Pharmaceutical companies caught altering Wikipedia pages to remove mention of drug risks.
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> Story via http://Muvy.org
August 30, 2007
Abbott caught altering entries to Wikipedia
Several drug companies have now been caught deleting important information
from Wikipedia, in order to downplay the risk of their drugs.
The first drug company caught messing with the Wikipedia was AstraZeneca.
References to claims that Seroquel allegedly made teenagers “more likely
to think about harming or killing themselves” were deleted by a user of a
computer registered to the drug company, according to Times.
According to Patients not Patents, now it is Abbott Laboratories who've
been caught doing the same thing. The group alleges that "employees of
Abbott Laboratories have been altering entries to Wikipedia, the popular
online encyclopedia, to eliminate information questioning the safety of
its top-selling drugs."
The tool used to catch these corporate erasers is the WikiScanner, which
was developed by Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute
of Technology, and it reveals changes to the online encyclopaedia by
linking edits back to the computers from which they were done, using each
computer’s unique IP address. The scanner has wreaked havoc in news media,
politics and among corporations caught redhanded "improving" articles.
Patients not Patents found that in July of 2007, a computer at Abbott
Laboratories’ Chicago office was used to delete a reference to a Mayo
Clinic study that revealed that patients taking the arthritis drug Humira
faced triple the risk of developing certain kinds of cancers and twice the
risk of developing serious infections. The study was published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006.
The same computer was used to remove articles describing public interest
groups’ attempt to have Abbott’s weight-loss drug Meridia banned after the
drug was found to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke in some
patients.
The site’s editors restored the deleted information, but Patients not
Patents claim that Abbott’s activities illustrate drug companies’
eagerness to suppress safety concerns.
Jeffrey Light, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy
group said, “The argument that drug companies can be trusted to provide
adequate safety information on their own products has been used by the
pharmaceutical industry to fight against government regulation of consumer
advertising. Clearly such trust is misplaced. As Abbott’s actions have
demonstrated, drug companies will attempt to hide unfavorable safety
information when they think nobody is watching.”
- Peter Rost, M.D. is a former VP of Pfizer and the author of Killer Drug
and The Whistleblower.