Quote:For decades, the U.S. FDA has uncovered misconduct in clinical trials but hidden it from the public, according to a new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The study, by New York University journalism professor Charles Seife, looked at 78 publications resulting from trials where the FDA found serious misconduct, including “failure to protect the safety of patients” and data fakery. Only three of those publications mentioned the problems uncovered by the FDA. No retractions or errata were ever issued for any of them.

For example, in one of the three cases:

Quote:…data from several patients were excluded from the efficacy analysis because “site monitoring raised questions in regard to certain data at 1 study site.”65(p431) The FDA documents64 allege that none of the individuals enrolled at 1 study site had met the inclusion criteria and that the responsible researcher had fabricated chest radiographs of participants and committed other forms of misconduct.

Quote:That misconduct happens isn’t shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn’t notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted…The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn’t get forthright answers. For an agency devoted to protecting the public from bogus medical science, the FDA seems to be spending an awful lot of effort protecting the perpetrators of bogus science from the public.