Accused of Hiding Drug Dangers Again, Big Pharma Starts 2008 Defending Itself [View All]

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Accused of Hiding Drug Dangers Again, Big Pharma Starts 2008 Defending Itself
by Martha Rosenberg


If Hillary and Obama think the press is picking on them, they should look at Big Pharma.

The ink isn’t even dry on the massive Vioxx settlement and already Big Pharma’s been accused of burying clinical data, spinning journal articles and selling drugs that cause the conditions they’re supposed to fix. Sound familiar?

Merck and Schering-Plough, it turns out, were sitting on the ENHANCE clinical trial results of cholesterol lowering drug, Vytorin for a reason. Rather than reducing the growth of fatty plaque in the arteries, Vytorin, a combination of Zetia and Zocor, almost doubled the growth in the trials.

Not only did it take a Congressional committee to pry the truth out of the Big Pharma giants, their response to the clinical belly flop was that they “would be changing the ENHANCE study’s endpoint”–the actual result the study was meant to measure. In other words, the sun was in their eyes.

Nor was it just TV that Big Pharma is accused of using in service to half truths like “Vytorin treats cholesterol from two sources: food and family.”

Ninety-four percent of positive studies about antidepressants found their way into medical journals versus 14 percent of negative ones says an article in the January 17, 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine called Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy.

Publishing only pro drug articles deprives researchers of accurate data, wastes resources, squanders the contributions of investigators and patients and misleads doctors says lead author Erick Turner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/20/6489/