Big Pharma megalith GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have announced that they are going to mend their ways when it comes to suppressing inconvenient data from their clinical trials. GSK has already had a $3 billion (just how much money do these fuckers make?) fine this year for peddling dodgy drugs in the US. Fortunately, Ben Goldacre -'The Bad Science Boot Boy' - is on the case and he will no doubt make it his business to keep an eye on the goings-on at GSK. Expect to hear more about this story...
'Briefly: today, several people have asked for my response to this story in the Guardian, celebrating GSK’s promise for more transparency on their trial data.It is always good to hear a drug company making promises, and I hope that GSK will stick by the commitments they have made today.
'But we should judge drug companies by their actions, not by their promises, especially when similar promises have been made in the past, and then broken.
'In 1998 GlaxoWellcome promised to set up a clinical trials register, amidst outcry over withheld trial results. But when the company merged with SKB to create GSK, in 2002, this register was unceremonially deleted from the internet. This tragic story is described in an excellent open access article on this history of attempts to get access to hidden data, by Iain Chalmers.' (Bad Science article).
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