Pay to Play: Big Pharma $$$ Equal Big Clout in Medical Journals

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Big Pharma $$$ Equal Big Clout in Medical Journals

A study in last week's British Medical Journal reveals that medical journals are biased in favor of studies sponsored by Big Pharma. Corporate sponsorship was the single most important factor determining what studies were published.

In that study recently published in the British Medical Journal, Dr. Tom Jefferson commented:

“The study shows that one of the levers for accessing prestige journals is the financial size of your sponsor. Pharma sponsors order many reprints of studies supporting their products, often with in house translations into many languages. They also purchase advertising space in the journal. Many publishers openly advertise these services on their website. It is time journals made a full disclosure of their sources of funding.”

"Study sponsorship is associated with optimistic results."

T Jefferson, C Di Pietrantonj, M G Debalini, A Rivetti, and V Demicheli
Relation of study quality, concordance, take home message, funding, and impact in studies of influenza vaccines: systematic review
BMJ 2009;338:b354, doi: 10.1136/bmj.b354 (Published 12 February 2009)

PDF can be viewed here



...Those sponsored by industry had greater visibility as they were more likely to be published by
high impact factor journals and were likely to be given higher prominence by the international scientific and lay media, despite their apparent equivalent methodological quality and size compared with studies with other funders. Although differences in citation index by study funding are sensitive to the inclusion of the large number of studies with undeclared sources of funding, the higher impact factor and citation index are probably a reflection of a higher profile of industry sponsored studies and a more thorough dissemination
of their content.

In "Vaccine Studies: Under the Influence of Pharma" , Barbara Fischer of the NVIC writes:

"It was the pharmaceutical industry that told Congress in 1982 that they were going to leave the nation without vaccines if they didn't get liability protection but have opposed making it less difficult for vaccine victims to obtain federal compensation in the U.S. Court of Claims under a 1986 law that gave them liability protection. It is Pharma lobbyists, who bully the FDA into fast tracking vaccines like Gardasil and who sit at the CDC's policymaking tables urging that new vaccines be recommended for use by all children so they can persuade state legislators to mandate vaccines like influenza vaccine."

...Jefferson's analysis confirms that drug companies marketing vaccines have a major influence on what gets published and is said about vaccines in medical journals. It is no wonder that there are almost no studies published in the medical literature that call into question vaccine safety.

[madrchsod]

1. i worked in a bindery dept that assembled and mailed out many medical magazines

several magazines consistently had an equal number of advertisements as articles. others would have separate multi page advertisements that would be bagged with the publication and mailed out. the advertisements paid for the the pre- production and printing of the magazines.

i never read any disclaimer in any of these magazines concerning the drugs that were advertised and most of the drugs were just released into the market. yes there`s some nasty habits in the medical/pharma complex on the marketing of their products.

[flyingobject]

2. stinking conflict of interest

who is looking out for us?