Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18397

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Kon P
WHO and pandemic flu: GlaxoSmithKline UK responds
BMJ 2010 Jun 29; 340:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/jun29_4/c3464

Abstract:

Cohen and Carter explore whether the World Health Organization should have taken advice from experts who had declarable financial and research ties with pharmaceutical companies producing antivirals and influenza vaccines, including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).1 Can experts provide advice on public health issues such as pandemic flu, as well as help to develop medicines and vaccines for these same health issues?

It is understandable that WHO and research based pharmaceutical companies would seek the same world experts for their respective purposes. Indeed, expertise could be compromised if those that have worked with industry are not able to advise on public health issues. Similarly, without outside advice the development of drugs to meet patients’ needs and address public health issues would not be possible.

To help manage the potential conflict of interest highlighted by Cohen and Carter, disclosure of financial relationships with industry is clearly important. We agree that transparency over the relationships . . .

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909