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.
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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“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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So basically Big Pharma has PR strategists with huge budgests working out how to counter Ben Goldacre (authoer of Bad Pharma) and other similar campaigners.
How do we stay two steps ahead?
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