Mmmm…. Something doesn’t add up here…

Although you are evidently an intelligent individual , you seem to be quite naive to the reality of what your pharmaceutical industry has actually become..

I don’t rubbish the entire industry, and as I have said before I am not anti-pharma. Of course people need access to drugs but these drugs should be safe , adequately tested and effective, but in the past decade the rampant greed emanating and encouraged by the industry itself has led to many people being harmed by dangerous and defective drugs.

Surely you have to see that an industry which claims to save lives with one hand yet harms with other is a massive and ridiculous contradiction?

Glaxo’s alleged unethical conduct in Argentina is just another example in long line of shameful practices. Pharma’s bad deeds created its bad reputation.It is a reputation ill earned. Employees of pharma should be questioning the ethics of their organizations and CEO’s instead of defensively overreacting to valid criticism from consumers, patients , activists and advocates.

Personally I couldn’t work for a company that participates in the kind of exploitation detailed in this report. But we’re all different aren’t we?…

Oh Christopher, what are you on about?
The pharmaceutical industry is up there with Big Tobacco and the Arms Industry. Everyone knows that.
Pharmaceutical companies get away with murder every day just like Big Tobacco and the arms industry. Vioxx, Zyprexa, Avandia, Paxil, need I say more?
The pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive and profit driven, you can’t deny that surely?
You also cannot deny that there is huge amount of documented negative reports of the Pharma industry’s bad behavior. One would only have to search through the web pages of Pharmalot to make that blindingly obvious!
I’m just going on what is reported and what I read about the industry, and from that perspective, it looks poorly regulated , massively biased, certainly corrupt and ethically defunct.

Anon says that 12 deaths in 13,000 isn’t low. The average death rate amongst healthy infants <5 years of age (live births) in Argentina is 18/1000 (UN data) and mortality from pneumonia 4-5/1000. So you tell me. The 10 year old reference was to the NIgerian (?) example raised by the ABC story, not this.

Bob and anon question why GSK wouldn’t gain by the supposed mis-management of the study, other than to make money. Well I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. How would they make money - medium to long term money from this vaccine - by deliberately taking actions by compromising the data which ultimately they weould need to support its regulatory submissions, marketing etc? It makes no commercial sense. They are not making money on this trial: It’s a means to an end and if they screw up this step there is no commercial happy ending is there?

Just my 10c worth, but I doubt that anybody with any sense in a multinational with billions of dollars at stake would deliberately risk a) the business and b) their job this way.
C

Scary..

But it’s true..

How many deaths were there in the placebo group?

We’re talking kids getting a pneumonia vaccine. I can guarentee you that GSK would have tried to only enroll otherwise healthy kids so as to not increase the risk of finding a toxicity. They would not have enrolled kids who were so sick or emaciated in the first place that a significant number would be expected to die.

These comments are prima fascia so incredibly biased that I am highly suspicious of Chris’s claims that this was a 10 year old situation.

As for Glaxo not having anything to gain. I disagree. Glaxo has repeatedly hidden safety information on kids, and I’m talking about things that are not public, YET. In fact Glaxo hired Shirley Murphy as VP of Pediatric Marketing around 1996 and she then went to FDA where she headed up the brand new Pediatric program with her sister.

“My view is that companies like GSK have nothing to gain by conducting studies improperly”

Apart from making money huh?

You are conveniently forgeting Paxil 329 study

Fid