Why Wyeth is interesting

Posted: September 8th, 2010 | By Bruce Gorton | Posted in Everything else | Tagged as , , , , , ,
  • 2 Comments
  

An interesting study has found corrupt dealings with Wyeth – essentially the company looks to have paid ghostwriters to submit studies that put a somewhat positive spin on Hormone Replacement Therapy.

Fair disclosure, the person who did the study is being paid by the other side in a lawsuit. The litigants didn’t pay for the study, but it is a competing interest.

That said the whole thing provides an interesting insight into drug company science, as well as making me think of what we learn in business journalism about PR.

Basically, we are supposed to consider the source and recognise that while PR will very rarely an outright lie, they will empathize what is in the company’s interest.

There are very deceptive ways of telling the truth.

This is why being open about one’s competing interests is important – you need to know how to read the article and just who paid for it tells you a bit about that.

 

Comments

 

anonwithathought

September 9, 2010 at 5:31 pm

Wow, not a tremendously thoughtful post. If PR smeared journalists the way that journalists smear PR…

Journalists don’t mean to get the facts wrong, they just do. Some of the time.

 

Bruce Gorton

September 13, 2010 at 3:52 pm

anonwithathought

No smear involved. PR is essentially a form of marketing, and putting your product forward in a positive light. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, except in cases like Wyeth trying to use scientific journals as PR mouthpieces.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/ar.....ed.1000335

The result of this massive scientific fraud by dishonest scumbags who should never have graduated primary school (Lets not kid around, when you have one of the guys involved talking about how they used to plaguarise in college, this isn’t a bunch with any integrity whatsoever) was people getting cancer.

Sure, PR people have feelings, in this case those feelings don’t appear to have included guilt, or anything else regarding having a conscience.

And that, is not all that unusual with PR. A PR company will laugh its *** off at getting a journalist to publish their spin on a factory tech upgrade, that will mean job cuts down the line. Free advertising after all.

There is a lot of money in writing PR, a lot of it. And it can even be honourable, not all PR is evil, but for anybody reading it? Remember whose dime it is written on.

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  • About

    Bruce Gorton helps put together the TimesLIVE, mostly specialising in science and business. He is liberal, atheist and fairly interested in nonsense and the way it is reaching critical mass. Hence the blog.

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