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Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
"The numbers didn’t add up.
Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.
He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.
“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”
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August 27, 2014 Press Release, “Statement of William W. Thompson, Ph.D., Regarding the 2004 Article Examining the Possibility of a Relationship Between MMR Vaccine and Autism”
”The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed”.
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Interpretations and methods: Towards a more effectively self-correcting
social psychology
“In this paper, we consider how valid conclusions often lay hidden within research reports, masked by plausible but unjustified conclusions reached in those reports. These conclusions do not necessarily involve the use of questionable research practices. Invalid conclusions may be reached based, not on failing to report dropped conditions, failed studies, or nonsignificant analyses, but on selective interpretations of data that highlight researchers’ preferred conclusions while masking more valid ones.”
“Getting it right” is the sine qua non of science (Funder et al., 2014).
Science can tolerate individual mistakes and flawed theories, but only if
it has reliable mechanisms for efficient self-correction. Unfortunately,
science is not always self-correcting (Ioannidis, 2012). Indeed, a series
of threats to the integrity of scientific research has recently come to
the fore across the sciences, including questionable research practices,
failures to replicate, publication biases, and political biases (Begley &
Ellis, 2012; Duarte et al., 2015; Ioannidis, 2005; Simmons, Nelson, &
Simonsohn, 2011). In response to these issues, individuals and organizations
have begun addressing how to improve scientific practices
through reforms targeting transparency, statistics, and data collection
methods.
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The FDA buries evidence of fraud in medical trials. My students and I dug it up.
Are Your Medications Safe?
By CHARLES SEIFE
FEB 09, 201511:16 AM
"It’s not just the public that’s in the dark. It’s researchers, too. And your doctor. As I describe in the current issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, my students and I were able to track down some 78 scientific publications resulting from a tainted study—a clinical trial in which FDA inspectors found significant problems with the conduct of the trial, up to and including fraud. In only three cases did we find any hint in the peer-reviewed literature of problems found by the FDA inspection. The other publications were not retracted, corrected, or highlighted in any way. In other words, the FDA knows about dozens of scientific papers floating about whose data are questionable—and has said nothing, leaving physicians and medical researchers completely unaware. The silence is unbroken even when the FDA itself seems shocked at the degree of fraud and misconduct in a clinical trial."
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And that's not the only way science can go awry. In his seminal paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," Stanford professor John Ioannidis (see the Atlantic article "Lies, damned lies and medical science" that explains this) developed a mathematical model to show how broken the research process is. Researchers run badly designed and biased experiments, too often focusing on sensational and unlikely theories instead of ones that are likely to be plausible. That ultimately distorts the evidence base — and what we think we know to be true in fields like health care and medicine.
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WHO agrees to watered-down resolution on transparency in drug costs
"Countries at the World Health Organization agreed on Tuesday to push for clearer drug pricing, after watering down a draft resolution that would have also required pharmaceutical firms to disclose the cost of making medicines.
The deal calls on governments to share more information about the prices they pay for drugs, which can vary widely around the world and are often kept shrouded in secrecy."
An example from James Packard Love of KEI: "There's a cancer pill that's $60 per pill. They're $1.80 in India. You need three a day."
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Pharma screwup poster child of the year - 2019
CNN runs story on a measles crisis but uses photo of a child who got measles from a vaccine.
"“This 1968 image depicted the face and back of a young child after receiving a smallpox vaccination in the right shoulder region. Note the erythematous halo surrounding the vaccination site, which can also be seen in PHIL 13321 and 13323, as well as a morbilliform skin rash, i.e., resembling measles, consisting of numerous flattened erythematous, amorphous macules. This child was subsequently diagnosed with roseola vaccinia.”
Public Health Image Library (PHIL)
Translation: the kid has a vaccine strain of measles that he got from a measles shot.
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Israel shows they can use computer viruses to make CT scans show fake cancer.
"When Hillary Clinton stumbled and coughed through public appearances during her 2016 presidential run, she faced critics who said that she might not be well enough to perform the top job in the country. To quell rumors about her medical condition, her doctor revealed that a CT scan of her lungs showed that she just had pneumonia."
"But what if the scan had shown faked cancerous nodules, placed there by malware exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used CT and MRI scanning equipment? Researchers in Israel say they have developed such malware to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit those images — vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering consequences if unaddressed."
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Young breast cancer patients with faulty BRCA genes have the same survival chances as those without, a study has found.
The study, published in The Lancet Oncology, found 12% of 2,733 women aged 18 to 40 treated for breast cancer at 127 hospitals across the UK between 2000 and 2008 had a BRCA mutation.
The women's medical records were tracked for up to 10 years.
During this time, 651 of the women died from breast cancer, and those with the BRCA mutation were equally likely to have survived at the two-, five- and 10-year mark as those without the genetic mutation.
This was not affected by the women's body mass index or ethnicity.
About a third of those with the BRCA mutation had a double mastectomy to remove both breasts after being diagnosed with cancer. This surgery did not appear to improve their chances of survival at the 10-year mark.
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47 out of 52 milestone cancer studies can't be reproduced
cite
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Ben Goldacre is an MD that specializes in global epidemiology - he's a doctor that crunches numbers. Hear him complain he can't get data and is flat out lied to.
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Editor In Chief Of World’s Best Known Medical Journal: Half Of All The Literature Is False
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”
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Association of Compensation From the Surgical and Medical Device Industry to Physicians and Self-declared Conflict of Interest
A bibliometric analysis of the 100 physicians receiving the highest compensation from 10 large surgical and medical device manufacturers used payment information from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Open Payments Database. Conflicts of interest were declared by the authors in only 84 of 225 of the relevant 2016 publications (37.3%).
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According to Science Times, the Tuesday science section in The New York Times, scientific retractions are on the rise because of a "dysfunctional scientific climate" that has created a "winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct."
But elsewhere, audacious, falsified research stands unretracted - including the work of authors who actually went to prison for fraud.
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That paper you read - it may be garbage.
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The History of the Pharma Cartel
The Supreme Court of the U.S. finds John Rockefeller and his Trust guilty of corruption, illegal business practices and racketeering. As a result of this decision, the entire Rockefeller Standard Oil-Trust, the world’s largest corporation of its time, was sentenced to be dismantled. But Rockefeller was already above the Supreme Court and did not care about this decision.
In order to disperse public and political pressure on him and other robber-barons, Rockefeller uses a trick called “philanthropy”, whereby the illegal gains from his robber-practices in the oil business are used to launch the Rockefeller Foundation. This tax haven was used to strategically take over the health care sector in the U.S..
The Rockefeller Foundation was the front organization for a new global business venture of Rockefeller and his accomplices. This new venture was called the pharmaceutical investment business. Donations from the Rockefeller Foundation went only to medical schools and hospitals. These institutions had become missionaries of a new breed of companies: the manufacturers of patented, synthetic drugs.
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