Pharmaceutical companies do not have to provide their raw research data. Should researchers be obligated to provide their raw data? What happens whey they don't?
Why we don't always get to see the raw data and how this impacts the research we read.
Note: This post is a lineup to tomorrow’s post on the recent niacin study and its findings of increased CVD risk.
I noticed quite a few posts and interviews lately in which the complaint is that no one ever sees the raw data in these extensive pharmaceutical studies. They state that doctors are basing medication recommendations not on the data or the published study but rather on a summary of the studies (perhaps a quick summary provided by the pharmaceutical rep).
Should pharmaceutical companies be forced to show their raw data?
What damage is being done at the individual level when doctors do not get to see the raw data?
Below is taken from The Free Press. (Bold highlighting is mine).
We’re Not Curing Cancer Here, Guys
A top cancer surgeon at Columbia University is under scrutiny after one of his research papers was retracted for containing suspect data. Twenty-six other studies by Dr. Sam S. Yoon, who conducted his research at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, have been flagged as suspicious by a British scientific sleuth called Sholto David.
David raised the alarm after spotting the same images across different articles that described wholly different experiments. He has also found duplications and manipulated data in papers published by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that have since been retracted.
This news shocked me: leading scientists at some of the most respected research centers in the world, working on the very important and well-funded fight against cancer are. . . making stuff up. That seems bad. Really bad. And it poses a lot of unsettling questions, like whether we can really trust medical research at all. But maybe I am missing something.
In search of reassurance, I called up an expert: oncologist, UCSF professor, the author of more than 500 academic papers, and Free Press contributor Vinay Prasad.
Here’s an edited version of our conversation. (Spoiler alert: I was not reassured.)
Vinay, how worried should we be about the problem of fraud in cancer research?
Extremely worried. There’s something very unique about all these papers that allows people to find the fraud, and that is they report the raw data, in the form of images. Most papers, though, do not contain images. The data is all hidden. The researchers only provide a summary of the data. You have to worry how much fraud you’d find if everybody provided all the raw data. I suspect you’d find a gargantuan amount of fraud. This is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Most laymen like me assume all the data is transparent in medical research. You’re telling me that’s not how it works?
Scientific papers are like someone’s dating profile on an app. They’re picking what pictures to show you and what stories to tell you. You don’t get to see the whole library of photos on their phone. Researchers are only presenting a sliver of what they’ve actually done. And just like a dating app on your phone, everything is inaccurate.
That’s shocking, Vinay. What can we do about it?
These concerns have been brewing for a while and they are reaching a tipping point. The fact that there’s been so much plagiarism at Harvard and there’s been all this image manipulation shows that the most venerable institutions are no safeguard against malfeasance.
What punishment have any of these researchers actually faced? Claudine Gay resigned, although was shuffled into a role that paid her very well. All of the authors of these disputed papers have, to my knowledge, faced no sanction. Their paper gets withdrawn, but they still get promoted. There’s no punishment.
A few years ago, there was a proposal by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors arguing that every paper published in the top journals should make the raw data available. That proposal was shot down because people were worried about their careers, and that other researchers would take their data and use it to make breakthroughs before them. Sharing is the solution. You should have to make all the data available whenever you publish medical research.
My Views on Sharing Raw Data
The cancer study example above indicates researchers are getting paid to do faulty research, and there is no oversight. Most likely, there is no oversight because that fake cancer study resulted in a promising and profitable conclusion for the cancer drug industry.
But what is that study doing to the people who have cancer and the doctors who are telling cancer patients to take certain drugs and therapies based on these faulty studies?
They may be literally killing their patients but have no clue!
When I was completing my dissertation, there were sites available where you could upload your raw data for others to use. I did not share it. My thoughts at that time were that since I did not receive funding and had to pay a large sum of my own money to conduct my research, I did not want to put it out there for free for someone else to use to conduct further research. I know that sounds selfish, but I would rather share it for a fee for other researchers to access.
But this is different than reviewing the raw data to ensure it is legitimate. (My dissertation methodologist reviewed all my raw data).
Shouldn’t an oversight committee review the raw data before a study gets published? Shouldn’t that be part of the publishing process?
Currently, researchers are not required to provide their data to the public. This is different from government-funded data sites such as NHANES. So Pfizer, Moderna, and so forth have no legal requirements to provide the data to anyone.
Abramson Interview. Author of Sickening. How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare. And How We Can Repair it.
In this interview, Dr. Abramson shares Prasad's views, stating that a large problem with basing medication decisions on studies is that much of it is fraud, but there is no way of proving it without a review of the raw data.
Abramson states the reason for no oversight is because a source of income for the journals is from selling reprints back to the drug companies. Reviewing the data could result in less profit for the journals and a less cozy relationship with drug companies.
He also states that the peer-review process is a sham because the reviewers never see the actual data.
In school for my Ph.D., we were required only to use peer-reviewed sources.
I think the PR process is a sham because so much bias is involved. I am guessing there is a lot of “you PR my paper and approve it, and I will do the same for you.” They also can see the authors of papers, and their PR response may be biased based on who’s name is on that paper.
The peer-review process should be anonymous on BOTH ends. The reviewer should not know who the study authors are, and the authors should not know who reviewed the paper.
Why is this not done?!
I watched the entire video above, and I must state that the more I listened, the less enchanted I was with Dr. Abramson.
He went on to state that he had 3 cov!d messenger mRNA injections because of a heart defect. This disappointed me because why would you do that if the injection can cause heart damage and does not protect you from the virus?
He then said it should be a choice to do what you want.
That statement I have heard over and over again, and I disagree because there is no informed consent, the injection people are getting isn't even the one that was approved in research trials, it contains contaminated DNA that was never approved, and there is no mention to people that repeated injections can lead to immune tolerance. There is no long-term safety data, and the trials were conducted on healthy participants, which does not accurately represent the masses at least here in the U.S. (I am just scraping the surface here).
I do not think these injections should be a choice. I think they should have been removed from the market as soon as the adverse event data rose its ugly head.
He also stated that Kennedy discussed studies and got some of them “wrong,” but Abramson did not elaborate on this or provide one example of Kennedy’s error.
The part in the video (at about the 1-hour 20-minute mark) that really bothered me was when he was asked if he trusted Fauci. I felt he skirted the question and never answered it. He also stated he supports organizations such as the WEF.
Finally, at the end of the video, the topic shifted to the need for more health and lifestyle intervention research. The one obvious reason it is not conducted is that there is no profit, which would draw money and attention away from Big Pharma. Also, as one who tried to conduct a study (on my own, however) that included a dietary intervention, I realize this is much more complex and challenging than most people realize (including myself at the start of my research design).
Bottom Line:
Take any research study with a grain of salt. For instance, a new study indicates that high-dose niacin may be harmful, yet there are many studies on high-dose niacin benefits for an array of health conditions such as depression.
Don’t base a health decision on one study.
Don’t base a decision on one doctor’s statement a medication is safe and effective.
It is your health, you will need to do some homework. Gather all the information first before making a rushed health decision.
Show my posts some love, please! It is just me writing, reading, researching, and seeing clients!
I do not use mainstream social media, so please share my posts so that more people can get informed on how to get and stay healthy.
This is NOT information allopathic practitioners will share with you.
Sounds like researchers are running out of ways to hide cancer drug poisonings/killings in their papers and steer away from pharmaceuticals/naturopathic methods that actually work.
Pharma bankrolls the medical journals, so they've become just another advertising venue for them. And don't even get me started on our public serpents in the various health departments.