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Foxes and Henhouses
The American Scene —
Ezra Klein has an interesting post up in which he correctly points out the conflict of interest inherent in having pharmaceutical companies that develop new drugs execute the clinical trials that test for their safety and efficacy.
While literal corruption of the results makes for good movies, and will always be present to some extent as long as money is at stake and humans remain human, it appears to be vanishingly rare. What is clearly one huge problem is publication bias in which positive results are much more likely to be reported than negative results. A second problem that he doesn’t really get into in the post is that subtle decisions about study design – in effect, ...
Foxes and Henhouses
The Corner on National Review Online —
Friday, January 02, 2009 [image] Foxes and Henhouses [ Jim Manzi ] Ezra Klein has an interesting post up in which he correctly points out the conflict of interest inherent in having pharmaceutical companies that develop new drugs execute the clinical trials that test for their safety and efficacy. While literal corruption of the results makes for good movies, and will always be present to some extent as long as money is at stake and humans remain human, it appears to be vanishingly rare. What is clearly one huge problem is publication bias in which positive results are much more likely to be reported than negative results. A second problem that he doesn t really get into in the post is ...
Conflicts Of Interest
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan —
Manzi explains the danger of government funded pharmaceutical research: Ezra Klein
has an interesting post up in which he correctly points out the
conflict of interest inherent in having pharmaceutical companies that
develop new drugs execute the clinical trials that test for their
safety and efficacy... Klein recommends a paper that presents a simple solution: the government should fund contract research directly.
But
the obvious point that this misses is that a government bureaucracy has
its own conflicts of interest. Most directly, bureaucrats and
politicians tend to have enormous career risk from an unsafe drug
introduction, but almost none from a ...
End of Holiday Open Thread
BlueNC - The people's think tank —
Here is an eye-opener to start your Monday.
In 2002, four intrepid researchers filed a Freedom of Information Act. But they weren't looking for information on Guantanamo or revelations from Cheney's lair. All they wanted was the FDA's drug analysis data. Taxpayer funded research. They got it. The studies examined were conducted between 1987 and 1999 andcovered Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. They found, on average, that placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs.
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