Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8314

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Publication type: report

Flynn P
Evidence based or evidence biased.
Newport West: Common's Knowledge 2007 Jan 27
http://www.paulflynnmp.co.uk/commonsdetail.jsp?id=1147

Notes:

Pharmas’ deceptions

Lobbying by pharmaceutical companies has changed. Public trust in their propaganda is collapsing. One survey asked how well the industry was serving its customers. 80% of respondents said the industry was serving its customers well in 1997. This had plummeted to 44 per cent by 2003. Since then the distrust has grown. In response, the pharmas persuasion technique have become desperate and crude.

More than any other industry, the pharmas have cynically exploited public and parliamentary gullibility. One dreadful example was quoted at a January meeting of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee by Sir Iain Chalmers. Ninety-five people with heart problems were involved in a trial in Nottingham in 1980 of an anti arrhythmic drug named Lorcarnaid. During the test, one of the people on the placebo died and an alarming nine on Lorcarnaid died. That report was suppressed for 13 years. In the intervening period, the drug was widely proscribed in America. It directly caused the deaths of between 20,000 and 70,000 Americans per year. More American males died from the use of Lorcarnaid than died in the Vietnam War.

The worst recent example was Vioxx. Dr David Graham, safety director of the US Food and Drug Administration said that the COX-2 inhibitor drug Vioxx was the `single greatest drug safety catastrophe in the history of the world’, resulting in up to 140,000 strokes and heart attacks in the USA. A million prescription for Vioxx were issued in the UK in 2004. Lawsuits have been filed against Merck because of allegations that Vioxx suppressed information that Vioxx caused heart attacks, strokes and death although they were aware of the risks.

GlaxoSmithKline were fined in the USA for suppressing research findings that the antidepressant Seroxat increased up to six fold the risk of child suicide. Campaigners say the damning findings were suppressed for up to a decade while thousands of teenagers and children as young as six continued to be given the pills to ease depression.

Last year, I was hooked by a letter praising the miraculous properties of a new drug for pancreatic cancer. The claim was, of course, that the tight fisted government was denying British patients this wonder drug. A familiar fable but one that I followed up because I had a constituent suffering from the disease.

The letter was from a PR company acting for Roche Pharmaceuticals. Private research proved that the objective evidence did not match the PR hype. An exchange of letters and a meeting with Roche’s PR person shattered any hope. The drug costs £1,631 a month, creates serious adverse side effects, including death, in 10 per cent. of patients and increases life expectancy in pancreatic cancer patients by an average of only 12 days.

Luckily I had not alerted my constituent and raised false hopes. The tabloid press have no such scruples. It suits their purpose to hail every new medicine, that is not universally available, as a miracle cure . Details to be ignored include cost, adverse side effects and ineffectiveness. Cynically every heart string is pulled by sick patients recruited by the pharmas’ PR lackeys.

Furthering the myth of a mean Government is an added bonus to the tabloids’ agenda. It’s the reverse of the truth, of course. Spending on drugs outpaces inflation and has grabbed a bigger slice of NHS spending in each of the past five years. Patients are also leaned on to approach MPs to campaign for drugs rejected by the objective rational decisions of NICE. It’s easy to reject the silken-voiced public relations hireling: impossible to disregard the personal pleas of terminally ill constituents. How can cold scientific reason face down emotional hysteria and blackmail?

The Commons all party parliamentary groups are among the all embracing tentacles of influence of the pharmaceutical industry. Since 1995, when MPs were banned from working directly for political consultancies, the number of groups wholly or partly financed by businesses or trade organisations has tripled.

There are now an incredible 64 parliamentary health groups. Almost all are funded directly by pharmas or indirectly by patients groups and charities that are dependent on drug industry cash. Although the rules have been tightened recently that groups are still used as Trojan Horses to smuggle pro-drug propagandists into parliament.

They provide the secretarial services and write reports that are then are often published with spurious parliamentary authority. It’s difficult for overworked MPs to find the time to properly monitor the self-serving views of the pharmas who continue to spend more on marketing their wares than researching new products.

Parliament has asserted itself against the malign influences. Unfortunately the courageous call for improved surveillance of the pharmas made by the Health Select Committee was answered with a bleating weak echo from Government.

Will there be a stronger answer to the other evidence presented at the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee January meeting? Two speakers reported that research funded by drug companies is more likely to produce results that favour the sponsor’s product than independent drug trials. Researchers analysed 30 previous reports examining pharmaceutical industry-backed research and found the conclusions of such trials were four times more likely to be positive than research backed by other sponsors. “What we found was that in almost all cases there was a bias – a rather heavy bias – in favour of a drug when the study was industry funded,” study leader Joel Lexchin told New Scientist.

It’s no surprise that adverse reactions to drugs is now a major killer.
Italy has found an answer and set up a national wholly independent drugs testing body that is funded by a levy on the industry. That’s the answer to produce results that are evidence based not evidence biased.