Four physicians, not scientists, working at a private university, not a public university, run by a corporation, are found to have committed fraud on numerous medical publications.
In the continued waste of taxpayer’s dollars by funding physicians to do research, DFCI President and CEO Laurie H. Glimcher, M.D., Executive Vice President and COO William C. Hahn, M.D., Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Irene M. Ghobrial, M.D., and Harvard Medical School professor Kenneth C. Anderson, M.D., allegedly committed research misconduct across dozens of papers. Already these physicians have have sent the journals where the papers in question were published, new figures to replace the falsified data. So far, 6 of their papers have been retracted, and 31 need modifications.
First, physicians are not trained to be scientists or to analyze science. They are taught to memorize facts, mostly outdated and not current with what scientists know, and how to administer drugs to patients as the pharma companies have told them to do. When physicians do research, it’s often fraudulent, flawed, and ghostwritten, and used to sell harmful drugs that don’t work, through what Peter Gotzsche, M.D. describes as an organized crime syndicate – otherwise known using a more genteel descriptor, The Medical Industrial Complex. With the worst health care system and the most expensive, a massive amount of government money is spent in the US on biological and medical research, almost all of which is controlled by these non-scientist physicians. The NIH invests nearly $30.1 billion annually in medical research. The NIH controls most biological research in the US, and it is always led by physicians, not scientists. The National Science Foundation, led by scientists, the people trained to do research and analyze it, funds little biological research. When NSF does fund biological related research, such as the chemistry performed by Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D. at Berkeley, and the physics performed by Don Glaser, Ph.D. at Berkeley, consequential discoveries and outcomes result. Dr. Doudna was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her co-creation of CRISPR, and Nobel Laureate, Dr Glaser started the biotech industry in 1971 with his co-creation of Cetus Corp, leading to doctor of chemistry (Ph.D. Chemistry, Berkeley), Kary Mullis’ Nobel Prize for the creation of PCR. Notice what happens with public funding of public universities directed by and to Ph.D. scientists. Of course, some of the funding by the NIH results in good work. Case in point, and continuing with public funding at a public university, Berkeley, the NIH funded Prof. Dr. Jim Allsison, Ph.D, for his work at Berkeley on checkpoint inhibition of T-cells in cancer. His Nobel Prize winning research eventually led to the development of checkpoint inhibitors for cancer treatment, a revolutionary new paradigm of immunotherapy for cancer..
As Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of NEJM wrote in 2009, “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor” A private school, led by a corporation, which is led by Penny Pritzker, a corrupt billionaire-heiress of the notorious Pritzker fortune, Harvard is an epicenter of medical corruption. Whether it was the fraud of John Darsee, M.D., Piero Anversa, M.D. , Ellis Reinherz, M.D., Robert B. Fogel, M.D., or Elizabeth Homes (Stanford dropout and a Houston-born daughter of an Enron executive), of the fraudulent company, Theranos, who became a member of the Harvard Medical School’s Board of Fellows, the place is a den of fraudsters. And get this, some of these Harvard Medical School physicians are replicating themselves without the surrogate mother’s awareness. Once again, truth is stranger than fiction.
These physicians join the international list of fraudsters in medicine, including Japanese physicians Yoshihiro Sato, M.D. and Jun Iwamoto, M.D., who have almost 300 papers “that bore signs of fabrication and other ethical lapses. Nearly half have been retracted.” However, in the current rankings, Joachim Boldt, M.D. of Germany is in the lead with 184 papers retracted. Yoshitaka Fujii, M.D., also of Japan, is in second place with 171 retracted medical papers.
And the editors at the medical journals, they’re as corrupt as the physicians who submit the fraudulent articles. State medical boards are corrupt and/or inept and do little to protect patients from corrupt and inept physicians. So too are the physicians at the NIH, where one-third of HHS (Human Health Services, of which NIH is a part) appointees between 2004 and 2020 exited to industry. Compared with other sectors (for example, government, nonprofit, and academia), industry accounted for the greatest share of exits. This HHS industry exit rate is somewhat higher than that reported for appointees at the Department of Defense, which was the only other agency for which we could find revolving-door estimates (32 percent versus 28 percent). Physicians are the salespeople for drug companies, being the only people that can legally sell prescription drugs, and their money-making sales schemes are often fraudulent. Sometimes their fraudulent sales schemes are as reviewers for the FDA, as they are paid-off by the drug companies. These are the guys deciding what drugs will be approved for sale by physicians, after having reviewed the fraudulent, ghostwritten clinical trial studies presented by physicians on behalf of their money-suppliers, the pharma companies.
Little wonder why most prescription drugs don’t work, and most medical procedures may only cause harm. Medicine is all about the money, and little else matters. Solution – put the biological research in the hands of scientists at the NSF, and stop the privatization of clinical trials that were foisted on us by Ronald Reagan’s privatization and deregulation of almost everything..
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 