Hundreds were fraudulently ghostwritten by a P.R. firm called ‘DesignWrite’
Mike Adams – Even though the big revelations about Big Pharma’s science paper research fraud came out years ago, most people are still not aware of this. Here’s the scoop: Drug companies routinely pay P.R. firms to ghostwrite clinical science papers which are published in medical journals and forwarded to the FDA to “prove” the drugs are safe and effective. But it’s all a farce: The papers are pure fiction, dreamed up by what are essentially marketing firms for the sole purpose of getting drugs approved even when they don’t work.
“In 2009, around fourteen thousand women who developed breast cancer while taking Prempro, a hormone replacement therapy (HRT), sued the drug’s manufacturer, Wyeth,” wrote Rupert Sheldrake in an extraordinary book called Science Set Free.
In court, it turned out that many of the medical research papers supporting HRT had been ghostwritten by a commercial medical communications company called DesignWrite, whose website boasted that over twelve years they had “planned, created and/or managed hundreds of advisory boards, a thousand abstracts and posters, 500 clinical papers, over 10,000 speakers’ bureau programmes, over 200 satellite symposia, 60 international programmes, dozens of websites, and a broad array of ancillary printed and electronic materials.” It emerged that DesignWrite organized a “planned publication programme” for Prempro, consisting of review articles, case reports, editorials and commentaries, using the medical literature as a marketing tool.