16 February 2017
Authors: Lundh A, Lexchin J, Mintzes B, Schroll JB, Bero L
Results from clinical studies on drugs and medical devices affect how doctors practice medicine and thereby the treatments offered to patients. However, clinical research is increasingly sponsored by companies that make these products, either because the companies directly perform the studies, or fully or partially fund them. Previous research has found that pharmaceutical industry sponsored studies tend to favor the sponsors’ drugs more than studies with any other sources of sponsorship. This suggests that industry sponsored studies are biased in favor of the sponsor’s products.
This review is an update of a previous review that looked at sponsorship of drug and device studies. The primary aim of the review was to find out whether the published results and overall conclusions of industry sponsored drug and device studies were more likely to favor the sponsors’ products, compared with studies with other sources of sponsorship. The secondary aim was to find out whether such industry sponsored studies used methods that increase the risk of bias, again compared with studies with other sources of sponsorship. In this update, we carried out a comprehensive search of all relevant papers of empirical studies published from 2010 to February 2015 and included 27 new papers, yielding a total of 75 papers included in our review.
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TAMIFLU FRAUD BILKED $1.5 BILLION FROM GOVERNMENT, ALLEGES WHISTLEBLOWER
JANUARY 13, 2020
Whistleblower Dr. Thomas Jefferson, a physician and public health researcher affiliated with the respected global Cochrane Collaboration research network, has researched neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu for more than two decades. He began questioning Tamiflu’s efficacy in 2009 and spearheaded efforts to have the company release the underlying clinical study data. When he finally received the data in 2013, Dr. Jefferson analyzed it and concluded that the clinical data does not support Roche’s claims about Tamiflu’s effectiveness for use in an influenza pandemic, the lawsuit states.
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When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed
Was the US drug Vioxx responsible for far more deaths than has been acknowledged so far?
ARE American lives cheaper than those of the Chinese? It's a question raised by Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, who has produced a compelling comparison between the way the Chinese dealt with one of their drug scandals – melamine in baby formula - and how the US handled the Vioxx aspirin-substitute disaster.
The Chinese scandal surfaced in 2008, shortly before the Beijing Olympics. Crooked dairymen diluted their milk products, then added a plastic chemical compound called melamine to raise the apparent protein content back to normal levels. Nearly 300,000 babies across China suffered urinary problems, with many hundreds requiring lengthy hospitalisation for kidney stones. Six died.
Long prison sentences were handed down and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were tried and executed for their role. Throughout these events, American media coverage was extensive, with appropriate sneering about the Chinese leadership's indifference to human life.
Four years earlier, in September 2004, Merck, one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies, issued a sudden recall of Vioxx, its anti-pain medication widely used to treat arthritis-related ailments.
The recall came just days after Merck discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish a study by an FDA (Food and Drug Administration) investigator indicating that the drug in question greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the five years it had been on the market.
It soon turned out Merck had known of potential lethal side effects even before launching Vioxx in 1999, but had brushed all such disturbing tests under the rug
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