This post by David Healy and Peter Selley does not question the good intentions of anyone mentioned. But sometimes good intentions can land us in a mess.
In 2001, Study 329, a clinical trial comparing paroxetine to imipramine and placebo was published; it claimed paroxetine was effective and safe (1). Jon Jureidini and other clinicians drew attention to problems with the publication (2).
Investigative journalists working for the BBC, with clinical input, also became interested in Study 329 (3).
In 2002, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) submitted Study 329 and two other trials to FDA seeking a license to treat depressed children. They made it clear paroxetine did not work in these trials. In an approvable letter, FDA responded agreeing these studies were negative and agreeing not to mention this in the label of the drug.
In 2004, GSK were charged with fraud by the Attorney General of New York on the basis of a 1998 document BBC journalists had sourced. The document indicated a company intent to pick out the good bits of the data and publish them, primarily to claim paroxetine was effective in Study 329 despite an internal company assessment stating it was not effective.
GSK resolved their New York legal case with a payment and an offer to make the data from their studies publicly available. The company later faced a Department of Justice action, in which Study 329 featured, which was resolved with a record breaking monetary payment.
A number of articles around this time made it clear that company studies were routinely written by medical writers (4). Medical writing (ghostwriting) raised a number of concerns. One was that a medical writer might not represent the study outcomes as a clinician might. A second centred on a failure to acknowledge the input of medical writers.
Two decades ago, BMJ editors commonly attended medical writer meetings. There was an understanding that medical writers produced articles that met quality metrics for publications more reliably than academics and turned around a product more expeditiously than academics. There was a view that writers also tempered the input of company marketing departments. Medical writing continues to this day. The contribution of medical writers is more often acknowledged at the end of published articles. The editors of leading journals and medical writing companies still liaise closely on medical publication matters.
A legal case established that Study 329 had been ghostwritten by Sally Laden. Between medical writing and a mismatch between the data and the publication, there was a strong case to get the publication retracted. Jon Jureidini and Leemon McHenry wrote to the journal, the authors, and their institutions inviting a retraction.
The article remains unretracted. A complicating factor is that over 50% of the studies of antidepressants, in all age groups, submitted to FDA around this time were negative (5,6,7). Many were published as positive, particularly in adolescent trials (7). Another factor is that it is not obvious that there was any research misconduct by the clinicians involved. Study 329 was run in the very best institutions by leading clinicians and to a high standard.
The primary problems lay with GSK’s handling of the study. GSK’s handling, however, was standard company modus operandi and the company could point to the fact that none of the clinicians or their institutions had called for a retraction.
In 2007, to coincide with a further BBC investigation of ghostwriting and the selective reporting of Study 329 results, Fiona Godlee, the editor of the BMJ, approached Jureidini and McHenry to write an article on their failure to secure a retraction of the Study 329 paper. The unretracted paper was being cited in guidelines as evidence for the effectiveness and safety of SSRIs, including paroxetine, and was therefore shaping the treatment of depressed adolescents.
BMJ sent the Jureidini and McHenry article to Richard Smith and Elizabeth Wager to review. They did not support publication, citing historical practices that had now changed, uncertainties about what was being claimed, and legal risks. Jureidini and McHenry elicited BBC support and provided documentary support for all the points they made. To no avail.
Much of the McHenry and Jureidini article was published in 2009 in Accountability in Research without legal consequence (8, 9). In 2010, BMJ commissioned an article overlapping the Jureidini and McHenry article, written by Melanie Newman, listed as linked to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (10). Newman’s article balanced the original claims with alternate interpretations like Elizabeth Wager’s view that these practices were historical.
In 2006, Healy submitted an article to BMJ on the inappropriate handling of significant adverse events in company adult antidepressant trials. The reviewers, Stephan Evans and Simon Wessely, supported publication. After returning the galley proofs of the article, Healy received an email saying BMJ’s lawyers had stopped publication. It was published a year later as ‘Did regulators fail over selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors’. Only one word had changed – companies became regulators (11).
In 2014, Jureidini, Healy and colleagues submitted a first Restoration of Invisible or Abandoned Trials (RIAT) article to BMJ, restoring Study 329 (12). Over a year later it had not been published. Among other things a legal review, it seems, intimated that by virtue of their prior engagement in these issues Jureidini and Healy were conflicted. It would be better if an entirely independent group analyzed the data. The roadblock to publication lifted, after it was noted that a senior member of the BMJ editorial team had a more striking conflict of interest than Jureidini or Healy (3).
See How to Become a Ghostwriter for Beginners
BMJ and Investigative Journalism
In the 1850s the Lancet all but created investigative journalism publishing features on the contents and health consequences of proprietary foods and medicines. This led in 1875 to the first Food and Drugs Act. By 1900, investigative journalism had become a distinct branch of journalism, embracing the British Medical Journal’s Secret Remedies series in 1910 and 1912 (13).
The BMJ recently set up an explicitly designated investigative journalism unit, whose site lists a string of publications dating back over a decade before the unit was set up (14). Some of the contributions, like the Thacker article on Brook Jackson and Ventavia, are striking (15).
BMJ investigations around 1900 were embedded in obviously medical journals. In addition, adding the word Investigative to Journalism suggests a publication that takes a position, analogous to the need for a doctor to take a position when faced with a possible adverse event on treatment – there is no escaping a decision to increase or reduce the dose of treatment. Is the new BMJ Unit investigative in this sense or does it serve another function?
In December 2022, Peter Selley and David Healy contacted the Investigative Journalism Unit, calling their attention to GSK and Pfizer trials of maternal vaccines for RSV infections. The GSK trial was suspended early in 2022. GSK did not respond to our request for information. The MHRA responded after a fashion, indicating there had been an issue with premature births. In fact, the trial also had an excess of neonatal deaths. GSK had informed investors of this in early 2022 – investors have rights to know about adverse events that clinicians and patients do not have.
A just published Phase 2 Pfizer study of a vaccine, similar enough for GSK and Pfizer to sue each other for breach of patent, pointed to a somewhat concealed, comparable prematurity problem. Subsequent Phase 3 Pfizer data, trumpeted as proving efficacy and safety, are open to question.
Selley and Healy hoped BMJ’s Investigative Team could find out more than they already had. The BMJ unit expressed initial interest, were then slow to engage, and finally made contact through Hristio Boytchev.
An article appeared on May 10th (16). This was short on key details, not mentioning that the consent form for the Pfizer trial had told women their babies could not be harmed as they, rather than their babies, were getting the vaccine. Selley and Healy were told that a Consent article would follow but BMJ lawyers were having difficulties – perhaps women at some sites had been informed there could be hazards. The consent article had still not appeared 3 months later.
More to the point, the article under Hristio’s name only, apart from some sound bites from experts, essentially contained nothing that had not been given to him by Selley and Healy, with no acknowledgement of this. Rapid responses by Selley and Healy to the article, bringing out extra points for consideration, were not published.
The medical writers who had done the work vanished.
A case can be made that in areas where pharmaceutical companies might be sensitive about their products, an article by a journalist rather than a doctor poses less risk to BMJ. There is less of a causal heft to it. The journalist can omit details and elicit a broad base of comments from other experts, as Newman did a decade earlier, to dilute the impact of points being made.
This may be good journalism, but it suggests BMJ may no longer be a journal for members of the British Medical Association. The mission statement of its current leadership team is:
Combining specific industry knowledge with a broad range of experience, our leadership team are dedicated to improving patient outcomes.
At BMJ, our leadership team is represented by the heads of our central business functions and each of our international hubs. The team works closely to make sure that, as a company, we deliver on our strategic goals.
This reads like a mission statement from a publishing corporation, whose ethos aligns more with that of pharmaceutical or life sciences corporations than that of a professional body.
The concern for patient outcomes may be genuinely held, and ensuring the survival of the BMJ to continue tackling issues may help with this, but does managing the risks to the corporation now trump a concern for patient outcomes? Managing risks to a corporation may paradoxically make a pharmaceutical company embrace of medical writing easier to understand and make critiques of company practices by BMJ and other ‘medical’ journals sound hollow.
It also condemns BMJ to finding and throwing rotten apples (individual instances of bad practice) out of a barrel. Disposing of rotten apples risks generating a false sense of security for patients, and those working within what was once healthcare but are now health services, if the problem is a rotten barrel.
A 1991 pharmaceutical company publication in BMJ created what in this case is the possibly pertinent rotten barrel (17). This company article took issue with a clinical article, which, using the appropriate scientific methods to determine cause and effect, established fluoxetine can cause suicide (18). The company claim was that randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are the scientific way to determine cause and effect. They are not. RCTs speak to average effects. In the company article, moreover, there was a significant excess of suicidal events on average on active treatment – which BMJ ignored.
This company publication effectively created Evidence Based Medicine. In publishing it, BMJ gave medical journals and their lawyers difficulties with the word ‘cause’ and with medical determinations of cause and effect tied to specific cases. Medical practice and reports of adverse events conform with scientific norms in a way that company trials do not. Case reports, which embody our best and most scientific data on adverse events, vanished from leading medical journals. Even letters raising cause and effect issues, like those from doctors alerting colleagues to the birth defects caused by thalidomide, are not published today.
A publishing business based on sales of company trial reprints, and articles by journalists, replaced medical journals.
While corporations and professions can work together, their interests can conflict. Nowhere is this more apparent than when a patient has an adverse event on a treatment. Professionals are defined by an obligation to put the interests of the person seeking their help before those of corporations, whether State, Church, or Company. Facing a possible adverse event, doctors have no option but to make a causal determination and act accordingly. If the outcome of their action supports their judgement about a link to treatment, they should inform clinical colleagues and the natural place to do so would be in the journals of their professional associations. Is this still possible?
References
- Keller MB, Ryan ND, Strober M et al. Efficacy of paroxetine in the treatment of adolescent major depression: a randomized, controlled trial. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 2001;40: 762-72.
- Jureidini J, Tonkin A, Paroxetine in major depression (letter to editor), J Am Acad Child and Adolesc Psychiatry 2003, 42: 514.
- Healy D, LeNoury J, Wood J. Children of the Cure. Samizdat Healthwriters’ Cooperative, Toronto 2020.
- Healy D, Cattell D. The Interface between authorship, industry and science in the domain of therapeutics. Brit J Psychiatry 2003, 182, 22-27.
- Turner EH, Matthews AM, Linardatos E, et al. Selective publication of antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy. N Engl J Med. 2008, 358:252–60.
- Laughren T. The scientific and ethical basis for placebo-controlled trials in depression and schizophrenia: an FDA Perspective. European Psychiatry 2001,15, 418-423.
- Healy D, Le Noury J, Jureidini J. Pediatric antidepressants; benefits and risks. Int J Risk & Safety in Medicine 2019; 30, 1-7.
- McHenry LB, Jureidini J. Industry sponsored ghostwriting in clinical trial reporting: a case study, Accountability in Research 2008, 15: 152–167.
- Jureidini J, McHenry L. The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine. Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2020.
- Newman M, The rules of retraction, BMJ 2010, 341:c6985.
- Healy D. Did regulators fail over selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. BMJ 2006, 333, 92-95.
- Le Noury J, Nardo J, Healy D, Jureidini J, et al. Restoring Study 329: A randomised, controlled trial of the efficacy and harms of paroxetine and imipramine in the treatment of adolescent major depression BMJ 2015; 351: h4320
- Healy D. Shipwreck of the Singular. Samizdat Healthwriters’ Cooperative, Toronto 2021.
- The BMJ Investigations Unit. https://www.bmj.com/investigations
- Thacker P. Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial. BMJ 2021; 375: n2635
- Boytchev H. Maternal RSV vaccine: Further analysis is urged on preterm births. BMJ 2023; 381 p1021
- Beasley CM, Dornseif BE, Bosomworth JC et al. Fluoxetine and suicide: a meta-analysis of controlled trials of treatment for depression. BMJ 1991, 303: 685–92.
- Teicher MH, Glod C, Cole JO. Emergence of intense suicidal preoccupation during fluoxetine treatment. Am J Psychiatry 1990, 147, 207–10.
“Case reports, which embody our best and most scientific data on adverse events, vanished from leading medical journals. Even letters raising cause and effect issues, like those from doctors alerting colleagues to the birth defects caused by thalidomide, are not published today.
“A publishing business based on sales of company trial reprints, and articles by journalists, replaced medical journals.”
“and the natural place to do so would be in the journals of their professional associations.
Responses – BMJ
The following are excerpts from the BMJ Response Pages with the 329 Team responses.
Some of the responses are expanded here.
https://study329.org/responses-bmj/
Study 329 gave rise to a controversy about suicidality when it became clear that the medical reviewer of the issue was gagged by FDA leading to Congressional Hearings on the matter of his gagging.
What can we conclude? That all FDA reviews are vetted and reviewers self-censor so that no-one is being told the truth. That in the absence of access to the underlying data most journal articles on the results of RCTs and FDA reviews must be assumed to be compromised as Study 329 was as there is nothing in Study 329 that suggests this was anything other than standard industry practice.
1 https://davidhealy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Paxil-Approvable.pdf
Competing interests: Both authors on Restoring Study 329 with competing interests declared there.
23 September 2015
David Healy
John M Nardo
an action figure…
Posted on Monday 16 December 2013
https://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2013/12/16/an-action-figure/
For someone who was such a journal hound, it’s remarkable that I stopped reading them. It wasn’t just that they filled up with drug trials and speculative articles about an indeterminant future, it was the review articles and editorials. I’d always read them as a way to keep up, but they changed. Instead of updates, they began to feel like commercials. I didn’t know that’s what they were in reality, I just found them boring. At the time, I might’ve said that there was a new breed of doctors who were different, or maybe as doctors age, we lose interest. What I’d say now is that they were written by KOLs who were bound to some commercial or ideological effort, or worse, they were ghost written. All I really knew was that rather than looking forward to their arrival, I began to stack them to be chunked en masse – finally letting the subscriptions lapse. It didn’t feel like I’d abandoned them. It felt like they had left me. How did I keep up? I didn’t. I guess I felt like I’d rather be behind than ill-informed. I’m ten years older now than I was when I retired, and I definitely haven’t lost interest.
Is this still possible?
Good word, from this – gagged…
Commentary: The Faults Of Expert Reviews Are Already Well Known
(Aug. 2, 2003)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25455152
Journal Information
The BMJ is an international peer reviewed medical journal and a fully “online first” publication. Our publishing model–”continuous publication”– means that all articles appear on bmj.com before being included in an issue of the print journal. The website is updated daily with the BMJ’s latest original research, education, news, and comment articles, as well as podcasts, videos, and blogs. All the BMJ’s original research is published in full on bmj.com, with open access and no limits on word counts. We do not charge authors or readers for research articles, nor for other articles arising from work funded by open access grants. The BMJ’s vision is to be the world’s most influential and widely read medical journal. Our mission is to lead the debate on health and to engage, inform, and stimulate doctors, researchers, and other health professionals in ways that will improve outcomes for patients. We aim to help doctors to make better decisions. The BMJ team is based mainly in London, although we also have editors elsewhere in Europe and in the US. Digitization of the British Medical Journal and its forerunners (1840-1996) was completed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) in partnership with The Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK. This content is also freely available on PubMed Central.
Publisher Information
Vision – To be the world’s leading and most trusted provider of information and services that will make a real difference in clinical practice and improve outcomes for patients. Mission – To lead the debate on healthcare and to deliver innovative, useful evidence based knowledge, best practice and learning to doctors, other health professionals, researchers and patients when and where they need it. We publish a number of journals covering major specialties and a growing number of online products for doctors and patients. Continuous product development ensures that our products and services are of constant importance to the medical profession. The BMJ Publishing Group Ltd (BMJPG) is the innovative publishing division of the British Medical Association (BMA) and is one of the world leaders in medical publishing. The BMJ Group complements the activities of the BMA.
“Our mission is to lead the debate on health and to engage, inform, and stimulate doctors, researchers, and other health professionals in ways that will improve outcomes for patients.
2003 is pertinent
“We aim to help doctors to make better decisions.”
It was written,’ I read in a recent medical journal that antidepressants are no more efficacious in anxiety than benzodiazepines’.
How helpful…
Head to Head… (or knickers in a twist)
“Globally, Covid vaccines have been credited with saving almost 20 million lives during the first year of their existence.”
Row erupts over study which claimed that Covid vaccines raise risk of dying from heart problems: Scientists slam ’embarrassing’ and ‘flawed’ paper
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12380463/Row-erupts-study-Covid-vaccines-raise-risk-dying-heart-problems-embarrassing.html
Imran Ahmed, the group’s chief executive, said: ‘Online anti-vaxxers are parasites, cynically exploiting tragedy to baselessly connect any injury or death of a notable person to vaccinations.’
On Musk specifically, he added: ‘It is particularly worrying that Twitter has rolled back its policy on Covid disinformation to reflect Elon Musk’s desperate need to prioritise controversy, engagement, and short-term advertising profits over the public good.
‘Anti-vaxx lies are deadly and platforms must stop allowing dedicated spreaders of disinformation from abusing their platforms and the trust of other users.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12339279/Covid-vaccine-myocarditis-heart-Elon-Musk-bronny-james.html
Should spreading anti-vaccine misinformation be criminalised?
BMJ 2021
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n272
Head
But criminalising people who intentionally hurt others through false information should also be considered. The freedom to debate, and to allow the public to raise legitimate vaccine concerns to fill the knowledge void, should not extend to causing malicious harm.
To Head
Moreover, trust in authorities, governments, and the healthcare system is key when it comes to ensuring high vaccine acceptance.252627 The only way to sustainably reduce misinformation about vaccination—and to strengthen vaccine confidence and acceptance in the long run—is to increase trust in these institutions and authorities in different countries.
Rapid Responses
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n272/rapid-responses
‘Dare one say that the topic was never quite what it seemed: “misinformation” is not the same as false information – it may simply be information deemed unsuitable for the public, to be controlled on pain of prosecution by a government bureaucracy. ‘
‘Careful editorial practice at the BMJ, ensuring that such factual referenced rapid responses never appear in the print edition, is mirrored in the rest of the media, where factual comments that do not fit the vaccine industry agenda are discarded. Thus creating a very partial picture of the whole situation.’
‘Courts might also expect them to explain at least some of the emerging uncertainties, as Doshi has illustrated…”
‘at a time when government seeks to restrict people’s movements it can at least respect their views. …
To judge from the comments here the general public are beginning to get it based on their own or friends and family experience
LYVJ59RN
san diego, United States 19 hours ago
“We, the people, don’t need any scientific studies- we have learned for ourselves after talking to friends or our very own experience- this jab clearly has cost many people their good health.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12380463/Row-erupts-study-Covid-vaccines-raise-risk-dying-heart-problems-embarrassing.html#newcomment
But it is not the case with psychiatric problems even though it is clearly the case that very many thousands have been severely injured and died as a result of psych drugs.
Have just learnt that Prozac was to be marketed as a weight loss drug and this new weight loss drug Ozempic is now being linked with suicide ideation. Would Prozac still be around if it had gotten the go ahead to be marketed as a weight loss drug – they couldn’t then put the suicides and violence down to depression, which is the default position the general public take on suicide and violence over the medication’.
“We have a vaccine for the world, because we’ve got a vaccine which is highly effective – it prevents severe disease and hospitalisation”.
Mathematicians…
Prof Norman Fenton
@profnfenton
So the AZ batch (PV46664) that caused the rapid deterioration in my wife’s frontotemporal dementia got the runners up spot for most adverse reactions reported
https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1688499752533430272
AstraZeneca’s second most lethal batch
It’s really personal now
NORMAN FENTON
8 AUG 2023
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/astrazenecas-second-most-lethal-batch
Her GPs and dementia specialists of course would not countenance the notion that the vaccine played any role in her deterioration, so I knew there was little point in applying to the (disfunctional) vaccine injuries compensation scheme. I did, however, with enormous difficulty submit a Yellow Card report (which was never acknowledged and which does not seem to appear in any search result).
The scandal of the Astrazeneca vaccine from the Emergent Biosolutions plant in Baltimore
Faulty Covid vaccines were donated to millions of Canadians and Mexicans
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-scandal-of-the-astrazeneca-vaccine
We don’t know how many Canadians were killed by the AstraZeneca vaccine (although as we reported just yesterday the excess deaths in Canada are sky-rocketing), but here are just four of the Brits, none of whom was ever at risk from covid, who are acknowledged to have been killed by it:
Prof Norman Fenton Retweeted
John Bowe
@JohnBoweActor
I’ll just leave this here…….
Thomas Loken, Norwegian nurse: “We have recently had a rather peculiar case in Norway: a mathematician who was using his skills to drill the numbers on Covid, lockdowns, vaccine injuries/death and excess mortality was detained for psychiatric evaluation against his will based on an anonymous tip. He was held for nine days, allegedly because some anonymous entity was worried about his mental health due to his posts on social media. At the hearing (in Norway, hearings are conducted after nine days detention if a person is forcibly admitted to a psychiatric unit), the doctors had not read his posts and thus had no grounds to detain him any longer, although according to his lawyer and supporting friends they tried to keep him there. So, he is now “free” again.”
https://twitter.com/Thomas_Binder/status/1688860122108350464
Andrew Pollard Announces Vaccine Breakthrough
https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/article/andrew-pollard-announces-vaccine-breakthrough
Speaking about the vaccine, Prof Pollard said: “We have a vaccine for the world, because we’ve got a vaccine which is highly effective – it prevents severe disease and hospitalisation”.
Why did your group wait longer than the other trials, such as those run by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna, to release its phase III protocol?
All the way through I think we’ve followed the normal processes, and actually, for our studies, we’ve got five publications on the clinical trials. All of the data are out there for people to see. And it’s a bit perplexing that there’s this constant accusation of a lack of transparency. It’s actually something that, as a university, we’re absolutely committed to and have been doing all the way through.
What we normally do with our research projects is write a protocol paper, and BMJ Open is one of the places we usually launch those. I have to say that, in this pandemic, we’ve just been a bit busy. We didn’t focus on publishing a protocol paper as we’ve gone along; we just said that we’ll put it in the publications when we get there. But I think it’s just the scale of what we’ve been doing as a small university research group: we just couldn’t do everything that maybe the big pharmaceutical companies could.
Here’s our response to Big Pharma funding medical assoc. “One of most concerning aspects of ties to industry—no matter their size, nor whether payments are disclosed—is they promote SELF-CENSORSHIP of views that are critical of industry & its products.”
Rapid Response:
How many bite the hand that feeds them? Industry funding of self-censorship
https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1658/rr-5
Dear Editor
According to research published in the BMJ in 2020, 72% of leaders of influential US professional medical associations have financial relationships with industry.[1] It therefore seems that Boytchev’s investigation[2]—finding many royal colleges have financial ties with the drug and medical device industries—adds one more to the list marking the “special relationship” between the UK and US.
In their defense, the royal colleges told The BMJ that industry funding represents “a fraction of their overall budgets.” The Royal College of Physicians said “no corporate partner has ever provided more than 1% of our annual income.” Other royal colleges stated pharmaceutical companies provide a similarly small percentage of overall college income.[2]
What can we make of such statements? The implication seems to be that, because the amounts comprise a small contribution to overall budgets, industry funding does not matter—and certainly would not contribute to bias in the royal colleges.
We disagree for the simple reason that many people dare not bite the hand that feeds them.
One of the most concerning aspects of ties to industry—no matter their size, nor whether payments are disclosed—is that they promote the self-censorship of views that are critical of industry and its products. Industry funding need not even alter the private views of recipients for this to occur. For example, consider the possibility that the leadership of some of these organizations hold views critical of industry in general, and/or have concerns about specific medical products. As stewards of royal colleges in receipt of industry funding, will they air those concerns? We think industry funding reduces the chance that they will. In contrast, the reverse–in which individuals self-censor an industry-friendly viewpoint–seems unlikely.
When medical leadership refrains from voicing criticism due to industry funding, such self-censorship contributes to a false impression of the landscape of views. It helps justify the labeling of critical viewpoints as “minority” or “fringe.” It enables the perception of “scientific consensus” around a given issue when in reality no such consensus exists.
Open debate over the safety and efficacy of drugs, biologics, and devices is central to scientific discourse, the progress of medicine, and the health and welfare of patients. Self-censorship is incompatible with that requirement.
Peter Doshi
Kim Witczak
Linda Wastila
References
[1] Moynihan R, Albarqouni L, Nangla C, Dunn AG, Lexchin J, Bero L. Financial ties between leaders of influential US professional medical associations and industry: cross sectional study. BMJ. 2020 May
27;369:m1505. doi: 10.1136/bmj.m1505. https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1505
[2] Boytchev H. Medical royal colleges receive millions from drug and medical devices companies. BMJ. 2023 Jul 26;382:1658. doi: 10.1136/bmj.p1658. https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1658
The Quest to Nowhere…
The BMJ
@bmj_latest
People aged ≥ 65 years discharged after a covid-19 related hospital admission had a high risk of death and readmission within 180 days after discharge, finds study. But the risk of death after discharge substantially declined during the pandemic
https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj-2023-076222
Bill Gates admits Nobody Trusted him or the “experts” during Covid
https://twitter.com/DiedSuddenly_/status/1688743642234511360
In 2021, I remember reporting on the words of senior political leaders. Of course, I knew that people like president Biden and prime minister Johnston were not doctors or scientists. However, I assumed they would be directly advised by the best their respective countries had to offer. Having assumed these leaders were well informed, I often passed on what they had to say. Well, this video is just one example of how they got things wrong, meaning in turn I was wrong. The age of deference has well and truly passed.
94,678 views 9 Aug 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryhw7P6BjOo
“It put you in a very hard spot” …