Ben Goldacre's Blog, page 7

This is excellent, and amazing. GSK have just signed up to alltrials.net

GSK have just this minute announced that they are signing up to the alltrials.net campaign. This will be written in a hurry. Briefly: the results of clinical trials have been routinely withheld from doctors and patients throughout medicine, and this problem has not been fixed. The www.alltrials.net campaign is asking for all trials to be [...]

EU lead on clinical trials comes out in favour of transparency. Hurrah!

There is a new EU Clinical Trials Regulation currently passing through parliament in Brussels. It is currently in draft form, and riddled with holes: essentially it allows companies and researchers to withhold trial results, and play fast and loose with analyses. These problems are best documented in the BMJ by one of the co-founders of [...]

Some talks in the US and Canada. COME!

Bad Pharma is out in the US and Canada on 5th Feb, which is extremely good news (sorry about the delay, floods and hurricanes apparently..). I’ll be doing a few public lectures in various places, there’s a list below. Also: in the UK I’ve done about a gazillion talks, and the most fun things always [...]

AllTrials campaign launches, please sign and spread!

I am very pleased to announce the launch of a prominent campaign for access to all trial results, which we have launched this week at www.alltrials.net, with myself, Sense About Science, Sir Iain Chalmers from the James Lind Initiative (previously co-founder of Cochrane), Dr Fiona Godlee (Editor in Chief of the BMJ), and Dr Carl [...]

Health Select Committee call on NICE, GMC, pharma industry to address missing data

Excellent to see the UK House Of Commons Health Select Committee making such a clear statement about the ongoing problem of missing trial results, which the ABPI have laughably claimed is “historic“. They call upon NICE, the GMC and the pharmaceutical industry to address the problem, and they also take a very strong clear position: [...]

I made this Radio 4 documentary on randomised trials on government policy

Here’s a documentary I made for BBC Radio 4 (with producer Rami Tzabar) about evidence based social policy, and why we should do more randomised trials in government. It’s good fun, 40 minutes, with contributions from Dean Karlan (who wrote this book and is behind all these excellent trials on reducing poverty), Prof Sheila Bird, Jonathan Portes [...]

Interview on missing trials with the Institute for Clinical Research

Just catching up on posting some overdue entries, I’ll do a roundup of progress on the hidden trial data problem in a while. Firstly, briefly, here’s an interview I did with the members’ journal of the Institute for Clinical Research (the people who design and run clinical trials). It’s a good, constructive discussion, mostly covering [...]

MPs write to Public Accounts Committee to request action on hidden trials and Tamiflu.

The letter below has been sent to Margaret Hodge, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, asking her to take action on the ongoing problem of hidden trials, and specifically Tamiflu. The very notion that we spent £500 million on Tamiflu – with information about over half of the clinical trials still being withheld – is [...]

False claims by Stephen Whitehead and Deepak Khanna of the ABPI

Briefly: the ABPI have engaged in an energetic personal smear campaign, as predicted at the end of Bad Pharma. I’ll think about posting the details from leaked and external ABPI documents at some stage. I’m posting some correspondence today because the CEO and President of the ABPI have both falsely claimed to MPs and journalists that [...]

Win. Parliamentary Sci Tech Committee announces official inquiry into missing trial data.

Sorry to have been absent, I’ve been working away on several projects behind the scenes, on which much (much!) more shortly. I’m extremely pleased to say that the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee have just announced that they will now conduct a formal inquiry into missing trial data. Full details are posted below, and [...]