When The Media Says "Experts" They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (part 9)
Originally posted on Quora May 19, 2023
From 2015 to 2021 Monica Bertagnolli was the recipient of more than 116 Pfizer grants totaling $290 million. And yet Bertagnolli hints that the perverse incentive of Pharma money extends beyond her as an individual into clinical trials themselves.
All industry contracts were used by the Alliance’s 3,000+ member clinical trials group to conduct cancer clinical trials. Importantly, virtually all of the funding from Pfizer was for a single large international breast cancer clinical trial—a very high $$ total because it enrolled over 6,000 patients over quite a number of countries.
The funding was distributed across many different health care institutions—both academic and community—to conduct the trial. Alliance overall does not have more involvement with one industry partner over another—it’s just that this one Pfizer trial was very large and therefore very expensive.
As I mentioned in part 8, industry sponsored trials rarely produce outcomes unfavorable to the sponsor and their product and have been found to be 4x more likely to produce outcomes favorable to the sponsor compared to independently funded trials where the usual methods of manipulation (i.e. controlling the terms of reference, design, and selecting clinical endpoints or centers that produce the desired outcome) are absent. Thus, the problem is not so much that Bertagnolli herself is compromised by Pfizer but that the entire system is compromised.