In an article about Tamiflu, an anti-flu drug developed by Roche, Helen Epstein writes:
[Non-Roche researchers] noticed yet more discrepancies between the articles that had appeared in scientific journals and Roche’s internal documents, many concerning the drug’s safety. According to published articles, no potentially drug-related serious side effects—or “serious adverse events” as they are called—were reported in the papers describing two Roche-sponsored clinical trials in which 908 people took Tamiflu; but according to Roche’s unpublished documents, three “serious adverse events” that were possibly related to Tamiflu occurred in these trials.In 2008, an article in the journal Drug Safety, signed by a group of Roche authors, claimed that rats and mice, both given a very high dose of Tamiflu, showed no ill effect. But according to documents submitted to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare by Chugai, the Japanese Roche subsidiary, the exact same dose of Tamiflu killed more than half of the animals. As they died, the rats exhibited many of the same central nervous system symptoms that Hama had described in his case series on the Japanese children.
That’s deceptive. Here’s evasive:
“Do the ‘full study reports’” containing all five modules exist?” I asked my correspondent at Roche. “A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer will do.” In reply, she did not say “yes” or “no,” but repeated her claim that the Cochrane group had all the information it needed to analyze the Tamika studies.
This sort of thing is why I don’t trust drug companies. They’re dishonest again and again, with trivial consequences. Epstein’s article would have been even better had she given the names of the Roche employees she criticizes (the authors of the deceptive studies, the evasive correspondent).
I have a policy of mistrusting all official communication unless I have specific evidence to the contrary.
Do I know for certain they’re usually punished for misleading statements? Have they been reliable in the past? Do I have independent corroborating evidence?
Need I say how very never this is the case?
Alrenous, I’m curious how this works in practice. If I go to the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicules) and start questioning everything I’m told I would be quite rightly treated as a nut. I think there are forces that push public officials to tell the truth; there are also forces that push them to lie. Whether your ideas about this, which strike me as too black and white, actually help I would like to know. What do you actually do as a result of this approach?
Anyone who remembers history would distrust the major drug companies. They have an appalling track record and have been caught lying numerous times. But I sort of expect that – after all, they’re in business to make money.
What scares me more is that we can’t trust our government officials to tell the truth either.
“and start questioning everything I’m told I would be quite rightly treated as a nut. I think there are forces that push public officials to tell the truth;”
So there’s two possibilities here. Either you have specific evidence (forces for truth?) that your DMV is generally truthful, or else you’re just taking it on faith. Either you already follow this technique, or what makes you a nut is failing to question them – just don’t do it out loud to DMV officials.
Are we talking about renewing your licence, or are we talking about motor vehicle policy?
I actually would distrust everything a DMV official told me. I would, however, intentionally look for evidence if it was important – say there is a threat of jail. Sometimes I even investigate if I’m told something I originally thought was true, and these things have turned out wrong frequently enough to be worthwhile.
Even the simplest official communications are often misleading.
The only time I default to acceptance is where the lie has no possible benefit and the odds of incompetence are nearly zero. Again, just about never.
If we’re talking licence renewal, then lies would have no benefit and it’s completely obvious for most of them. “You’re next in line.” Yes, yes I am, good work. Though come to think I would even doubt and check “The line starts over there,” – been burned by that lie before. “You need to fill in this form.” Usually not true. Some bureaucrats will get more tetchy about it than is worth the hassle, but if you manage to pass back a mostly-empty form, you’ll get your licence anyway.
If we’re talking motor vehicle policy…Hmm, does “Rolling stops are illegal,” count as an example?
I suppose it is illegal, but ~nobody ever gets prosecuted for them. Regardless, you stop at stop signs because you’ll get hit if you don’t, not because it’s the law – if it stopped being illegal today the change in driving would be hardly noticeable. Indeed, judging by the improvements in those townships that removed all signs and lights, mortality would likely go down.
Whereas if we invented inertial dampeners and negated all crashes, running stop signs and such would drastically increase. (I’d personally try to drift through mine. Bumper cars at 40 sounds like fun to me.)
Have you heard the one about how it’s illegal to go over OR under the speed limit? That one’s good too.
Even some of the things cops routinely say when they pull you over can be ignored, and though I’d have to double check which ones.
When an official in any capacity says something about X, it’s a hint that you should investigate X, not evidence about X either way.
We’re talking about license renewal. I have specific evidence that when they tell me to wait in line X, that is actually the right line to wait in. An example of the evidence is that the place looks orderly — it is not full of angry people who have waited in the wrong line for 1 hour. I don’t investigate whether they are truthful.
“The lie has no possible benefit.” Well, yes, now you are coming close to what I mean by “pressure to be truthful” — certain lies would have big bad consequences and smaller (or no) good consequences. For those statements there is pressure to be truthful. It varies from statement to statement whether the bad consequences outweigh the good consequences.
I agree about the terrible record of drug companies (“caught lying numerous times”).
“I sort of expect that — after all, they’re in business to make money.” Every day I deal with a dozen businesses that are in business to make money. A newstand, a grocery store, my Internet provider, and so on. They don’t lie to me, by and large, and certainly not in the extraordinarily dangerous way that drug companies lie. I think it is their power that lets drug companies lie like this, not their motivation. Too Big to Tell the Truth.