Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails

by Sharyl Attkisson

He said it was widely known inside the FDA that drug companies actively conspire to hide the dangers of their drugs from FDA reviewers. He said it was also widely known that such subterfuge by the companies, when discovered, was never punished.

By way of background, it’s important to know that when a side effect emerges during a study, it’s an extremely significant event. Most side effects don’t come to light during clinical trials because the samples are too small, the studies are too short, and the test subjects are usually healthier, overall, than those who will actually be taking the drug once it’s approved. It’s typically only when thousands or millions of people use a medicine for years that distinct patterns emerge and serious adverse events are detected. So when a side eff...

FDA scientists have told me they’ve caught drug companies using various tricks to do that.

When split into these smaller classifications, no single category rose to the level of a worrisome liver signal. Had they been properly clustered together, it would have amounted to a five-alarm fire, according to the FDA official.

The fact is, people with predispositions are often more likely to get hit by a medicine’s adverse events. As with the smallpox vaccine, existing illnesses and genetic vulnerabilities can magnify the risk of side effects. But the drug company writes it off.

researchers collect a lot of data and keep analyzing it in different ways until they find the conclusion they wish to reach.

Likewise, if a researcher is part of an effort to undermine a competing medicine or treatment that stands to undercut profits for their own company, they can design studies and crunch data in a way that’s sure to produce negative results about the competition. Today there’s no way for consumers to know how many studies are really done on a pill or injection before the one that actually gets published.

government officials have gotten caught actively cooperating with drug companies in a way that raises ethical questions.

According to one scholarly analysis of the Rezulin disaster, “company and government documents . . . showed that officials from Warner-Lambert had collaborated closely with certain senior officials in the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during the approval process and later, when the company was being pressured to take the drug off the market.”

David Willman of the Los Angeles Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Rezulin, elaborated: “senior government officials repeatedly played down the drug’s propensity to cause liver failure and death. Before it was withdrawn on March 21, the FDA assured doctors and patients that Rezulin’s potential benefits in lowering blood-sugar levels outweighed its grave risks. . . . As deputy director of the FDA’s drug-evaluation center, [Dr. Murray M. ‘M...

5. Controlling Data

Lessons Learned: Drug companies retain tight controls over studies in such a way that may hide adverse events or exaggerate benefits. It cannot be assumed that drugs approved for market are as safe or effective as advertised.

6. Compromised Medical Journals

most well-respected medical journals routinely publish slanted, manipulated, misleading, and untrue information. That’s not just my conclusion; it’s something confirmed by independent published research and even by the leaders of the actual journals. For example, a research paper in 2023 found that about one-third of studies in neuroscience journals, and one-fourth of studies in medical journals, are “made up or plagiarized.”

“Starting about then was when you saw the drug companies assert more and more control, until finally over the next couple of decades, they began to treat the researchers as hired hands. They would design the research themselves. You know, you can do a lot of mischief in how you design a trial. Or ‘We’ll test this drug, and we’ll tell you whether it can be published or not.’ And so if it’s a positive study, it’s published. If it’s a negative study, it’ll never see the light of day.”

“Most people probably think if an article is in a journal, it’s probably written at a university and based on independent study, and that’s that.” “It used to be that way, as you describe it. Pretty simple,” she agrees. “And it began to change as the pharmaceutical industry became richer, more powerful, more influential, and began to take over the sponsorship of probably most clinical research.”

Dr. Angell tells me, “I would call up [a research author prior to publishing a study] and say, ‘Okay, you’ve shown that your drug is pretty good. But [you claim] there’s not a single side effect. [Yet] any drug that does anything is going to have some side effects.’ And I had people say, ‘Well, the [drug company] sponsor won’t let me [publish that].’ And so, I came to be extremely distrustful of most of the research that was published. We did our very best. We often rejected things because it was clearly biased. But anything we rejected always ended up in another journal.”

Your doctors and mine rely on research in medical journals as if it’s the word of God. But it’s often little more than paid advertising.

she wrote an article that famously declared, “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published.” The editor in chief of the British journal Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton, has said much the same. In 2015, he wrote a scathing editorial declaring: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue; science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

In 2023, he authored an eye-opening study concluding that in 2020, “28% of all biomedical publications” were fake. According to Sabel, “as if you’re buying a T-shirt in the shop, you can buy a paper for it to be published in the scientific journal.” In an interview with NPR, he adds, “You can now go online, and you can see a title advertised, sign up here. Pay this and that much for it. There are papers that have fake photos. They have fake text. I presume many are automatically produced by artificial intelligence. And there are agencies who are specializing in this business, which creates a lot of junk in the scientific literature at a scope that is just unbelievable.”

By 2015, I’d learned through experience that oddly glowing medical articles about controversial prescription medicines are often influenced if not wholly produced by the drugmakers.

When one admiring article about human papillomavirus (HPV) cervical cancer vaccines is published in the British journal Lancet, I decide to do a little digging. The article is written by Dr. Sharon J. B. Hanley. It was published after the Japanese government decided to stop promoting HPV vaccines due to concerns about vaccine injuries. Dr. Hanley defends HPV vaccines in her article and criticizes the Japanese government. She also implies patients are incorrectly blaming HPV vaccines for unrelated illnesses. What do I find after I poke around a little? Naturally, Dr. Hanley has financial ties to HPV vaccine makers, though she didn’t disclose that in her medical journal article defending them. I discover she’d received funding from middlemen. They’re entities supported by makers of both HPV vaccines: Gardasil and Cervarix. I also find that she’d previously admitted, elsewhere, to having received “lecture fees” from vaccine makers. But she discloses none of this in her Lancet article. After I make these discoveries, I write Lancet to point out Dr. Hanley’s undisclosed financial conflicts of interest. To its credit, the journal issues a correction based on my letter. Of course, it p...

It could mean that industry interests have successfully lobbied to have the study removed because the findings were harmful to their bottom line. A retraction could mean that an influential company lobbied to remove a good study that reflects well on a competitor. For these reasons, on occasion, retracted studies carry more truth than nonretracted studies on the same topic. In other words, a retraction can say more about who likes or dislikes the study’s findings than the accuracy of the study.

The Chocolate Diet was based on a study about the supposed benefits of eating chocolate. Who wouldn’t love a diet like that? It was publicized with a slick marketing campaign and a catchy tune on the web, as a singer crooned the lyrics, “A scientist in Germanyyyyyyyy recommends choc-o-late treats . . .” But it turns out the whole Chocolate Diet was a hoax perpetrated by a journalist named John Bohannon to show how easy it is to get shoddy research published. When the scheme was exposed, Bohannon told reporters, “I already knew that there were fake journals who would publish this stuff, but [I wondered], would journalists pick it up and turn it into a big story? And the sad answer is yes—[a] very big [story].” The Chocolate Diet was promoted by mainstream outlets all over the world.

that it will compound the known but little publicized risks from cell phones such as infertility, depression, and other chronic disorders.

Congress, federal agencies, and even the telecommunications industry that produces 5G all admitting there are no studies proving 5G is safe for humans. But the way the industry spins it, that means there’s no proof of harm either.

What are the odds they can be trusted to expose the risks of their own multibillion-dollar technology?

research itself,

Public health policies are driven and controlled through the granting or withholding of research funds. Some research that is most important to public health is not getting funded.

Oddly, while many consumers understand that profit-driven corporations can commit the worst kind of unethical and in some cases criminal behavior—think Enron, Firestone, Ford, and Solyndra—they seem incapable of fathoming that pharmaceutical companies could be capable of the same.

the biggest offenders on the legal violations list include vaccine makers such as GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, is it rational to believe that they would never mislead when it comes to their multibillion-dollar vaccines?

According to a May 2024 analysis by the watchdog group Public Citizen, from 1991 to 2021, the government won payments of $62.3 billion in penalties from pharmaceutical companies. But the group observed, “This total amounts to a small percentage of the $1.9 trillion in net income made by the 35 largest drug companies during just 19 of those 31 years (2000–2018).”

from 1992 to 2012, taxpayers shelled out $58 million in grant money to scientists whose papers were later retracted due to misconduct. And those are only the ones who got caught.

Long after the misconduct was flagged, I saw that Dr. Poehlman’s work was still being cited by other researchers.

the study consent form presented to Gage’s parents falsely stated Propulsid was “approved by the FDA” for children. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration had repeatedly rejected the drug for pediatric use.

Lessons Learned: Blind trust cannot be given to people simply because they are researchers, or have a medical degree or license. Fraud, misconduct, and wrongdoing in the pharmaceutical and medical industries are well established.

To my surprise, I learned that the connection between vaccines and brain injuries, including autism, turned out to be well documented in scientific literature and in court.

Murphy was beginning to catch flack for our stories from the CBS advertising department and beyond.

The bulk of the funding for Every Child By Two came from vaccine maker Wyeth,

An investigative producer once joked to me that when a nonprofit calls itself one thing, you should assume its goal is the opposite. There’s some truth to be found in the joke.

a 2023 Yale University School of Medicine analysis finds that 74 percent of the “highest-revenue patient advocacy organizations” have board members or senior leadership tied to Big Pharma.

One example is the American Cancer Society (ACS). The Yale report found that the American Cancer Society’s chief executive officer, Dr. Karen Knudsen, is also a member of Genentech’s Scientific Resource Board. Genentech markets and develops cancer drugs and can benefit if the ACS endorses or promotes its products.

And the ACS also stands to gain from the endorsement. For example, Genentech has given millions to the American Cancer Society for partnerships that could put its drugs into the hands of more patients.

Also, according to the Yale analysis, top executives at three other patient advocacy groups—Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the Cancer Research Institute, and the Foundation Fighting Blindness—were serving simultaneously on phar...

US Right to Know found the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics was taking millions from the very industries blamed for much of our poor diets and chronic diseases: pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness companies, and companies that make sugary sweets and highly processed foods. They include Conagra, Abbott Nutrition and Laboratories, Pepsi, Coke, Hershey, General Mills, Kellogg, the National Confectioners Association, and Bayer CropScience.

By the time we sat down for the interview in his office, I had traced every donation on record to his Frontier Foundation. It turned out to be big money from the pharmaceutical, tobacco, and telecommunications industries. By examining the Congressional Record and cross-referencing dates, I found that each donation to Buyer’s “charity” matched up to a specific congressional action Buyer took. Within days of advocating for initiatives that benefited the contributing industries, he got donations from them.

Shortly after my report, Buyer acknowledges the startup money for his nonprofit came from the pharmaceutical industry and announces he’s retiring from Congress. He goes on to work for a drug company, a tobacco company, and a telecommunications firm. In 2023, he gets convicted of insider trading of telecom stock.

Lessons Learned: The pharmaceutical industry blankets the information landscape in ways that are invisible to us and made to appear grassroots in nature. The word of news organizations, nonprofits, or government agencies and officials cannot be accepted without question. A pharmaceutical agenda is often driving the public narrative.

Has your doctor warned you about potential side effects each time you or a loved one got a vaccine? Under established ethics guidelines, you should be informed about everything from the risk of paralysis to brain damage and death, depending on the vaccine. If you weren’t told of these risks, then did you truly give your informed consent to be vaccinated?

Let me pause to state something that should be obvious. It’s not “anti-vaccine” to ask questions, research, or report about vaccine safety. In all my years of investigating topics, this one stands alone in terms of the magnitude of orchestrated pushback it draws. When I broke international news about deadly rollovers of Ford Explorers outfitted with Firestone tires, nobody suggested I was “anti-car” or “anti-tire.” That would be absurd. When I uncovered fraud at the Red Cross involving 9/11 donations, nobody suggested I was “anti–Red Cross,” “anti-charity,” or “anti–9/11 donations.” When I investigated other drug safety issues, nobody considered me to be “anti-medicine.” If I were to talk about studies showing that some people are allergic to penicillin, it wouldn’t make me “anti-penicillin.” Ask yourself why the game changes when it comes to vaccines. The fact that people feel compelled to say, “I’m not anti-vaccine . . .” before making perfectly grounded statements or asking rational questions speaks to the success of one of the most influential propaganda movements of our time.