Big Pharma Cover-Up

Carl Lowe | Jan 31, 2013 | Comments 0

Drug companies invest large sums in running clinical trials that are supposed to determine if their pharmaceuticals are effective. Many critics have long argued that the results of those trials can’t always be trusted. And now experts at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have produced more proof that Big Pharma can’t be relied on to tell the truth about its products.

The Johns Hopkins researchers compared internal company documents at Pfizer that discussed experiments with the drug gabapentin to articles that were published. They found that Pfizer was tweaking the published results of its studies, probably to make the drug look more effective than it proved to be.

The scientists found that in three out of 10 trials there were differences in the internal research report and the main publication regarding the number of randomized participants in the trial. Furthermore, in six out of 10 trials, the authors were unable to compare the internal research report with the main publication for the number of participants analyzed for the beneficial effect of the drug (efficacy) because the research report either did not describe the main outcome or did not describe the type of analysis.

They found that the drug company often kept secret its method for declaring the drug effective, tossed people out of its trials for no disclosed reason and generally did not release enough information about its studies.

The researchers emphasized that it’s time for more transparency from drug companies.