The gang that have produced new rules to prevent even the appearance of conflict of interest in medical research have an agenda.
They single out any relationship involving any resource or transaction that "may" have a monetary value exchanged between drug or device companies and academics.
But health IT companies, HMOs, trial lawyers, hospitals, government bureaucrats who hand out dough for comparative effectiveness research are exempt from oversight. Apparently there is no possibility for any undue influence from such entities.
The NIH are defensive about the impact these regs will have on innovation. And they should be.
"We want to emphasize that the revisions are not designed to prevent or hinder relationships among government, academia, and industry. Rather,
the revisions are aimed at facilitating such relationships by increasing transparency and accountability so that the resulting research is considered objective and in the interest of the public."
Given that most scientific misconduct and publication bias is a product of career climbing having nothing to do with industry, the emphasis on industry seems misplaced.
Moreover, who said that people are concerned about objectivity as defined by the Obama administration? One person's objectivity is another person's bias. And the new regs simple open up the process of biomedical innovation to more questions about conflict that have nothing to do with quality of the research -- ultimately measured by whether we can prevent or control diseases more effectively -- but everything to do with the cultural and ideological belief that commercialization inherently benefits large companies at the expense of the rest of us and that the commercialization process is inherently corrupt and corrupting.
The advocates of the regs claim that more oversight and investigation is needed because industry support for research has increased. Is it the industry support itself or the magnitude? Where is the evidence that more money means more corruption? Isn't the opposite outcome as likely: That is, people with a financial stake in the outcome of a research are more likely to be more scrupulous about research to protect their investment? Loss of reputation is a huge price to pay for fudging data for starters. Do the NIH reg advocates believe that industry funded scientists are more likely to lie about the safety and effectiveness of new products even at the expense of harming people?
The answer is yes. This culture of mistrust would have ensnared and persecuted the following individuals who had -- under the new guidelines -- the potential or actual presence of a financial conflict:
Louis Pasteur -- wine and beer maker and recipient of wine industry money
Gertrude Elion
George Hitchings
Sir James Black
Craig Zello
Phil Sharp
Joseph Goldstein
SIr Peter Mansfield
Judah Folkman
Most are Nobel Prize winners. All used industry money to commercialize devices and medicines that have extended and improved life. But according to the conflict of interest priesthood, the research they produced was tainted and therefore the results could be not trusted. They would be required to "report the name of the company or entity in which there’s a conflict of interest, the value of the interest, why it’s a conflict and “some key elements” of how the institution plans to manage the conflict."
blogs.wsj.com/health/2011/08/23/new-nih-conflict-of-interest-rules-better-than-the-old-rules/
Note there is no room for arguing there is no conflict. It's a confict. Acting as if it isn't is a grounds for investigation. Your only option is to tell the world just how guilty are are or appear to be. This makes a forced confession easy by comparison.
Meanwhile Andrew Wakefield, who received cash from trial lawyers and his own patients, would be exempt not only from the new NIH rules but the suspicion of the COI kapos.
Ditto the groups who pushed for this sort of witchhunt. Money from George Soros, the IOM (a conduit for ideologically tilting foundations) and others are exempt too.
The new rules are the culmination of an ideological assault by those who believe commercialization is inherently corrupt and corrupting and who ignore the fact that as a result of such innovation, life expectancy and death rates from cancer, heart disease and other illnesses have declined in direct relation to the industrial investment in treatments for death and disease.
They single out any relationship involving any resource or transaction that "may" have a monetary value exchanged between drug or device companies and academics.
But health IT companies, HMOs, trial lawyers, hospitals, government bureaucrats who hand out dough for comparative effectiveness research are exempt from oversight. Apparently there is no possibility for any undue influence from such entities.
The NIH are defensive about the impact these regs will have on innovation. And they should be.
"We want to emphasize that the revisions are not designed to prevent or hinder relationships among government, academia, and industry. Rather,
the revisions are aimed at facilitating such relationships by increasing transparency and accountability so that the resulting research is considered objective and in the interest of the public."
Given that most scientific misconduct and publication bias is a product of career climbing having nothing to do with industry, the emphasis on industry seems misplaced.
Moreover, who said that people are concerned about objectivity as defined by the Obama administration? One person's objectivity is another person's bias. And the new regs simple open up the process of biomedical innovation to more questions about conflict that have nothing to do with quality of the research -- ultimately measured by whether we can prevent or control diseases more effectively -- but everything to do with the cultural and ideological belief that commercialization inherently benefits large companies at the expense of the rest of us and that the commercialization process is inherently corrupt and corrupting.
The advocates of the regs claim that more oversight and investigation is needed because industry support for research has increased. Is it the industry support itself or the magnitude? Where is the evidence that more money means more corruption? Isn't the opposite outcome as likely: That is, people with a financial stake in the outcome of a research are more likely to be more scrupulous about research to protect their investment? Loss of reputation is a huge price to pay for fudging data for starters. Do the NIH reg advocates believe that industry funded scientists are more likely to lie about the safety and effectiveness of new products even at the expense of harming people?
The answer is yes. This culture of mistrust would have ensnared and persecuted the following individuals who had -- under the new guidelines -- the potential or actual presence of a financial conflict:
Louis Pasteur -- wine and beer maker and recipient of wine industry money
Gertrude Elion
George Hitchings
Sir James Black
Craig Zello
Phil Sharp
Joseph Goldstein
SIr Peter Mansfield
Judah Folkman
Most are Nobel Prize winners. All used industry money to commercialize devices and medicines that have extended and improved life. But according to the conflict of interest priesthood, the research they produced was tainted and therefore the results could be not trusted. They would be required to "report the name of the company or entity in which there’s a conflict of interest, the value of the interest, why it’s a conflict and “some key elements” of how the institution plans to manage the conflict."
blogs.wsj.com/health/2011/08/23/new-nih-conflict-of-interest-rules-better-than-the-old-rules/
Note there is no room for arguing there is no conflict. It's a confict. Acting as if it isn't is a grounds for investigation. Your only option is to tell the world just how guilty are are or appear to be. This makes a forced confession easy by comparison.
Meanwhile Andrew Wakefield, who received cash from trial lawyers and his own patients, would be exempt not only from the new NIH rules but the suspicion of the COI kapos.
Ditto the groups who pushed for this sort of witchhunt. Money from George Soros, the IOM (a conduit for ideologically tilting foundations) and others are exempt too.
The new rules are the culmination of an ideological assault by those who believe commercialization is inherently corrupt and corrupting and who ignore the fact that as a result of such innovation, life expectancy and death rates from cancer, heart disease and other illnesses have declined in direct relation to the industrial investment in treatments for death and disease.
