Day: May 27, 2016

Big Pharma’s medical research papers are total bunk

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Hundreds were fraudulently ghostwritten by a P.R. firm called ‘DesignWrite’

wyethMike Adams – Even though the big revelations about Big Pharma’s science paper research fraud came out years ago, most people are still not aware of this. Here’s the scoop: Drug companies routinely pay P.R. firms to ghostwrite clinical science papers which are published in medical journals and forwarded to the FDA to “prove” the drugs are safe and effective. But it’s all a farce: The papers are pure fiction, dreamed up by what are essentially marketing firms for the sole purpose of getting drugs approved even when they don’t work.

“In 2009, around fourteen thousand women who developed breast cancer while taking Prempro, a hormone replacement therapy (HRT), sued the drug’s manufacturer, Wyeth,” wrote Rupert Sheldrake in an extraordinary book called Science Set Free.

In court, it turned out that many of the medical research papers supporting HRT had been ghostwritten by a commercial medical communications company called DesignWrite, whose website boasted that over twelve years they had “planned, created and/or managed hundreds of advisory boards, a thousand abstracts and posters, 500 clinical papers, over 10,000 speakers’ bureau programmes, over 200 satellite symposia, 60 international programmes, dozens of websites, and a broad array of ancillary printed and electronic materials.” It emerged that DesignWrite organized a “planned publication programme” for Prempro, consisting of review articles, case reports, editorials and commentaries, using the medical literature as a marketing tool.

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Common Core Opt-Out Movement Growing

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common coreTJ Martinell – Nationwide opposition to Common Core is on the rise, and more and more students and parents are choosing to opt-out on their own.  According to a story by U.S. News & World Report over half a million school-aged children opted out of Common Core standardized testing last year. In New York around a fifth of students simply didn’t take the tests.

In November 2013, Federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan attributed opposition to Common Core to “white suburban moms” who discovered that “all of a sudden, their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought.”

Like so many federal bureaucrats, Duncan was dead wrong, as USA News reports the opt-out movement reflects widespread distaste crossing demographic lines:

When the opt-out movement first gained traction in 2014, it was initially dismissed by some educational policymakers as a movement primarily taken up by middle-class white families concerned that new standardized tests would reveal their children to be lower-achieving than once thought. Data from New York, for example, suggests that those opting out tended to come from more affluent areas and are more likely to be white.

However, data from Ohio have shown a much more inclusive movement, representative of the state population. Early evidence from 2016 suggests that the movement has been gaining momentum in communities of color – the Seattle chapter of the NAACP issued a statement in support of opting out, and principals in New York City have publicly voiced support for giving parents the right to opt out.

Teachers have also indirectly expressed their opposition to Common Core, emailing parents about how their students can opt out without fear of punishment.

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