Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18682

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

O’Dowd A
Drug company denies allegations of bribery in Finnish justice ministry investigation
BMJ 2010 Sep 1; 341:
http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c4755.extract

Abstract:

Finland’s chancellor of justice is investigating claims that a government institute accepted research money from a drug company and then approved the purchase of large amounts of one of its vaccines for use in the recent swine flu pandemic.

The allegations have, however, been denied by the drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, and the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare.

Last week the institute recommended that vaccination with the drug in question, Pandemrix, should be halted until an explanation is found for an observed rise in cases of narcolepsy among children and adolescents in Finland who had been given it.

The chancellor of justice, whose remit includes ruling on allegations of wrongdoing by state officials, has received complaints about the decision making process for use of …

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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