British Medical Journal: Big Pharma Secrecy 'Morally Indefensible'

The British Medical Journal has launched a frontal assault on a key part of the Covid Regime’s modus operandi—secrecy—calling Big Pharma’s failure to transparently release key data on the medication trials “morally indefensible.” This is significant, coming from a prestigious medical journal, as it provides dissenters from the Covid Regime with valuable ammunition.

Lifesite has some extended coverage of this development: 

World renowned British Medical Journal calls for ‘immediate release’ of all COVID jab data

‘Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees,’ the BMJ explained.

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Drug companies conduct their own trials, keep data hidden

According to the BMJ, manufacturers of today’s COVID-19 drugs — including double-shot mRNA jab producer Pfizer — have been allowed to sponsor and conduct their own clinical trials while keeping the data hidden from independent analysts. Findings from these corporate-sponsored trials have subsequently been forwarded to government regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which have granted approval of the shots based upon the companies’ closely guarded data.

“Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees,” the medical journal explained, adding that “[t]he company and the contract research organisations that carried out the trial hold all the data.”

Meanwhile, Pfizer has said it won’t entertain requests for access to its trial data until May 2025, a full two years after the primary study completion date of May 15, 2023.

It’s ‘morally indefensible’ to hide clinical trial data

“[D]espite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public — and are likely to remain that way for years to come,” the editors of the prestigious journal stated. “This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health intervention.”

The full editorial can be found here:

Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now

Note that the BMJ includes “treatments” in their demand for transparency. Here is the key passage in that regard:

Underlying data for covid-19 therapeutics are similarly hard to find. Published reports of Regeneron’s phase III trial of its monoclonal antibody therapy REGEN-COV flatly state that participant level data will not be made available to others.21 Should the drug be approved (and not just emergency authorised), sharing “will be considered.” For remdesivir, the US National Institutes of Health, which funded the trial, created a new portal to share data (https://accessclinicaldata.niaid.nih.gov/), but the dataset on offer is limited. An accompanying document explains: “The longitudinal data set only contains a small subset of the protocol and statistical analysis plan objectives.”

We are left with publications but no access to the underlying data on reasonable request. This is worrying for trial participants, researchers, clinicians, journal editors, policy makers, and the public. The journals that have published these primary studies may argue that they faced an awkward dilemma, caught between making the summary findings available quickly and upholding the best ethical values that support timely access to underlying data. In our view, there is no dilemma; the anonymised individual participant data from clinical trials must be made available for independent scrutiny.

Journal editors, systematic reviewers, and the writers of clinical practice guideline generally obtain little beyond a journal publication, but regulatory agencies receive far more granular data as part of the regulatory review process. In the words of the European Medicine Agency’s former executive director and senior medical officer, “relying solely on the publications of clinical trials in scientific journals as the basis of healthcare decisions is not a good idea ... Drug regulators have been aware of this limitation for a long time and routinely obtain and assess the full documentation (rather than just publications).”22

Legal attacks, scientific attacks, public protests—it’s all about creating friction, and it’s all good.