04/22/2022 / By Ethan Huff
Over the course of a single year, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published 73 studies about new drugs, and an astounding 82 percent of these were funded by Big Pharma.
About 68 percent of the authors were also employees of the companies that produce the drugs, while 50 percent of the lead researchers accepted money from a drug company.
What this shows, of course, is that the field of “science” is highly corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry, which also heavily influences the political realm.
A 2013 study conducted by the University of Arizona College of Law found that even when drug companies are not directly funding research, company stockholders, consultants, directors, and officers are almost always involved in funding it, which ensures a “correct” outcome that promotes a new drug product as “safe and effective.”
Another study published in 2017 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) further found that about half of all medical journal editors are on the dole of Big Pharma, with the average payment per editor clocking in at around $28,000.
Keep in mind that these statistics are only accurate if researchers and editors are transparent about the payments they receive (hint: many of them are not, which means the true figures are likely much higher).
More recently, a 2022 investigative analysis of two of the most influential medical journals in the world found that a shocking 81 percent of study authors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments received from drug companies, despite being required to do so.
“Unfortunately, this trend shows no sign of slowing down,” warns The Defender (a project of Children’s Health Defense).
“The number of clinical trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry has been climbing every year since 2006, according to a John Hopkins University report, while independent studies have been harder to find. And there are some serious consequences to these conflicts of interest.”
If the drug industry is successfully biasing the “science” on new drugs, then it suffices to say that doctors who rely on said science are also biased – whether they want to be or not – when making prescribing decisions.
There is also a prolific problem of “ghostwriting” in medical journals where a doctor’s name gets slapped on a study when the true author is a Big Pharma hack paid off to promote a drug or medical device.
“Big pharma execs know citizens are way more likely to trust a report written by a board-certified doctor than one of their representatives,” The Defender explains.
“That’s why they pay physicians to list their names as authors – even though the M.D.’s had little to no involvement in the research, and the report was actually written by the drug company.”
This practice started back in the 1950s and 1960s when tobacco executives were scrambling to come up with proof that cigarettes do not cause cancer. They commissioned doctors to put their names on “research” towards this end, even though the doctors had nothing to do with the research.
It turns out that more than one in 10 articles today published in the NEJM is at least co-written by a ghostwriter. Only a very small percentage of medical journals have clear policies against ghostwriting, and technically it is legal regardless.
The result of all this is that many drugs and medical devices currently on the market are actually unsafe and ineffective. But because the corrupted “science” suggests otherwise, the entire medical field is littered with these dangerous and often deadly products.
So much for the idea of science being neutral.
More related news can be found at Corruption.news.
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Tagged Under:
bad doctors, Big Pharma, BMJ, corruption, ghostwriters, journals, medical journal, NEJM, pharmaceutical fraud, Prescription drugs, rigged, science deception, science fraud, science tyranny
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