Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [121]
10 See Krimsky, Science in the Private Interest, note 1; Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie (1997), Academic Capitalism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press; and Derek Bok (2003), Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Marcia Angell (2004), The Truth about the Drug Companies, New York: Random House; and Jerome P. Kassirer (2005), On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health, New York: Oxford University Press.
11 National Institutes of Health Care Management Research and Educational Foundation (2003), “Changing Patterns of Pharmaceutical Innovation.” Cited in Jason Dana and George Loewenstein (2003), “A Social Science Perspective on Gifts to Physicians from Industry,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 290, 252–255.
12 Investigative journalist David Willman won a Pulitzer Prize for his series on conflicts of interest in bringing new drugs to market; two of them include “Scientists Who Judged Pill Safety Received Fees,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1999; and “The New FDA: How a New Policy Led to Seven Deadly Drugs,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2000.
13 Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle (1996), Toxic Deception. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing.
14 Richard A. Davidson (1986, May—June), “Source of Funding and Outcome of Clinical Trials,” Journal of General Internal Medicine, 1, pp. 155–158.
15 Lise L. Kjaergard and Bodil Als-Nielsen (2002, August 3), “Association between competing interests and authors’ conclusions: Epidemiological study of randomised clinical trials published in BMJ,” British Medical Journal, 325, pp. 249–252. See also Krimsky, Science in the Private Interest (note 1), chapter 9, “A Question of Bias,” for a review of these and other similar studies.
16 Alex Berenson, Gardiner Harris, Barry Meier, and Andrew Pollack, “Dangerous Data: Despite Warnings, Drug Giant Took Long Path to Vioxx Recall,” The New York Times, November 14, 2004.
17 Richard Horton (2004), “The lessons of MMR,” The Lancet, 363, pp. 747–749.
18 Andrew J. Wakefield, Peter Harvey, and John Linnell (2004), “MMR—Responding to retraction,” The Lancet, 363, pp. 1327–1328.
19 Wikipedia, under the entry “Thimerosal,” has an excellent, balanced review of the entire controversy surrounding this chemical (variously spelled thimerosol and thimerserol), used commonly since the 1930s as a preservative in vaccines and many household products, such as cosmetics and eye drops. In recent years, some consumer groups became concerned about the possibly toxic effects of mercury contained in this preservative, claiming it causes autism and other diseases. The Wikipedia entry represents their concerns fairly, but shows that their arguments have largely been based on anecdotes, exaggerated fears, unsupported claims, and the antivaccine research conducted by Mark Geier and David Geier, president of a company specializing in litigating on behalf of alleged vaccine injury claimants.
As for the research, in a study of all children born in Denmark between 1991 and 1998 (over half a million children), the incidence of autism in vaccinated children was actually a bit lower than in unvaccinated children: See Kreesten M. Madsen, Anders Hviid, Mogens Vestergaard, et al. (2002), “A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism,” New England Journal of Medicine, 347, pp. 1477–1482. Moreover, after vaccines containing thimerserol were removed from the market in Denmark, there was no subsequent decrease in the incidence of autism: See Kreesten M. Madsen et al. (2003), “Thimerserol and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence from Danish Population-Based Data,” Pediatrics, 112, pp. 604–606. See also L. Smeeth, C. Cook, E. Fombonne, et al. (2004, September 11–17), “MMR vaccination and pervasive developmental disorders: A case-control study,” The Lancet, 364, pp. 963–969.
The reaction of many parents of autistic children to this news is itself a story of dissonance. Having committed