Pseudoscience: Monsanto’s ghostwriting and strong-arming threaten sound science—and society

While passing a placard of contemporary protest buttons in New York’s Greenwich Village, my attention was drawn to one that read “Science is Peer Reviewed, Not Politician Approved.”

This short aphorism brought into focus two unfortunate realities. First, there are growing segments of the population who have lost confidence in science and choose to act on un-scientific or pseudo-scientific truth claims. And second, other segments of the population view scientists as just another stakeholder group subject to the same market influences in the competition for producing credible knowledge.

As a generator of truth claims, science stands on its own footing. Unfortunately, many corporations view science not as a generator of truth, but as one of many inputs into production.

The most recent examples of the corporate capture of science can be found in the investigations of discovery documents, released under court mandate, arising from mass tort product liability litigation filed against Monsanto Co. Thousands of people have filed lawsuits claiming they developed cancer after exposure to the company’s Roundup herbicide, and that the company suppressed information about the toxic effects of Roundup.

Thousands of pages of these discovery documents – made up largely of internal Monsanto communications – were analyzed in two peer-reviewed publications. My co-author Carey Gillam and I published our results in the Journal of Public Health Policy. Leemon McHenry, a member of the Philosophy Department at California State University, published his assessment in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine.

Pseudoscience: The Anti-Vitamin Paper That Never Existed

Jessica Burger, CBS News, 15 April 2015

As Michael McBurney writes on the TalkingNutrition blog of supplement manufacturer DSM, a variety of media outlets (Sunday Express, The Guardian, Daily Mail, CBS News) reported on a study supposedly presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting by Dr. Tim Byers of the Colorado Cancer Center.

McBurney is not too happy about it.

Byers is reported to have presented evidence, after studying thousands of patients for ten years, that some people get more cancer while on vitamins. My problem is the apparent lack of peer-reviewed evidence with hazard ratios (HR) or odds ratios (OR), or even an abstract to partially substantiate the claim.
A session entitled “Dietary Supplements and Cancer Risk and Prognosis” was apparently held Monday, April 20 from 5-6:30pm. Dr Tim E Byers is listed as an invited speaker but there is no abstract for his presentation. The University of Colorado Cancer Center has promoted his research but an abstract, peer-reviewed paper, or supplemental data cannot be found. The question is, did journalists ask to see the scientific evidence? Certainly, I cannot make an evaluation without some scientific evidence beyond expert opinion.

In a follow-up post, McBurney wrote that there was, in fact, no presentation of new study data by Byers at the AACR meeting, and that “The entire news cycle linking multivitamin/mineral supplements with cancer risk seems to have been stimulated by the university press release alluding to a commentary published in 2012.”

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It is horrifying that my Alma Mater allows colleagues to blog about fake studies. They must be paid a lot by drug companies to slam the competition. Another example of Fake News!

PseudoScience: Is Evidenced Based Medicine Manipulated Evidence to Sell Bad Drugs?

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

Read all about it!

Pseudoscience: How Big Pharma Cooks the Books in the Scientific Journals

When David Sinclair’s company started clinical trials on the health benefits of reverse ageing through manipulation of genes, big pharma published critical articles on his approach and the FDA shut down his clinical trials. Fortunately, David did not capitulate to corporate manipulation of the scientific journals.

Time Magazine Recognizes Dr. David Sinclair for His Work On Nad+ and Resveratrol’s Contribution to Human Health and Disease Prevention.

Posted by Logan Wallace on May 8th, 2014 // No Comments

LIGHTNING RELEASES — Arlington, Virginia, Biotivia, May 8th, 2014. Dr David Sinclair fought a lonely battle for 5 years. As the Harvard scientist who discovered the health benefits of Resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine grapes, Sinclair’s work was dismissed by his critics. Now with thousands of scientific studies confirming his claims, Sinclair is getting the recognition he deserves.

Time Magazine just added Dr Sinclair to their list of 100 Most Influential persons, and in December of last year David and a team of fellow scientists from Harvard, MIT, The National Institutes of Health and UNSW announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered that a coenzyme called NAD+ is able to reverse muscle aging by the equivalent of more than 30 human years by restoring communication between the cells’ nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.

Dr. Jonathan Wright reports:

The extent of published research on the phytochemical resveratrol is impressive and growing all the time, with now more than 6000 studies reported. This pharmacologically promiscuous compound demonstrates an amazing array of favorable health outcomes, such as cardioprotective, antidiabetic, anticancer, antiviral, neuroprotective, antiplatelet, anti-inflammatory and modulation of fat metabolism. More importantly, the development of major chronic diseases might also be reduced by resveratrol, based on laboratory studies, including cardiovascular disease, dementia, type 2 diabetes and osteoarthritis. This is in addition to its touted effect on holding back the aging process via SIRT1, implying that this one simple molecule has the potential to help prevent most of the chronic diseases associated with old age. For more see Nutrition and Healing, Volume 21, Issue 5, August 2014.

Pseudoscience at CDC – When Politics Trumps Science, How Many People are Harmed?

Natural News has acquired a letter from William Thompson to former CDC head Dr. Julie Gerberding, dated February 2nd, 2004. The date of this letter is important because a pivotal Institute of Medicine (IoM) meeting on vaccine safety took place just one week later on February 9th. (See the full letter below.)

In this letter, William Thompson says he will be “presenting the summary of our results from the Metropolitan Atlanta Autism Case-Control Study,” and he laments that the data will show MMR vaccines cause an increased risk of autism in youth African-American babies. He explains “I will have to present several problematic results relating to statistical associations between the receipt of MMR vaccine and autism.”

He then goes on to implore Dr. Gerberding to respond to questions that had been raised by “Representative David Weldon” regarding the integrity of CDC scientists working in the immunization program. He also explains that the CDC has been covering up the truth about the safety problems the agency’s own scientists had documented with vaccines, saying:

I’ve repeatedly told individuals in the [National Immunization Program Office of Directors] over the last several years that they’re doing a very poor job representing immunization safety issues and that we’re losing the public relations war.

In response to this letter, the CDC took deliberate action to retroactively alter the outcome of the autism study by arbitrarily eliminating most subjects from the study, thereby shrinking the sample size to a small data set which would not achieve statistical significance. This is a clear and irrefutable case of scientific fraud. This fraud allowed CDC scientists such as Colleen Boyle to testify before Congress that there was “no credible link” between MMR vaccines and autism.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/046597_CDC_whistleblower_secret_letter_Julie_Gerberding.html#ixzz3BQDF8yhf

See also: http://www.wddty.com/agency-hides-data-that-reveals-the-mmr-causes-autism.html

Pseudoscience: Vaccine Fraud (update – finally some jail time)

Update: Dr. Dong-Pyou Han was sentenced to jail time and fined 7.2M.

(NaturalNews) Yet another vaccine researcher has been caught faking research on a bogus AIDS vaccine, adding to the pattern of scientific fraud and criminality that characterizes the modern-day vaccine industry. Dr. Dong-Pyou Han from Iowa State University has resigned this week after admitting he spiked rabbit blood samples with healthy human blood to falsely show the presence of antibodies that would “prove” his AIDS vaccine worked.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) was so convinced by the fraud that they gave Han $19 million in research funding. The NIH later found the fraud after attempting to replicate Han’s work and figuring out something was terribly wrong with the research.

Newly-released federal documents reveal the stunning breadth of the fraud. As the findings state:

[The investigation] found that the Respondent falsified results in research to develop a vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) by intentionally spiking samples of rabbit sera with antibodies to provide the desired results. The falsification made it appear that rabbits immunized with the gp41-54 moiety of the HIV gp41 glycoprotein induced antibodies capable of neutralizing a broad range of HIV-1 strains.

A summary of the fraud was also posted on RetractionWatch.com, a site that frequently posts details of Big Pharma research fraud.

Merck vaccine scientists blew the whistle on similar fraud inside Big Pharma

Han’s $19 million vaccine research fraud eerily resembles the vaccine industry fraud exposed by former Merck virologists Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski. In a little-known False Claims Act filing, these two scientists accused Merck of spiking mumps vaccine blood tests with animal antibodies in order to make the vaccines appear to be effective.

This fraud is what allowed Merck to falsely claim its mumps vaccine is 95% effective, say the scientist whistleblowers. In reality, the fraudulent Merck mumps vaccine actually contributed to the spread of mumps across America, they explain.

The spread of mumps, of course, results in more people buying mumps vaccines. This is how scientific fraud can produce enormous profits for vaccine companies. In many cases, vaccines actually spread the disease they claim to prevent.

The fact that an AIDS vaccine research has now been caught faking his bogus AIDS vaccine in precisely the same way Merck scientists say Merck faked their vaccine tests is yet another significant red flag that screams the obvious: the vaccine industry is riddled with scientific fraud.

No punishment for scientific fraud

For being caught stealing $19 million in taxpayer grant money and faking AIDS vaccine research, Dr. Dong-Pyou Han is merely barred from receiving government contract money for the next three years.

No jail time. No criminal charges. Not even an effort to force him to repay the funds he essentially stole.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/043344_AIDS_vaccine_research_fraud_science_hoax.html#ixzz2ohsPW8kY

Pseudoscience: Spin Doctors

Spin and spin doctors: How medical researchers falsify data to change the course of healthcare

Sunday, August 18, 2013 by: Eric L. Zielinski
Tags: spin doctors, falsification, quack science

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) defines spin as the “specific reporting that could distort the interpretation of results and mislead readers.” Spin Doctors are, thus, the people falsifying data for reasons including financial ties to Big Pharma, to achieve higher professional status and to gain grant monies.

One of the most dramatic effects of spin is seen in a recent study published by JAMA. Researchers reported that over 40 percent of the best designed, peer-reviewed scientific papers published in the world’s top medical journals misrepresented the actual findings of the research. To confirm this and to identify the nature and frequency of distorted presentation or spin, Boutron et al. systematically evaluated 616 published reports of Random Control Trials (RCTs) and after appraising the 72 eligible studies concluded that, “In the representative sample of RCT’s published in 2006 with statistically nonsignificant primary outcomes, the reporting and interpretation of findings was frequently inconsistent with the results.” In other words, most of the published research has been intentionally falsified.

Spin has dramatically changed the course of healthcare and has deleteriously affected millions of people. One of the most shocking examples of this is when the National Institute of Health’s National Cholesterol Education Program dramatically lowered the ideal LDL level for cardiovascular disease prevention strategies in 2004; thereby, increasing the number of Americans for whom statins are recommended from 13 million to 36 million. Though, after a systematic review of the literature to confirm whether or not statins are even effective in managing heart disease, the highly acclaimed medical journal The Lancet published a paper concluding that, “In support of statin therapy for the primary prevention of this disease in women and people aged over 65 years, the guidelines cite seven and nine randomized trials, respectively. Yet not one of the studies provides such evidence.”

Thus, of the 23 million new people now with “high LDL levels;” however, there is no valid, scientifically proven reason to assume that they are at risk. Because of a spin on the data; however, they are labeled as being at elevated risk of developing coronary heart disease and are now being pressured by their medical doctors to take statins.

Learn more:
http://www.naturalnews.com/041668_spin_doctors_falsification_quack_science.html#ixzz2cLPbTBUw