A Times Transcript article today discussed some revelations that I suspect the Pharmaceutical companies would have preferred see the light of day.
Internal documents from Pfizer, made public in litigation, showed that 85 scientific articles on its antidepressant Zoloft were produced and co-ordinated by a public relations company. Pfizer itself thus produced a critical mass of the favourable articles placed among the 211 scientific papers on Zoloft in the same period. Internal documents tell similar stories for Merck’s Vioxx, GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, Astra-Zeneca’s Seroquel, and Wyeth’s hormone-replacement drugs.
Other details found in the article detailed the fact that studies that did not produce favourable results were either spun to show the results in a better light or not released with only a few negatives allowed to see the light of day.
Reading Merck’s internal e-mails, revealed during the class lawsuit, it was exposed that the company drew up a hit list of “rogue” researchers who needed to be “discredited” or “neutralized” – “seek them out and destroy them where they live,” reads one e-mail. Eight Stanford researchers say they received threats from Merck after publishing unfavourable results.
To promote the now-notorious Vioxx, Merck organized a ghostwriting campaign that involved some 96 scientific articles. Key ones did not mention the death of some patients during clinical trials.
Now there is a major issue right there. Not only are drug companies targeting researchers who publish results that are not to there liking, they are also covering up incidents as serious as death.
The problem with this is that there is major contention for the last few years regarding the safety of vaccines and links to autism. With all the reports that there is no link because they have not been able to find one during all the research, this revelation makes all the naysayers moot.
The issue is not that it proves there was a cover up over the vaccine/autism link but that any pharmaceutical related test automatically becomes suspect.
The only way that medical research can possibly be considered safe once again is if all clinical trials are performed by third party testers whose sole job is run clinical tests on medications to determine if it is safe for public use. There needs to be a complete ban on advertising by medical companies to the general public and the only studies that can be quoted is the clinical testing done by the third party testers.
Both American and Canadian regulatory agencies must be banned from approving a medicine whose clinical results are unsatisfactory.
Basically this information throws the entire vaccine/autism arguement into disarray because the safety and effectiveness of any and all vaccines are now no longer proven.
It is time to go back to square one and start over doing proper testing without any input from pharmaceuticals. This also means that all questions about the ethics of various doctors and researchers all need to be looked at to determine if the results of any actions were based on fact or based instead of pressure and underhanded tactics by pharmaceuticals and/or their paid/unpaid lackeys.
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