The British Medical Journal criticized Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers for ‘reaping vast profits’ without proper independent scrutinyHidden summary:
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has urged public health regulators and pharma majors to immediately release all raw data from Covid-19 vaccine trials for independent scrutiny, arguing that “complete data transparency” was a matter of “public interest.”
Branding Big Pharma as “the least trusted industry,” a recent op-ed by BMJ editors stated that it was “morally indefensible” that this information remains inaccessible to doctors, researchers and the public, despite the global rollout of vaccines and treatments.
In the scathing editorial, the writers – senior BMJ editor Peter Doshi, former editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee and her successor Kamran Abbasi – accuse pharmaceutical companies of “reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims.”
At least three of the many companies making Covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Other companies have no pre-Covid track record.
In particular, the editorial collective calls out Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca for not providing “timely access” to “anonymized individual participant data” from their clinical trials. This granular data is available to regulators like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which told a judge last month to give it 75 years to publish all data relating to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
But the BMJ said Pfizer – whose trial was “funded by the company and designed, run, analyzed, and authored by Pfizer employees” – has indicated that it will not entertain data requests until May 2025, a full two years after the primary study is completed.
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