Big Pharma Mobilizes Patients in Battle Over Data Transparency

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The U.K.’s Guardian reports on a leaked memo from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), a major pharma industry trade group, to directors of Roche, Merck, Pfizer, GSK, Astrazeneca, Eli Lilly, Novartis and others, that outlines a campaign to mobilize patient groups to concerns about the proposed requirement that pharma companies publicly release all data from drug trials. “Patient groups get traction because they are assumed to represent the voice of the suffering. But industry uses them to say we’re not going to get innovative medicines if the industry is deterred from investing by having to be transparent about their clinical trials,” said a representative of Health Action International, a pharma industry watchdog group.

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Kermit Cole
Kermit Cole, MFT, founding editor of Mad in America, works in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a couples and family therapist. Inspired by Open Dialogue, he works as part of a team and consults with couples and families that have members identified as patients. His work in residential treatment — largely with severely traumatized and/or "psychotic" clients — led to an appreciation of the power and beauty of systemic philosophy and practice, as the alternative to the prevailing focus on individual pathology. A former film-maker, he has undergraduate and master's degrees in psychology from Harvard University, as well as an MFT degree from the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. He is a doctoral candidate with the Taos Institute and the Free University of Brussels. You can reach him at [email protected].

3 COMMENTS

  1. Now NAMI will be forced to show its true colors. If all those studies that Robert Whitaker and others have been using to de-bunk biological psychiatry had been more carefully “controlled”, the recent NAMI convention would have just been the usual “love-in” for psych drugs.

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  2. “But industry uses them to say we’re not going to get innovative medicines if the industry is deterred from investing by having to be transparent about their clinical trials”

    Because scientists cannot discover great things if people are looking over their shoulders… or at least they can’t make them up.

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