Transparency Is Apparently A One Way Street

First, more on the context behind the Brownlee-Lenzer attack on Peter Pitts and Fred Goodwin.  I have written about how the two failed to reveal their bias against SSRIs in their previous selective reporting.  This is relevant since the point of the article Peter and I wrote in the Washington Times "Tabloid Medicine" was precisely about such one-sided coverage about how SSRIs "caused" or were "linked" to suicides.  Turns out that they are, but not in the way people like Brownlee and Lenzer had reported: the decline in SSRI prescribing that fear mongering contributed is associated with an increase in suicides. 

Now comes word from the exec producer of the Infinite Mind that Lenzer pitched a segment about so-called hidden corporate ties in reporting, which was rejected, before running the Slate piece. 

"....In the interest of full disclosure, I also should note for the record that Lenzer, who co-authored the Slate article, called me a few days after the "Prozac Nation: Revisited" program aired to pitch a program that she wanted us to do for The Infinite Mind, called "Journalists on Prozac," which would feature her and her writing partner Shannon Brownlee. Checking into Lenzer's credentials, I found a troubling article in The New York Times taking her to task for a British Medical Journal article that suggested that Eli Lilly and Company, which makes Prozac, had concealed documents about the link between anti-depressants, suicide and violence. The BMJ subsequently retracted the article, with full apologies, and the whole matter was widely covered in the news media.

After we told Jeanne Lenzer that we would not be proceeding with a program featuring her, she and Brownlee wrote the article for Slate."   fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/1237086.aspx

(Lichtenstein also notes that he did not ask Peter about his working for Manning, Selvage and Lee.  Which is true.  But then again, Peter had mentioned it to the producer for the segment in the context of noting that nothing he does for MSL involves CMPI and vice versa.)

One thing Brownlee and Lenzer failed to mention:  all the SSRIs made by the drug companies mentioned in their article have been generic for years. If all drug companies care about is marketing their meds, why would they promote a segment on products they no longer make? 

On another front, and speaking of fronts, the Prescription Project has  released “Toolkits to Guide Hospitals and Medical Schools with Conflicts of Interest”

The guides follow the same flow as the recommendations coming out of the AAMC taskforce. . 

From the titles of the tool kit modules along with the recommendations in the tool kit it appears that they had significant time to digest the AAMC recommendations and take them several steps further to advance their cause (this to be expected).   www.policymed.com/2008/04/aamc-and-prescr.html

The Prescription Project receives funding from trial lawyers and works with Institute for Medicine as Profession, largely funded by George Soros.  IMAP has a project that seeks ultimately to wrest drug development out of the hands of private companies and put it into the hands of government.  

You can see where this is heading ultimately.  Small bites at private sector innovation until nothing is left. 

Lots of people with anti-pharmaceutical innovation bias demand transparency but then hide their own biases, affiliations and funding.  And those that seek to connect the dots and spread their insinuations are equally biased and one-sided.  I think ideas matter and raising the funding link is just a way to divert attention from the debate over substance.