Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18724
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: Electronic Source
Silverman E
Pfizer Attacks Journal For Undisclosed Conflicts
Pharmalot 2010 Sep 27
http://www.pharmalot.com/2010/09/pfizer-attacks-journal-for-undisclosed-conflicts/
Full text:
Two weeks ago, a paper published in PLoS Medicine revealed the extent to which Wyeth used ghostwriting to promote its hormone replacement therapies. The practice was already known, but the paper offered new details thanks to a review of approximately 1,500 documents – emails, contracts, internal memos and depositions – that were culled from litigation brought by some 14,000 women and their families against Wyeth, which is now owned by Pfizer (read it here).
At the time, the author of the study, Adriane Fugh-Berman, a Georgetown University professor who runs the PharmedOut project that examines pharmaceutical marketing, disclosed that she has worked as an expert witness in various lawsuits involving prescription drug promotion, including the HRT litigation over Prempro and Premarin. However, the drugmaker has written a letter to PLoS to complain that she is actually still engaged as an expert witness, a fact the drugmaker says needs to be clarified.
Moreover, Pfizer contends that PLoS failed to disclose its own conflicts. To wit, Heidi Hubbard, a partner at the Williams & Connolly law firm that represents Pfizer, charges that PLoS failed to note the journal filed a lawsuit against the drugmaker to seek access to the documents. And that the legal advice was provided by Public Justice, an organization whose active directors or members include lawyers who are suing Pfizer.
In effect, she charges PLoS conspired with attorneys to provide fodder both its own pages and the litigation. “Indeed, the law firm of Suggs wasted no time in filing Dr. Berman’s article as evidence in one of its HRT cases on September 8, just one scant day after it was published,” she writes. The letter goes on to reiterate Pfizer’s claims that there is no evidence that HRT definitely caused any woman’s breast cancer and that its published studies were all properly peer-reviewed
We asked Fugh-Berman for her reaction and she tells us she will clarify her status so that it is clear she continues to act as an expert witness. “The implication that PLoS is used by lawyers is ridiculous. This is my academic work. As an expert witness, I’ve had access to many more papers than I’m allowed to write about. There were 1,500 papers made unconfidential and these were the only ones i could refer to in my paper. And I’ve made no secret about being an expert witness on pharmaceutical marketing.” Meanwhile, we have written PLoS editor Virginia Barbour for a reply and will update you accordingly.
UPDATE: Barbour writes to say “PLoS Medicine has a long-standing interest in the practice of ghostwriting, which predates the journal’s intervention in the release of documents from the Wyeth Prempro litigation. Our interest is noted in the material relating to the intervention that we posted on our public website and articles we have published previously on ghostwriting.
“We intervened in the Prempro case solely because of our interest in unmasking this practice. We have no professional, financial, legal or other relationship with the plaintiffs or their lawyers in any of the cases that Wyeth is defending, or in any other past or ongoing legal case. Specifically, we have received no payment from the plaintiffs or their lawyers. And none of the lawyers who represented PLoS Medicine in its motion to Intervene to obtain the documents represent any of the plaintiffs suing Wyeth.”
This is not the first time the PLoS article raised hackles. The European Medical Writers Association responded by posting on the PLoS site that “although using ghostwriters to insert unwarranted marketing messages into papers is unacceptable, and something we would unhesitatingly condemn, there is no evidence to suggest it is common. Statements such as ‘industry-funded marketing messages may infest articles in every medical journal’ are therefore entirely speculative and in no way supported by evidence. Although it is clearly very difficult to do high quality research into the prevalence of papers with inappropriate marketing messages, our own experience of writing many papers for many pharmaceutical companies suggests that it is probably extremely rare” (look here).
In her own point-counterpoint reply, Fugh-Berman wrote that it was time to “call a ghost a ghost…EMWA’s statement that professional medical writers ‘produce their work in an ethical and transparent manner’ is more wishful thinking than actual practice when a corporate master determines the subject, point of view, final product, and when, where, and in what form the work is published, not to mention the name that decorates the paper as ‘author.’”
