This is hot off the presses... "A secretly recorded meeting between the editors-in-chief of "The Lancet" and "New England Journal of Medicine" reveal both men bemoaning the "criminal" influence big pharma has on scientific research."
Key names and places:
Richard Horton
Phillippe DousTe-Blazy
Chatham House
Angela, as a small favor, could you rate my powers of prediction on a scale between one and one hundred? I think I have some skills here... what says you?
Richard Horton (EIC of The Lancet) also says: "Now we are not going to be able to basically, if this continues, PUBLISH ANY MORE CLINICAL RESEARCH DATA BECAUSE THE PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ARE SO FINANCIALLY POWERFUL today and are able to use such methodologies, as to have us accept paper which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which in reality, MANAGE TO CONCLUDE WHAT THEY WANT THEM TO CONCLUDE."
p.s. I added caps for emphasis
Well, I have a problem with some of this. First of all, pharmaceutical companies, or at least the ones which make chloroquine, would seem to me to WANT the study to show that it's efficacious against COVID both as a prophylactic or for treatment.
Second of all, they wouldn't make much money, because the patent is long expired and it's cheap as dirt to make and buy.
Third and most important anyone wanting to get to the bottom of this would have to investigate the disgusting scientist, Sapan Desai, CEO of Surgisphere, who provided the data and see if he has any specific ties to a pharmaceutical company or to any other group for that matter.
It's possible, but it's also possible he's just an incompetent and fraudulent quack, because this disgrace to the scientific community is having all his myriad papers pulled and audited, and it turns out he even digitally manipulated the visuals on his PHD dissertation. Of course, if all his work is sold to a specific company, that would be a different story, but again, a pharmaceutical company would WANT this medicine to be seen to work, and that's not what the "data" such as it was, showed. It might be possible that if someone was paying him to do it, it would be someone hoping to embarrass the administration, although I suppose it could also be some company making a different drug.
Another possibility is that the other scientists just expressed the perhaps innocent comment that they hoped it wouldn't work because of their own prejudices, and he happily obliged.
Needless to say, a lot of this would be extremely difficult to prove in a court of law, and, like Rorschach tests, people often see in the circumstances what they want to see. That 's why actual "evidence" is essential.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2...t-scientific-papers?__twitter_impression=true