Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

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"Peer review" isn't worth diddly squat...

Industry Money Squeezes Out Valuable Products From Smaller Companies

Clearly, the FDA's big bucks, pay-to-play approval system buoys the agency's budget with the drug industry's seven-figure fees. Most people realize "pay-to-play" is how drugs like Zohydro and Xarelto get approved. But the corrupt system also prevents new and innovative products from getting to the market. Companies without deep pockets and crony links seldom if ever negotiate the FDA's approval system.

New and exciting research is also suppressed through an academic and publications system that favors the status quo, says William A. Wilson in the magazine First Things.

"In many fields, it's common for an established and respected researcher to serve as 'senior author' on a bright young star's first few publications, lending his prestige and credibility to the result, and signaling to reviewers that he stands behind it.

In the natural sciences and medicine, senior scientists are frequently the controllers of laboratory resources — which these days include not just scientific instruments, but dedicated staffs of grant proposal writers and regulatory compliance experts — without which a young scientist has no hope of accomplishing significant research.

Older scientists control access to scientific prestige by serving on the editorial boards of major journals and on university tenure-review committees. Finally, the government bodies that award the vast majority of scientific funding are either staffed or advised by distinguished practitioners in the field."

Fraudulent Research Threatens Entire Field of Science

The same system can also encourage misleading or even fraudulent research when so many paychecks and egos are affected, notes Wilson, and it may explain why so much published research proves non-reproducible.18
"The 'bad' papers that failed to replicate were, on average, cited far more often than the papers that did! As the authors [a group of cancer researchers] put it, 'some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to conform or falsify its fundamental basis.'
What they [the researchers] do not mention is that once an entire field has been created — with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck — pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful."
From Vioxx to Paxil, to hormone replacement therapy and flame retardants, many dangerous products have rested on faulty research.19 Worse, much research discovered to be fraudulent, including instances where researchers actually went to prison, has never been retracted and still stands to mislead future generations.20


For example, Dr. Richard Borison, former Psychiatry chief at the Augusta Veterans Affairs medical center and Medical College of Georgia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a $10 million clinical trial fraud conducted on unsuspecting veterans but his "U.S. Seroquel Study Group" research is unretracted and cited over 300 times21 in subsequent research, including in medical textbooks.22

It is not surprising that both the FDA and mainstream media have become industry captives failing to perform their sworn duties of protecting and informing the public because of their lucrative partnerships with industry. Unless there is a major system of reinvigoration, the spiral of compromised ethics will only continue.

https://www.sott.net/article/319395-The-FDAs-financial-ties-to-BigPharma-are-keeping-unsafe-drugs-on-the-market-and-secretly-killing-millions