Following is an article published by Associated Press discussing the unethical and immoral behavior of pharmaceutical company Pfizer. The people at Pfizer who conduct bogus research that is then used for marketing their drugs based on the "fudged" results should be criminally prosecuted. As stated in several blog posts, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the medical device companies should all be held accountable for the price fixing, price gauging, and unethical behavior exhibited by these companies executives, researchers, and other employees.
Review: Reporting on Pfizer drug studies fudged
By LINDA A. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer – 1 min ago
Analysis of a dozen published studies testing possible new uses for a Pfizer
Inc. epilepsy drug found that reporting of the results was often fudged,
indicating the medicine worked better than internal company documents
showed.
According to the report, when a company-funded study's primary finding
wasn't favorable, that result was usually buried and something else positive
was highlighted, without disclosing the switch.
The documents used in the review were obtained by lawyers suing Pfizer for
refunds on prescriptions paid for by insurers and consumers. The lawyers,
who are seeking class action status for the cases, claim Pfizer concealed
evidence the epilepsy drug Neurontin didn't work for those unapproved uses,
including nerve pain, migraines and bipolar disorder.
One of the report's authors is an expert witness for the plaintiffs; another
has received fees from the lawyers.
Pfizer disputes the report's conclusions, saying the company never
"attempted to mislead the medical community about the effectiveness" of the
drug for certain uses.
"We believe the review suffers from significant bias, insufficient data,
poor methodology, and cannot pass the threshold of credible scientific
research," Pfizer said in a statement.
The report, by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco
and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, comes two months
after Pfizer was fined a record $2.3 billion — including an unprecedented
$1.2 billion criminal fine — for illegally marketing other blockbuster
drugs.
The report appears in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Sidney Wolfe, head of health research at consumer group Public Citizen,
called it the first comprehensive look "at studies in which a company and
people working for it so maliciously manipulated the data to make a drug
look more effective than it actually was."
"In every instance, the published article made the drug look better than it
would have," said Wolfe, a member of the Food and Drug Administration's drug
safety advisory committee. "This results in harm."
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